What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Encountering representations of the Holocaust
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A desire to learn more about the Holocaust was
reported by 68.6 per cent of the students who
completed the survey. This figure increased to
70.3 per cent among those who reported having
already learned about the Holocaust. Taken
alongside the students’ comments at interview,
this indicates a common appetite to learn more
about the subject, with limited evidence of socalled
‘Holocaust fatigue’.
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There was broad consensus about the importance
of the subject, as 83 per cent of respondents
thought that all students should learn about
the Holocaust while at school, suggesting
their support for its mandated place within the
curriculum. These findings were supported by
focus-group participants, who often spoke of
a sense of duty and obligation to know about
this past.
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In survey responses, students prioritised antiracist
and commemorative reasons for learning
about the Holocaust and a commitment to
preventing anything similar over more historical
rationales, although both received a high degree
of support. This balance was similar in focus
groups, and in some cases students expressed
their commitment to ensuring that ‘the concept’
of the Holocaust – that is, what it had come to
represent – was understood and remembered
over and above accurate or detailed knowledge
of the historical events. However, many students
also identified and articulated potential challenges
to the notion that there are clear or simple ‘lessons
from’ the Holocaust that can easily be learned.
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Those students who had been given the
opportunity to hear a first-hand account from a
Holocaust survivor strongly valued the experience;
both the survey findings and the focus groups
revealed what a powerful and engaging encounter
this proved for most students. Many reported that
meeting a survivor made the Holocaust feel ‘more
real’. They spoke enthusiastically of the powerful
personal, emotive and affective responses
experienced when meeting and listening to
survivor accounts. Arguably, this suggests how
‘unreal’ or phantasmagorical the subject may
seem to those who encounter the subject only
through texts and films – indeed, some students
described their previous perspective in terms of
‘disbelief’, ‘unreality’ or like ‘something out of a
story book’.
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Students spoke of taking a great deal from
being in the company of a survivor, with many
expressing how they found this an edifying as
well as an affective experience. Many spoke
convincingly of how the intimacy would perhaps
be hard to reproduce through technological
representation.
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Students also regularly reported being upset by
hearing survivor testimony. However, this was
described as an appropriate experience – one that
allowed students to believe they had gained
a personal understanding or emotional connection
to the history. There was no sense that students
avoided being upset and, instead, they actively
sought such a personal, emotional response to
the experience of the survivor. Weissmann (2004)
has argued that such feelings are not necessarily
equivalent – nor directly related to – meaningful
comprehension of the historical events, but some
students reported that survivor testimony had
given them greater insight into the textures of
everyday life at the time and of Jewish life before
and after the war.
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The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is, by a large
margin, both the most read book and the most
watched film about the Holocaust. Of the 43.0
per cent of students who reported reading books
about the Holocaust, 74.8 per cent had read The
Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, considerably more
than even the perennially popular Diary of Anne
Frank, which 59.1 per cent had read. This picture
was even more pronounced among the 76.2 per
cent of students who had watched films or TV
programmes about the Holocaust, of whom 84.4
per cent reported watching The Boy in the Striped
Pyjamas. It has now eclipsed Schindler’s List as
the predominant mainstream media representation
of the Holocaust.
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Focus-group interviews revealed that the clear
majority of students position the film as a work of
historical fiction and most students demonstrated
enough awareness of the reality of life in a Nazi
concentration camp to realise that the film was
based on a historically implausible narrative.
However, despite this awareness, students still
regularly drew on the film as if it provided them
with an unproblematic window on to the past.
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Notably, the film appears to be reinforcing a
perspective of widespread German ignorance
of the Holocaust. Moreover, in their discussions,
many students showed a marked tendency to
shift their locus of concern from the victims of the
Holocaust onto the bystanders and even, to some
extent, to the perpetrators.
www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust