What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

132
Who were the victims?
the Nazi ‘world view’ and the Holocaust, it was
significant that the term was not used by more
students. In this respect, the focus groups confirmed
the survey findings that the word ‘antisemitism’ was
absent from the lexicon of most 11 to 16 year olds,
probably due to lack of understanding about the
term’s meaning. A more complex and complicated
question, however, is whether this finding should
be taken as evidence that younger students do
not know or understand the history of anti-Jewish
discrimination. A second, related question is how far
unfamiliarity with the word ‘antisemitism’ reflects an
uncertainty about the nature of Nazi prejudice.
Findings already outlined earlier in this Chapter
are helpful in trying to answer the first of these. It
has been noted, for instance, that in tracing the
scapegoating of the Jews to events of the 1920s,
a few students nodded in the direction of historical
antecedents which made blaming ‘easier’ and more
likely to succeed. Jews were ‘easy targets’ (Alice,
Year 9, NE1); ‘they have always been a scapegoat for
problems’ (Erin, Year 12, EE1); and so Hitler ‘didn’t
just go round choosing random people; it was like
a section, a group of people who he’d chosen as
specific’ (Hannah, Year 9, EE1).
Similarly, a large number of focus-group
participants pointed to the existence of Christian
hostility towards the Jews – what one student
referred to as ‘like a deep history of antisemitism’
(Holly, Year 10 LON5) – with some grounding this
in the charge of deicide. In these and other more
ephemeral instances the interviews did provide
evidence that 11 to 16 year olds had some varying
levels of awareness that Jews had experienced
animosity prior to the Nazi period. However, the
depth of knowledge on which this consciousness
rested was commonly shallow, as students appeared
unfamiliar with the history of Christian hatred of the
Jews, the myths and misconceptions borne out of
this and the relation of Jewish prejudice to broader
historical developments.
Given this slight understanding it is unsurprising to
find that younger students tended not to recognise
antisemitism either as a substantive concept or as a
particular form of anti-Jewish sentiment. Commonly
unaware of what anti-Judaism looked like, its underpinning
rationale or its development within European
history, most students do not ‘know’ that for many
of those hostile to Jews, modernity saw the terms
on which Jews were determined to be ‘different’
undergo substantive change. As a consequence,
the notion of anti-Jewish prejudice rooted in ideas
of race and biology is not something necessarily
recognisable to the vast majority of students.
In some respects this is paradoxical. In nearly all
focus groups reference was invariably made at some
point to the Nazis (or, more commonly, to Hitler)
being obsessed with people having ‘blonde hair
and blue eyes’. These allusions to the Aryan ideal
were equally prominent in free-text responses made
by students to the survey questions on describing
the Holocaust and its victims. The ‘racial paradigm’
as a means of both understanding the Nazi regime
and accounting for the victim groups was thus
generally pervasive.
However, this finding sat alongside other
indications that, when it came to the Jews, some
students struggled to make the paradigm fit. This
was true of the youngest students, but also occurred
among the oldest too. Addressing the question of
‘Why the Jews?’, Charlotte (Year 8, LON5), who was
yet to study the Holocaust in history, wondered, ‘Is
it because they did not have blonde hair, blue eyes
that he [Hitler] mistreated them maybe?’ At the
Figure 5.9 Students in each year group who correctly identified the meaning of ‘antisemitism’
(percentage by year group)
Percentage of students
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
Year 7 Year 8 Year 9 Year 10 Year 11 Year 12 Year 13
Year group