What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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When and where did the Holocaust take place?
In a similar vein a few students spoke of areas or
regions during interview. Some, for instance, spoke
of Eastern Europe – ‘because that’s the countries
he took’ (Holly, Year 9, SE1); others, like Paige (Year
10, EE1), grappled with their thinking and knowledge
base: ‘…across Eastern Europe. Wasn’t the majority
of all the work and concentration camps in Poland
… I think?’ Evidence of students wrestling with the
unfolding historical events also appeared in the
following exchange between Year 10 students:
Interview: Does the Holocaust happen in Germany?
Carrie: I don’t think it does that much. I think they ship
them out of the country so they can work on building up
the Aryan race.
Sabir: Yeah.
Lachlan: We don’t build prisons next to our schools,
so it’s sort of like having their area clean as they look at
it and then having the messy stuff in the other countries
(Year 10, EE1).
Here, the students expressed their ideas about
why the Holocaust moved beyond Germany and
offered the beginnings of an explanation. However,
both student survey responses and interviews
(particularly among students from Years 7 to 11)
suggested that students’ understanding of where
victims came from or were killed typically did not
extend beyond Germany and/or Poland. Indeed,
there were only a small number of instances in which
a country other than Germany or Poland was referred
to by name. On such occasions references either
seemed to be linked to exposure to particular stories
– ‘there were some that like Anne Frank was from
Amsterdam, Holland 1 ’ (Abby, Year 8, LON6) –
or constituted an ill-formed list: ‘Poland, Germany
and Britain’ (Beth, Year 9, LON5); ‘There was another
country. Austria. Austria. And the Netherlands’
(Scarlett, Year 9, LON5).
Slightly more frequent were allusions or gestures
to Jews being found outside of Germany/Poland:
‘Lots of them in lots of different countries’ (Rob,
Year 9, EE1) was one of the best examples of this,
alongside ‘there was a lot in Europe’ (Leah, Year
10, LON5). Less sophisticated, but arguably more
symptomatic, was the simple refrain ‘all over’
(Tom, Year 10, NE1).
As indicated above, some students in Years 12
and 13 had a much greater awareness that mass
killing occurred outside Germany than many younger
students. For example, almost 60 per cent of Year
13 students knew that Poland was the country in
which the largest number of killings of Jewish people
actually took place. Students in Years 12 and 13 also
1 Anne Frank and her family were German, of course, but the
student here repeats the (fairly common) misconception that
they were Dutch.
typically appreciated that the Holocaust occurred in
many countries across Europe but that Poland and
other lands in Eastern Europe provided a particular
focus for mass slaughter. Furthermore, as indicated
in the next section, these older students typically
appreciated that Nazi deaths camps often were
situated in Poland.
What do students know about ghettos,
the ‘Holocaust by bullets’, the camp
system and the end of the Holocaust?
Ghettos
Following the German invasion of Poland in
September 1939, ghettos were established to
separate Jewish communities from the non-Jewish
population. The first ghetto was established in Poland
in Piotrków Trybunalski in October 1939. Often places
of horrific deprivation and suffering, larger ghettos
were also set up in Lodz (April 1940) and Warsaw
(October 1940). In total, more than 1,000 ghettos
were created in German-occupied and annexed
Poland and the USSR during 1940 and 1941.
Ghettos were not killing sites, but they did mark
‘the restructuring of the spaces of the urban and rural
environment’ (Cole 2003: 18) for nefarious purposes,
and they were places of mass suffering and mass
death, thus making them important spaces in the
geography (and history) of the Holocaust. They were
also places of extraordinary resilience, resistance,
and spiritual and physical courage in which Jews
struggled to cope with the unfolding genocide.
Students’ acquisition of deeper knowledge of
how Jews responded to events are of course critical
if they are to move towards seeing Jewish victims
as individuals with human agency rather than merely
as objects of persecution. As reported above, in
response to survey question 58, which asked what
the ghettos were, the majority of students (60.6 per
cent) correctly identified ghettos as areas where
Jews were forced to live separately from non-Jews.
While this is positive, it is noteworthy that a quarter
of students incorrectly thought that Nazi ghettos
were places where the Jews of Europe were killed in
gas chambers.
As illustrated in Figure 7.6, responses to question
58 also highlighted that while a large number of
students answered the question correctly, this
was more the case as students got older and in
particular with those in Year 11 and over. Indeed,
the survey data suggested that many younger
students (particularly in Years 7 and 8) have limited
understanding of what ghettos were and, potentially,
how their existence relates to the development of
the Holocaust.