What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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When and where did the Holocaust take place?
Catherine: I think the women and the children got
killed first.
Interviewer: So some people got killed almost
straight away?
Catherine: The weaker ones. But if they were strong
and capable…
Catherine: And the old ones, yes.
Tim: Yeah. If they were strong and capable then they
would be used to provide a purpose.
Interviewer: Is there a difference between a
concentration camp and a death camp?
Catherine: I think they’re the same.
(Year 9, EE1).
The notion that concentration camps were
similar to prisons is quite wrong, of course – these
places which ‘were initially used for the purpose of
crafting the racial community and eliminating political
opponents’ (Stone 2015: 10) were outside the due
process of the law and people could be sent there
without formal legal charge or trial. Nevertheless, the
camp as an archetypal prison was a misconception
prevalent among a large number of younger students
interviewed. One consequence of this may be that,
in attempting to explain how or why someone might
end up in a concentration camp, students might
presume that the victim bore some responsibility for
their imprisonment – the conflation with the prison
system may lead them to assume that there was
some due process of law.
Another consequence is the inability to
differentiate between camps established for work,
imprisonment, punishment or ‘re-education’,
and the death camps created for the purpose
of extermination. In this regard the prevalence of
‘Auschwitz’ is doubly problematic. Not only does
it exclude other camps, but its own hybrid and
complicated nature as both concentration camp and
death camp is obscured. It is, of course, potentially
possible that students’ familiarity with the film
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas might add to this
apparently confused picture (see Chapter 4).
The dominance of the concentration camp
in popular imagination is also problematic here,
because – while huge numbers of ‘other victims’
were incarcerated, suffered and murdered – the
vast majority of Jews never had the concentration
camp experience. Too frequently Jews were shot
in pits near their homes or else they were deported
to killing centres where they went straight to their
deaths in the gas chambers on arrival. The picture
of arrival, selection, registration, head shaving and
striped uniforms, of barracks and roll calls that so
dominates our picture of the past is a narrative that
is representative of many survivor experiences.
But, as Primo Levi (1988: 63) recognised:
We, the survivors are not the true witnesses;
the true witnesses, those in full possession of the
terrible truth are the drowned, the submerged,
the annihilated. We speak in their stead by proxy the
saved, who have written of their experience
of the concentration camps.
The death camp was a wholly different place
to the concentration camp. While both may have
been surrounded with barbed wire, there were only
five true death camps (Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor,
Treblinka II and Auschwitz-Birkenau) when there
were thousands of concentration camps and subcamps.
While the mortality rate in concentration
camps was indeed appalling, particularly in the war
years when they became increasingly murderous
places, the purpose of the death camp was mass
murder. Typically, those who arrived were dead within
hours. The death camps were all built for the specific
purpose of murdering Jews, although some people
from other groups were also killed in some of them
(Arad 1987: vii). Conversely, the vast majority of
the inmates of the concentration camp were
not Jews.
The distinction between concentration camp
and death camp is as little understood as is the
distinction between the mass crimes that the Nazis
committed against many victim groups and the
totality of the Holocaust: a Nazi programme that
intended to murder every last Jewish man, woman
and child wherever they could reach them. The
dominance of concentration camp imagery in the
collective imagination, and the conflation of the
genocide of the Jews with the terrible violence of that
camp system, has distorted popular and student
understanding of the Holocaust.
Among the group interviews with students in
Years 7 to 11 (age 11 to 16), there was little evidence
of widespread familiarity with the notion of death
camps. Exceptions to this tended to be found among
the older of these students. For example, Tom (Year
10, NE1) observed that:
…there was the ghettos before they went to the
concentration or death camps. They were like in
isolation, they wanted them to live away from the
rest of the German people so that they didn’t sort
of interfere with their lives and it was sort of a really
basic standard of living. And then the concentration
camps, they weren’t actually killed it was where they
wanted people to work for them for free and at the
death camps they killed them. But they could also
choose whether they wanted to keep them alive and
do work or kill them straight away.
It should be noted that, while this student correctly
recognised that the function of the death camps was
different from that of the concentration camps, he