What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

When and where did the Holocaust take place?
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nevertheless fails to appreciate just how murderous
the concentration camps were. His statement, ‘they
weren’t actually killed’ is certainly wrong, as vast
numbers were deliberately killed in the camp system.
More commonly, where reference was made to
death camps, knowledge and understanding was
fragmentary and/or confused. For example, Paige
(Year 10, EE1) suggested:
There could have been a few death camps before
the war. But some of them were work camps and it
wasn’t until the war had got really started that they
all turned into death camps and they weren’t work
camps any more.
Or, as Matt (Year 9, SE1) suggested while the
focus group attempted to recall other death camps:
I know there was another one; it was like another
big one. I don’t actually know the name of it but it
was like either in Holland or Poland. It was in that
kind of area.
There was, of course, no death camp located in
the Netherlands, although there were other types
of camps which possibly influenced this student’s
understanding, and very large numbers of deportees
from the Netherlands were sent to Auschwitz-
Birkenau and Sobibor.
We perhaps see in these examples how lowlevel
knowledge of there being ‘lots of camps’ in
occupied Europe, together with familiarity with the
concentration camp model, leads to a limited and
skewed understanding of the nature of death camps
and the means by which they came into existence.
As with Allied perceptions during the war itself, the
image of the pre-war concentration camp (a brutal
and at times murderous institution, where many
people from different victim groups suffered and
died) dominates the imagination. Many fail – now, as
then – to conceive of a wholly new, unprecedented
mass crime – one centred on the death camps and
targeted to killing all Jewish people, wherever the
Nazis and their collaborators could track them down.
The absence of clearly defined and securely
held conceptualisations of the different types of
camps that existed in Nazi-occupied Europe led in
some instances to students having fragments of
knowledge or pieces of information which inhibited
deeper understanding. A good example is seen in
this dialogue, where students were involved in a
discussion about whether Auschwitz was hidden
turned a question about whether victims knew what
was going to happen to them:
Scarlett: Well, they didn’t.
Beth: They were captured and taken on a train and I
think they thought that…
Beth: A fake train station.
Scarlett: Yeah, a fake train station (Year 9, LON5).
In this exchange we find the students drawing on
general knowledge that the perpetrators employed
techniques of deception, and on specific knowledge
that fake train stations were constructed. However,
this knowledge of the constructions at Sobibor and
Treblinka – both death camps – is incorrectly applied
to Auschwitz, where no such station was erected.
Some of these tendencies were also evident in
focus groups where a handful of students referred
to camps being ‘isolated places’. In one sense this
is correct, although this is only true of some of the
death camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, for example, was
situated in the relatively large town of Oswiecim),
and even then this did not prevent people coming to
know about even the most remote of these sites.
Concentration camps, by contrast, were very
much a part of the larger society – so much so that
they were an integral part of the local and national
economy (Horwitz 1990; Tooze 2007). Similarly,
students who go on to refer to railways and trains in
relation to victims arriving in these remote locations
are also correct – although knowledge is often
muddled and/or insecure (‘they were put on trains,
I think’ – Rosie, Year 8, NE1). However, due to the
dominance of ‘the concentration camp’ in most
students’ understanding, it is unclear whether the
true nature and purpose of these places is fully
understood. Furthermore, the notion that Jews were
simply tricked into going willingly to these remote
areas raises the potential that the violence and
trauma of deportation may be ignored.
Older students in Years 12 and 13 appeared
to have a slightly more nuanced and detailed
understanding of the camp system. Indeed, many
students were able to begin to distinguish between
different types of camp although, where the particular
nature of the death camp was better understood,
there was also sometimes a tendency to neglect
the very high death rate in concentration camps.
Emily (Year 12, EE1), for example, explained that a
‘concentration camp is where you put a lot of people
there, and a labour camp is where you put people
to work, and the death camp is where you just put
them to be killed’. Other students reasoned:
I thought concentration camps were just for, were
basically labour camps, well before the war started
they were more for re-educating, like, Communists
or whoever, but then once the war started
concentration camps were just for sort of labour,
and prisoner of war camps were similar as well.
Whereas there were only a few extermination camps
that were sometimes combined with labour camps,
only about six or seven of them, I think, and all of
them were in Poland (Alex, Year 12, EE1).
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