What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

16
Introduction
Holocaust are never forgotten lies at the heart of
Britain’s values as a nation’ (Cabinet Office 2015: 9).
The emphasis placed upon ‘memory’ and
‘commemoration’ in the Commission’s report is
also important to note. In its executive summary
and introduction – published under the title Britain’s
Promise to Remember – there are 17 individual uses
of the word ‘memory’. By comparison, the term
‘history’ is used only eight times. But it is far from
clear whether or not a collective like the British nation
can really be understood to ‘remember’ in the same
sense that an individual does. Within the growing
interdisciplinary field of memory studies, this issue
remains open to competing interpretation and debate
(see, for example, Halbwachs 1992; Wertsch 2002;
Assman 2006).
While we will not attempt to resolve this discussion
in these pages, Duncan Bell’s observations are
instructive here. Bell argues that notions of collective
memory are, for the most part, metaphorical at best,
and the processes through which a community
(re)constructs a shared history for future generations
is not analogous to how an individual’s memory
works (for a competing argument see Anastasio et al.
2012). For Bell:
Memory is a concept that is readily employed to
represent a whole host of different social practices,
cognitive processes and representational strategies
and what gets submerged, flattened out, is the
nuance, texture and often contradictory forces and
tensions of history and politics. In particular it can
elide the manner in which such ‘memories’ are
constructed through acts of manipulation through
the atavistic play of power’ (Bell 2003: 71).
This is not to say that our shared understanding(s),
conceptualization(s) or representation(s) of past
events … are unimportant, but rather that they
should not be classified as truly mnemonic (Bell
2003: 64).
Instead of ‘memory’, Bell argues that we should
conceive of these sorts of shared understandings as
‘mythical’ in the sense that we have already explored.
Again, almost by definition, ‘memory’ as ‘myth’
presents simplified stories and obscures complexity.
This matters with respect to our contemporary
relationship(s) with the Holocaust. For, in various
ways, it is precisely ‘memory’ and ‘commemoration’
that have been prioritised. A speech given by
Prime Minister David Cameron at the launch of the
Holocaust Commission makes this position clear:
There will be a time when it won’t be possible for
survivors to go into our schools and to talk about
their experiences, and to make sure we learn the
lessons of the dreadful events that happened.
And so, the sacred task is to think, ‘How are we
best going to remember, to commemorate and to
educate future generations of children?’ In 50 years’
time, in 2064, when a young British Christian child
or a young British Muslim child or a young British
Jewish child wants to learn about the Holocaust,
and we as a country want them to learn about
the Holocaust, where are they going to go? Who
are they going to listen to? What images will they
see? How can we make sure in 2064 that it is as
vibrant and strong a memory as it is today? (David
Cameron, 27 January 2014, emphasis added).
Both Cameron’s statement and the extract from
the Holocaust Commission at the start of this section
are clear that it is not just the Holocaust that must
be vigilantly ‘remembered’ but more specifically its
‘lessons’ for the present day.
Equally, we could draw examples from the
earlier Labour government’s official framing for the
introduction of an annual Holocaust Memorial Day as
an intervention intended ‘to ensure the terrible crimes
against humanity committed during the Holocaust
are never forgotten and its relevance for each new
generation is understood’ (David Blunkett quoted
in Pearce 2014: 76). As Pearce has argued, ‘quite
explicitly then, commemoration and education were
to be amalgamated together in the pursuit of these
goals. Schools were identified as essential hubs’
(Pearce 2014: 76).
It is important to clarify that this is not to
dismiss the importance of remembrance and
commemoration. Historian Jay Winter (2006: 55–6)
offers a compelling case for exactly this form of
memory work when he suggests it can be:
…a way of confronting the Holocaust at the very
moment that the survivors are steadily passing away
[in order] to capture those voices, those faces, and
through them to establish a bridge to the world
of European Jewry that the Nazis succeeded in
destroying.
The point remains however, that contrary to
the compelling rhetoric of successive British
governments and others working in this field, there
are very important distinctions to make between
education and commemoration: ‘remembering’ that
something happened is not the same as ‘learning’
in the sense of grappling with the complexities and
contingencies of why it happened (see also Gross
and Stevick 2010). Eckmann (2010: 10) argues this
point very clearly:
…it is important to counter a common
misinterpretation: that Holocaust education is
above all a duty of memory. In fact, it is first and
foremost a duty of history: the duty to transmit and
to teach and learn the history. Too much emphasis