What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Collective conceptions of the Holocaust 45 Figure 3.4 Most commonly used words and phrases which refer to victims of the Holocaust across all 6,094 student descriptions. All Wordcloud images in this chapter were generated by TagCrowd at www.tagcrowd.com www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust
46 Collective conceptions of the Holocaust Figure 3.5 Most commonly used words and phrases which refer to perpetrators of the Holocaust across all 6,094 student descriptions. in further detail later in this chapter. However, there are a number of other interesting features of the language students chose to use that are worth reflecting upon here. First, the variety of ways in which Jewish victims are identified is perhaps illustrative of a wider uncertainty – or at least a lack of consensus – over how ‘Jewishness’ itself should be conceived. Analysis of student responses here suggests that they are not always clear personally, and certainly not in wide agreement with each other, as to how Jewishness operates as a marker of identity – whether it is primarily a religious identification or matter of faith, for example, a question of culture or a racialized category. Chapter 5 examines related confusions and uncertainties that were expressed by students who took part in focus groups when asked if they were able to explain why the Nazis and their collaborators had specifically targeted Jews. Second, given the emphasis placed upon the victims of the Holocaust – both in terms of the overall frequency of referencing and the comparatively expansive vocabulary used – it is perhaps surprising that there was only very infrequent reference made to named individuals. Anne Frank was identified as a victim of the Holocaust 11 times across all 6,094 descriptions but hers was the only name that appeared with a frequency count of 10 or more. It is also striking that only 16 students made any specific reference to survivors of the Holocaust. Finally, while individual stories may not feature prominently in students’ immediate recall, there is nonetheless a strong impression that, in relation to the Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution, students are identifying with and describing human beings here. Again, this is particularly noticeable in contrast to what students say about perpetrators of the Holocaust. At a very basic level, the term ‘people’ is used extensively where students describe those who were killed, captured or discriminated against. Yet this term is relatively absent in students’ descriptions of those who perpetrated these acts. While there were approaching 3,000 individual references to ‘people’ as victims of the Holocaust, there were fewer than 100 made specifically to ‘people’ as those who did the killing, taking captive or discriminating. Instead, as Figure 3.5 makes clear, perpetrators were considerably more likely to be positioned with somewhat more distance – as ‘Germans’ much more commonly than as ‘German people’, or as ‘Nazis’. More likely still, they were obscured from view entirely in those descriptions where Hitler was the lone perpetrator identified. It is impossible to know from this data alone whether such humanising of victims and dehumanising of perpetrators was consciously undertaken. However, it is also evident on occasions where students chose to emphasise that victims were not just an undifferentiated mass of ‘people’ but, more specifically, included ‘families’ (35 references), ‘children’ (56 references), ‘women’ (21 references) and ‘the elderly’ (11 references). Again, this form of differentiation is entirely absent in the vocabulary summarised in Figure 3.5.
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CENTRE FOR HOLOCAUST EDUCATION What
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What do students know and understan
Page 5 and 6: iv About the UCL Centre for Holocau
Page 7 and 8: vi Foreword by Sir Peter Bazalgette
Page 9 and 10: viii Foreword by Professor Yehuda B
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Page 13 and 14: 2 Executive summary ■■ Many stu
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Page 17 and 18: Olivia Hemingway, 2014
Page 19 and 20: 8 Introduction ■■ What forms of
Page 21 and 22: 10 Introduction the fate of the Jew
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Page 35 and 36: 24 Methodology Of particular note w
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Page 41 and 42: 30 Methodology Table 2.2 Breakdown
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Olivia Hemingway, 2014
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102 Preface often socially construc
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106 Who were the victims? students
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108 Who were the victims? Figure 5.
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Appendix 1: The Survey 225 Appendix
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Appendix 1: The Survey 227 How do y
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Appendix 1: The Survey 229 Word qui
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Appendix 1: The Survey 231 Explorin
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Appendix 1: The Survey 233 Do you r
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Appendix 1: The Survey 235 42. Who
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Appendix 1: The Survey 237 The Nazi
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Appendix 1: The Survey 239 64. What
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Appendix 2: Attitudinal scales used
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Appendix 3: Coding frameworks for f
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Appendix 3: Coding frameworks for f
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References 259 Assmann, A. (2010)
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References 261 Carr, E.H. (1964) Wh
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References 263 Emler, N. and Ohana,
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References 265 Howitt, D. and Crame
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References 267 Levstik, L.S. (2000)
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References 269 Resnick, L.B. (1989)
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References 271 Snyder, T. (2009)
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References 273 Yeager, E., Anderson
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Centre for Holocaust Education UCL
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What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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