What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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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.