What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Collective conceptions of the Holocaust
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It is not just the numeric frequency with which
reference to camps are made that is striking. It is
also the enormous representational significance they
appear to hold. For, more than any other single word
or phrase used by students in their descriptions,
the association between ‘camps’ – and in particular
‘concentration camps’ – and the Holocaust is so
strong that, in a number of cases, they are
presented as though synonymous:
A holocaust is a prison/camp to hold up Jews
(Year 8 student).
Holocaust is a concentration camp for jews
(Year 9 student).
The holocaust was the concentration camp within
the world wars that jews would be sent to work as
slaves and eventually be gassed to death
(Year 13 student).
[The Holocaust is] otherwise referred to as the
concentration camps. These were built during
the second world war by the Nazis in which they
imprisoned jews, Blacks, gays and disabled there
to work and build more of the camp and then they
would put the ones that could no longer work into a
gas chamber where they were gassed until no one
in there was alive (Year 9 student).
Many others across all age groups appeared
to think of the Holocaust primarily as a place, for
example:
I think it’s a big place that’s locked where the
Germans killed the Jews. (Year 9 student).
A holocaust was a place where germans in the
second world war put jewish people in camps [to]
work or get killed (Year 9 student).
A place where the Nazis killed people with different
ethnicities (Year 10 student).
The holocaust was a place where they would put
people such as Jews and gay people and other
people who weren’t considered the right type of
German to try and wipe them out (Year 12 student).
[The Holocaust] was a cruel place for people that
Hitler sent people to go to just because of their race
and the way they are (Year 7 student)
Arguably, where students made the broadest
references to the Holocaust as somewhere that Jews
or other victims were ‘sent’ or ‘put’ they may not
have been thinking specifically in terms of the camp
system. Indeed, in 12 student descriptions, ghettos
rather than camps were prioritised, for example:
When Hitler sent Jews to Ghettos (Year 10 student).
When Hitler took all the Jews in Germany and
Poland, put them in Ghettos and made them do
degrading jobs or killed them (Year 12 student).
A small number of students provided descriptions
in which it was evident that they recognised at least
something of the specific function of the Jewish
ghettos. However, it was much more common
for ghettos and camps to be presented almost
interchangeably, and for any detailed knowledge
of the former to be subsumed or overshadowed
by the dominant imagery of the latter.
Behind their references, students were able
– or chose – to demonstrate varying levels of
understanding of the extensive system of labour,
transit and extermination camps established by
the Nazis. In 120 student responses, there was
at least some recognition that different types of
camps existed with different form and function.
However, in the majority of the descriptions provided,
such distinction was not apparent. Instead, most
students appeared to operate with a more monolithic
conception of ‘the camps’ – or, in a number of cases,
‘the camp’ singular – as prison-like places where
victims were ‘brutally’ ‘beaten’, ‘burned’, ‘starved’,
‘tortured’ or ‘punished’.
As has already been highlighted, the Nazis’ use
of gassing as a means of murder within the camp
system also featured prominently across students’
descriptions, especially among those in younger
years. In some cases this led to an even further
narrowing of understanding as, for example, where
the Holocaust was described as:
When the Germans put people in gas chambers
and gassed them (Year 7 student).
A gas camp the Germans controlled to kill Jewish
people (Year 10 student).
…a day in the war when a lot of Jews were killed in
the gas chambers which were in the concentration
camps (Year 7 student).
I think the Holocaust was about people in a camp
and they got tricked about going into a shower but
when really they got gassed (Year 10 student).
The idea that people were ‘tricked’ into thinking
they were taking a shower appears to have taken
particular hold in a number of students’ imagination
and similar descriptions appeared in at least 25
different accounts.
Other details that some students seemed to
prioritise were experimentation or medical testing
(23 individual references) – including one Year 7
www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust