What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Collective conceptions of the Holocaust
Figure 3.8 Most commonly used words and phrases which refer to the scale of the Holocaust across all
6,094 student descriptions.
itself would suggest that the number has at least
some traction within their collective conceptions
of the Holocaust. Although not captured in the
summary offered by Figure 3.8, a number between
10 and 12 million was also cited on 15 different
occasions. Here, students provided their own
explanation that this referred to the total number
of deaths if non-Jewish victims were included
within the count.
However, by their own volition, students most
commonly framed the question of scale with rather
less precision through reference to ‘millions’ of
people being killed. A smaller, but still significant
minority of students spoke in terms of ‘thousands’,
‘many thousands’, ‘thousands upon thousands’ or
‘hundreds of thousands’ of murders, while a handful
placed the figure in ‘billions’ instead.
Before this finding is interpreted too readily as
clear ‘evidence’ of students’ underestimation of the
scale of the Holocaust, closer examination of the
actual words they use and the context they provide
for any specific numbers given suggests that it is also
important to consider the students’ numerical literacy
and their conceptualisation of magnitude through
large numbers more generally.
Whether framed in terms of thousands, hundreds
of thousands, millions or even billions, almost all
of the students surveyed appeared to want to
emphasise what they conceived of as the enormity of
the Holocaust. And so, for example, while one Year
8 student included a speculative figure of ’10,000s’
of deaths, they added that this was a figure that was
‘more than people can count’. Some characterised
it as a ‘huge’ campaign or ‘mass genocide’ while
referencing thousands or hundreds rather than
millions of lives lost. Many others avoided the use
of numbers entirely but emphasised enormity in
other ways: some said that ‘a massive percentage
of Jews in the world’ or ‘nearly every Jew’ was
murdered (extracts from Year 11 and Year 10 student
responses); the prefix ‘mass’ was employed on well
over 700 occasions while other students simply
asserted that the Holocaust itself was ‘a huge event’.
Timeframe
In their short descriptions, only around one in four
students made mention of any kind of temporal
framework for the Holocaust and, as is illustrated in
Figure 3.9, the Second World War was overwhelmingly
the dominant point of reference here. Among
the much smaller number of students who chose
to offer a more precise timeframe, most considered
that the Holocaust began at some point between
1933 (20 references) and 1942 (17 references). They
were in clearer agreement that it ended in 1945
(61 references). Other students made less specific
associations with the 1930s (30 references) and/or
1940s (64 references), while some simply located the
Holocaust as ‘an event’ in history (13 references).
In a handful of students’ accounts, the sense that
the Holocaust was historically located was used
to highlight a disconnection with the present, for
example where one Year 8 student said that ‘[the]
Holocaust means that people where mean and racist
in the old days’, or where a Year 13 student outlined
something of Hitler’s racial ideology but countered,
‘however in modern days we know this to be untrue’.
In other student descriptions provided in response
to survey question 30, continuity with the past was
emphasised in various ways: