What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Collective conceptions of the Holocaust
53
The Holocaust was a terrible, problematic trauma
that happened many years ago but is still known to
this very day (Year 9 student).
The Evil atrocities of one Nation that changed the
land scape of the World we live in today (Year 10
student).
Holocaust was something what happened in the
past. But it was so around the world, that even
now people still talk about it. (Year 10 student).
I think that the Holocaust was a terrible event that
took place near the 1930s where the Nazi’s killed
innocent Jew[s] all around Europe. Germans hated
the Jews and so did Hitler, they decided to kill the
Jews in many ways by shooting them, torturing
them, concentration camps where they were
killed with gas without knowing and shoving them
in ghettos. Even today there are not many Jews
around because the populations dropped back
during the world wars (Year 9 student).
Although they did not give specific dates, some
students implied that the Holocaust really ‘began’
prior to 1933 and regularly cited both Germany’s
loss in the First World War and Hitler’s rise to power
as salient points of reference within even very short
accounts. Indeed, a small number of students across
all age groups explicitly stated that the Holocaust
occurred before as well as during the Second World
War. As the Year 9 student responses reproduced
below suggest, this might in part be explained if
and where students understand ‘the Holocaust’ in
a manner akin to broader notions of antisemitism:
The holocaust started many years before world war
2 and it was basically where the citizens of towns
and countries discriminat[ed] against the jews. After
many years Hitler came to power and killed many of
them. This was one of the most biggest events of
the holocaust so many people now remember that
as the holocaust (Year 9 student).
The Holocaust, was [an] act against the Jews. It
started way before Hitler, but Hitler when he became
in power, blew up the spark [against] the jews
starting with laws and then leading to gas chambers
or death chambers and concentration camps like
Auschwitz (Year 9 student).
In more than 40 further student responses, the
Holocaust is described as ‘having something to
do with’ or ‘happening during’ the First World War.
However, in many of these same accounts students
also reference Hitler and/or refer to dates within the
1940s, so this would seem to denote a much wider
confusion concerning the chronology of the twentieth
century rather than of the Holocaust per se.
It is entirely understandable – and indeed
completely appropriate – for the Second World War
to feature so prominently in students’ collective
conceptions of the Holocaust. However, if we look at
the detail of their responses through the theoretical
lens established at the start of this chapter, there
is evidence that certain forms of understanding
can be compromised where two potentially distinct
schemata – here ‘the Holocaust’ and ‘the Second
World War’ as separate but closely related entities –
lose their clarity and become unwittingly intertwined.
On one level, such entanglement might explain
some of the most striking ostensible confusions
in students’ accounts. In a number of cases, a
conceptual vocabulary related to students’ wider
schemata for the Second World War, or for war
more generally, appears to have been uncomfortably
tacked on to or incorporated within their framing of
the Holocaust. Among the more obvious examples of
this in students’ descriptions are the 21 references to
‘bombing’ noted in Figure 3.6 including the repeated
suggestion that Jews, like Britons during the Blitz,
were murdered by the deployment of Nazi bombs.
Here are some responses to survey question 30:
Where many jewish people were killed by german
bombers (Year 9 student).
The holocaust is about where jews where bombed
by gasses (Year 9 student).
Where the Nazis destroyed the jewish race by
bombing them or gassing them (Year 10 student).
I think the Holocaust was when the Germans
killed a lot of Jews by bombing their country
(Year 11 student).
There is also, arguably, a related fusion and
confusion evident in some students’ thinking on the
movement of child victims of war. As is illustrated
in the responses below, tentative and incomplete
knowledge of victims’ deportation by train to
concentration camps, the Kindertransport rescue
of Jewish children to Britain and British children’s
wartime evacuation to the countryside can all appear
to become entangled, if not entirely conflated,
especially in younger students’ minds:
Was the holocaust a train that took jews out of
Germany to help them? (Year 7 student).
I think holocaust was something that helped children
in the war go to the country side. This made them a
bit safer. (Year 7 student).
www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust