What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Encountering representations of the Holocaust
As he had argued elsewhere six years earlier, ‘the
Holocaust in its enormity defies language and art,
and yet both must be used to tell the tale, the tale
that must be told’ (quoted in Muschamp 1993:
no pagination).
For Wiesel, one of the most powerful imperatives
for at least attempting to communicate this history
is as a commitment to the Holocaust’s victims, to
those who feared their tale(s) might never be told.
In a famous passage from the preface to The
Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi describes a
regularly articulated fear among survivors that their
accounts would simply not be believed. This is a
fear all the more profound because it had been
foreshadowed by their persecutors, as Levi (1988:
1) illustrates in identifying the sort of admonishments
and threats made by SS officers to young Jews:
However this war may end, we have won the war
against you; none of you will be left to bear witness,
but even if someone were to survive, the world will
not believe him. There will perhaps be suspicions,
discussions, research by historians, but there will be
no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence
together with you. And even if some proof should
remain and some of you survive, people will say
that the events you described are too monstrous
to be believed: they will say that they are the
exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe
us, who will deny everything, and not you. We will
be the ones to dictate the history of the Lagers.
Of course the Nazis were successful neither in
entirely destroying the evidence of their crimes nor
in silencing their victims’ voices. On the contrary, in
place of silence multifarious ‘tales’ of and from the
Holocaust now abound. As Levi and Rothberg (2003:
4) note in the introduction to an edited collection
of readings from across the humanities and social
sciences, ‘despite a slow start in the early postwar
years and the many famous warnings about these
events’ incomprehensibility’, ‘the amount of research
and writing about the Holocaust is mind-boggling’.
In addition to the many academic historians,
philosophers, theologians, cultural theorists and
social scientists that Levi and Rothberg cite,
numerous artists, novelists, poets, playwrights and
film-makers have also attempted to communicate
and reflect upon the meaning – or meanings – of
the Holocaust in a variety of different ways. And, as
this chapter will demonstrate, multiple forms of both
academic and popular cultural representation of the
Holocaust are likely to inform students’ knowledge
and understanding of this history.
Wiesel’s central tenet – that ‘the truth’ of the
Holocaust can only be understood by those who
were its victims – remains contentious, as all
discussions regarding claims to ‘knowledge’ or ‘truth’
are wont to be. However, it has significant implication
for teaching and learning, as is illustrated by this
conversation with a group of Year 12 students who
had been asked to consider whether ‘too much time
is spent learning about the Holocaust in schools’:
Miles: I think the only key point about that is the fact
that if we get the point of what it means and what it
means in relation to us.
Interviewer: Could you try and articulate what that is?
What it is, and what it means in relation to you?
Miles: So like, for me, while I was listening to [the
survivor who talked in school] he was talking about
how there was kids in the concentration camps and
how they were sent off without their mothers and their
fathers and stuff like that. And for me I sort of pictured
myself into that situation, and once I saw it I thought,
I’ve got to respect this, it’s a really key thing in history.
Yeah, I don’t want to go on and on about it ’til the day is
done really, but ’til it’s really enforced in my brain, I just
think this is injustice in a sense and it isn’t right!
[. . .]
John: Yeah. It’s just so … you wouldn’t be able to
imagine yourself in that position. You try and imagine
yourself in that position and you think, that’s so intense
and so…
Sarah: It just sounds too terrible to be true.
John: Yeah, almost as if it could be … it’s not possible,
as if it didn’t happen because it’s so, so intense and
so …
Sarah: Brutal.
John: …brutal, yeah (Year 12, EE2).
Miles describes that, while he may not want
‘to go on and on about it ‘til the day is done’, it is
important that he and other students are able to
‘get the point of what [the Holocaust] means’ and,
more specifically, what it means in relation to them.
Sarah and John articulate their own struggle to
comprehend the almost unbelievable brutality of this
history while Miles says that he was able to ‘picture’
himself in the context of the concentration camp
system after hearing the spoken first-person account
of a survivor and that this visualisation enabled him to
grasp the salience of the Holocaust: ‘once I saw it I
thought, I’ve got to respect this, it’s a really key thing
in history’.
Such articulations by students of what they think
or feel it means to ‘know’ about or ‘understand’
the Holocaust are the focus of this chapter, along
with analysis of how they relate to various forms of
encounter in their attempts to do so.
In the context specifically of history classrooms,
several authors have raised concerns over ahistorical
forms of empathising based on ‘imagination’,
‘identification’ or ‘sympathy’, reminiscent of the
experience that Miles appears to describe (Foster