What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Encountering representations of the Holocaust
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and Yeager 2001: 169; Harris and Foreman-Peck
2004; Ashby and Lee 1987 and Shemilt 1984).
However, most would also argue that the ‘meaning’
and significance of the Holocaust could not be
comprehended through historical analysis alone.
Indeed, as this chapter will go on to describe,
many of the students who took part in this study
themselves described their ‘understanding’ in
affective and experiential rather than purely
cognitive terms.
It is perhaps for these reasons that the Centre’s
previous research on classroom practice found that
many teachers from across all subject backgrounds
– including history – were likely to draw upon
multiple forms of representation of the Holocaust.
For example, 76 per cent of those who answered
the relevant survey question reported that they were
likely to use feature films in their teaching, while 81
per cent said they were likely to use film or television
documentaries and 67 per cent were likely to make
use of school textbooks (Pettigrew et al. 2009: 52).
When interviewed, individual teachers described
incorporating drama, poetry, visual art and music into
their lessons – in some cases explicitly to facilitate
students’ emotional and affective engagement with
this history. But how are such forms or encounters
likely to be experienced by students? And what
impact might competing representations or accounts
of the Holocaust have upon their substantive
‘knowledge’ and ‘understanding’ of the ‘monstrous’
realities that Wiesel, Levi and others experienced
first-hand?
As a companion to that aspect of the 2009 study,
this chapter focuses on students’ perspectives and
experiences of learning about the Holocaust, both
within and beyond school. It begins with an overview
of the curricular contexts in which this learning takes
place and then considers the value – or otherwise
– that students place upon being taught about the
Holocaust within school. It specifically considers
the contention that some students may experience
reluctance or resistance to learning about this
subject. Critically, the chapter asks how students
themselves appear to frame the importance or value
of learning about the Holocaust and what ‘meaning’,
‘knowledge’ or ‘understanding’ they consider it
appropriate or possible to take from their encounters
with this history.
Students’ experiences of and perspectives on
three specific modes of encounter are then examined
in particular detail:
■■
first-hand oral testimony given in person by
survivors of the Holocaust
■■
the film adaptation of John Boyne’s novel
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
■■
photographic atrocity images of victims of
the Holocaust and more specifically their use
within schools.
While each of these was chosen for a different reason
(explained below), each also reflects a number of
debates and questions raised around competing
attempts to communicate meaning of and from
the Holocaust on both ethical and epistemological
grounds. For example: What are the relationships
between individual memory and disciplinary history?
Levi and Rothberg (2003: 25) describe how ‘some
historians [e.g. Wieviorka 2006a] remain sceptical
about the historical accuracy of victims’ testimony’.
But, as they continue:
…most scholars now agree on the human value of
oral and written testimonies. Whatever the problems
of memory and point of view that such documents
exhibit, they offer an unparalleled access to the
unfolding of the Holocaust and to the subjective
experience of catastrophe.
If that is accepted, how do students who have
heard first-hand testimony position this experience in
relation to their wider study of the history?
Further, in relation to The Boy in the Striped
Pyjamas, can the ‘meaning’ – or ‘meanings’ – of the
Holocaust only be reliably accessed through precise
and historically accurate retelling, or is a degree
of ‘poetic licence’ sometimes justified? What is or
should be the status of fictionalised accounts of the
Holocaust within and outside of the classroom? And
what do students themselves consider to be the
strengths or limitations of these?
Still other questions emerge when considering
whether the nature of the Holocaust itself imposes
certain limits on its own representation. Is the
classroom an appropriate space for students
to encounter graphic visual imagery, including
photographic evidence of Nazi atrocities?
For some commentators a reverence and respect for
the brutalised victims that such images depict must
always take precedence, while others argue that
those seeking to ‘understand’ the Holocaust must
be fully confronted with its barbarity.
It is not in the remit of this research to attempt an
ultimate reconciliation between the many competing
perspectives offered by numerous commentators
in response to questions such as these. Rather, the
focus is upon students’ experiences of encountering
the Holocaust and, critically, on the implication
of these for the knowledge, understandings and
meanings that they were able and inclined to draw.
www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust