What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Encountering representations of the Holocaust
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Muslims and Jews, there was no indication that this
then impacted upon their attitude towards learning
about the Holocaust in schools.
A further explanation for Muslim students’
potential resistance to this subject is offered by
Whine (2013: 29) who observes that, despite what
he considers to be its ‘implications for the entire
world’, the Holocaust was ‘a European tragedy in
which the Muslim world played only a very small
part’. Allouche-Benayon and Jikeli (2013) make a
similar argument in suggesting that, for many of
Europe’s Muslim populations, the Holocaust may not
be seen as a central point of reference within their
shared sense of community history.
This issue was broached by one of the groups
of Year 12 Muslim students who had been asked to
consider whether the Holocaust felt relevant to them
personally, despite it having happened before they
were born, in a different country and to an ethnic or
religious group with which none of them identified:
Laboni: Some students might want to learn about
something a bit more closer to their identity and identify
with it a bit more…
Samreen: It’s like Eurocentric. Being Muslim, it is more
than likely that you’ll be from somewhere in Asia or
Africa. I think learning about perhaps the Nationalist
challenge in India would be a bit more interesting to us
than what happened in Germany perhaps
(Year 12, LON8).
The sense that young British Muslim students’
historical concern lay outside of the histories of
European conflicts also arose in an oblique fashion
in discussion with a group of Year 13 students
in the second school. Here, an arguably critical
commentary emerged relating to what some
students considered to be a celebratory British
narrative within which the Holocaust itself was
regularly framed.
Marwa: It [the Holocaust] shows the British in a
positive light.
Zarak: That’s why they publicise it … When you are
studying certain subjects you sort of inoculate the
conflicting arguments so you don’t really know much
about them, so you can’t really acknowledge them.
So obviously by putting the Holocaust in, you see
Britain, as like they are doing a good thing, so you don’t
really think about the bad things they might have done.
[…]
Rameesha: I think’s it’s like last year we learned
about how Hitler got into power and more about the
Holocaust – that should be like the British Empire, how
they attained the British Empire, find out what the British
Empire did for them.
Wassim: All they really talk about is how our tiny island
ruled this many countries, which shows its power.
It doesn’t tell you about all the people who died, and like
India and how they lost their freedom. They don’t display
the debts, they don’t show the debts (Year 13, WM2).
Moreover, in this same interview, some students
identified and expressed resentment towards
discursive attempts to position Muslims as though
‘outside of’ or ‘other’ to the British nation and its
putatively shared values. As Chapter 1 has already
noted, precisely such ‘British values’ have recently
been framed at a governmental level explicitly in
relation to a national commitment to the memory
of the Holocaust. Represented crudely and without
sufficient context, these students’ voices could
arguably be interpreted as indication of potential
resentment towards learning about the Holocaust.
Wassim (Year 13, WM2), for example explained:
I think if, er, there was someone in the papers wrote
about, erm, ‘Muslims need to be taught British
values’, I think there wasn’t much … there was a
bit of anger, between Muslims, but it wasn’t [much]
… but if it was someone like, if they wrote about
Jewish people need to be taught about British
values that could have more of an impact because
of what happened in the Holocaust.
It was beyond the function of this particular focus
group – indeed of this whole research report – to
adequately probe and contextualise Wassim’s
thoughts here but this could be a critically important
avenue for future research.
Finally, it is crucial to emphasise that it was
by no means only Muslim students who made
observations or raised objections such as these.
In an entirely different school the following related
conversation ensued:
Ella: I think what we do is we teach about the
Holocaust because Britain got involved to stop
Germany. So it looks like we…
Sarah: We’re the better … yeah.
[…]
Sarah: We did mention the Boer War during our lessons
and the concentration camps that were used then.
But that’s the closest we’ve got to…
Billie: Yes, to the negative side of Britain.
Brian: Yeah. Like the negative side of Britain, like a lot
of conflicts that go on today happened because of us
– well, not us; but I mean Britain as in the country. The
results of our actions have led to a lot of other killings
around the world. Not just to do with our own country.
So I suppose we only really learn about things that we
win or…
Billie: Yeah, [where] we look the best.
Brian: Yeah.
Billie: Because I bet in other countries they learn about
what Britain has done and what Britain has caused.
www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust