What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Encountering representations of the Holocaust 85 maybe just a bit of conflict and it keeps on going, it builds up and up and it doesn’t stop … and then it just ends up like that. (Chris, Year 9, SE2). Personally I think someone can say, oh, racism is not really a big deal. But one snide comment can escalate and I don’t think at the beginning, when people got involved with Hitler and the Nazi Party, they probably didn’t really realise the extent to which they would go. And I don’t think anyone would ever have expected it when they joined that it would come to this mass genocide, millions and trillions of people being killed. I think people should know that that’s what can happen. Even if they’re saying, oh it’s only tiny, it’s not a big deal – it can lead to a big deal. It may not be, but it can be, that’s the problem – it can happen, it has happened. That’s my own opinion anyway (Stephanie, Year 12, SE2). The sense of inexorable escalation – that the Holocaust was something that ‘started out as quite small’, ‘something in [just] one man’s head’, or ‘just one snide comment’, but that ‘expanded to kill millions’ – expressed by these three students was regularly repeated in interviews. In other student responses there was clear suggestion that attention to the symbolic and representational significance of the Holocaust, as described in Chapter 1, could override or displace a comprehensive engagement with the actual history. The following group of Year 12 history students summed up this position when they prioritised ‘the concept of’ the Holocaust over knowledge or understanding of the events themselves: Ella: I think people should know about it, like the basics of it. I just thought … I just thought maybe it’s the actual event isn’t as important as the concept of it is. Interviewer: What do you mean by the concept of it? John: Like what Ella was saying, you should know it – you don’t come out of it happy – you know it’s wrong and people should know it’s wrong. But I feel more that that’s important rather than knowing the details of the actual event. Interviewer: Explain to me how you can understand the concept without knowing what happened? Ella: I think you have to, but I don’t think people have to know in exact depth … this bunch of people killed thousands, millions of people, these people died, this is mass genocide; they can tell it but you don’t have to go into such deep detail into it. They can just know it happened and I think that’s enough for anyone, let alone having any extra interest into it (Year 12, EE2). Again, students’ conviction of the importance of the Holocaust is evident here, and all were clear that this was something everyone should ‘know about’. However, the students stress the importance of ‘knowing about’ the Holocaust as a parable – for what it stands for or represents – rather than as an historical event. Given the wider sociocultural context described in Chapter 1, such responses are not altogether surprising. In most popular and political contemporary framings, the notion that there are ‘lessons to be learned’ from the Holocaust is taken as a given. Moreover, this is articulated in such a manner that it could easily be assumed that ‘just knowing it happened’ – or publicly ‘remembering’ that it happened – is sufficient; any suggestion of the Figure 4.12 Student responses to survey question 91, asking how far they agreed or disagreed with opinions about teaching the Holocaust in schools percentages below 5 per cent are not labelled in the chart Percentage of students 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 To understand where racism can lead 43.2 48.5 5.7 To respect the memory of victims 36.2 53.2 8.0 To stop something similar happening again 33.3 52.2 11.1 To deepen historical knowledge 26.6 60.5 9.8 To learn about what caused Holocaust 24.7 64.2 8.1 To become more likely to defend victims of bullying 22.1 53.0 19.8 To increase sympathy for refugees coming to this country 20.5 56.7 17.8 ■ Strongly agree ■ Agree ■ Disagree ■ Strongly Disagree www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust
86 Encountering representations of the Holocaust specific knowledge content that might be necessary to underpin or substantiate such ‘lessons’ is almost never made. However, at other times in interview, many of these same students were able to offer more critical and/or circumspect perspectives. For example, Ella (Year 12, EE2) – who volunteered the importance of ‘the concept of the Holocaust’ – later questioned the common proposition that learning about the Holocaust is primarily an intervention against racism and prejudice by identifying the following challenge to this thesis: Even when I was little, before I really knew anything about it, I wasn’t … I didn’t stop being racist because of the Holocaust; I wasn’t racist and then not racist. I’ve always not been racist. Others reflected upon potential limits to the idea that students should encounter this history in school in order to prevent things like the Holocaust from happening again: Megan: To stop it from happening again? I don’t think… Hermione: [Interrupts] There are genocides happening all the time. Megan: [I don’t think] … if we learned about it, it would stop somebody from thinking that they could do that. If Hitler learned about genocides, I don’t think he’d have thought, ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that now’. You know, ‘I’d never kill a Jew again’, because he learned about that (Year 9, SE2). In some cases, even the notion of ‘respect’ was critically interrogated and reframed in interesting ways: I’m not sure if it’s so much about respecting the individuals who died themselves as much as respecting the concept of the Holocaust and what it means to the people it affected. Like, when we talk about this statement, respecting… I don’t know, learning about the Holocaust, isn’t it more to do with respecting the fact that it happened [. . .] than respecting each individual person for having died? I don’t know (Milo, Year 12, SE2). Fariha: I think it’s also a sign of regret. Samreen: Yeah. Laboni: The world is regretting that we did not know, or we claimed not to know. I think not enough was done and six million odd people died, innocent victims died as a result of our neglect (Year 12, LON8). As seen in Laboni’s contribution, students’ discussions also began to identify and grapple with some of the most challenging moral, ethical and political questions that engagement with the history of the Holocaust can raise. Laboni is confronting notions of national and international responsibility: What did ‘we’, as Britain or as the rest of the world, know of what was happening at the time, and what could we perhaps have done differently? Other students suggested that encountering the Holocaust prompted fundamental questions about what it means to be a human – ‘How could a group of people that could be like us in a way do things like that?’ (Finn, Year 8, EE2) – and which can profoundly challenge notions of human progress and modernity: History has developed and you would think over time people would begin to treat people better. But it went from development to kind of reverse and any morals that ever existed about any human beings just went out the window and it was just okay to just kill people (Stephanie, Year 12, SE2). So, while the dominant discourse of clear ‘lessons from’ the Holocaust clearly frames student thinking, many of those who took part in focus-group interviews were also demonstrably able and willing to think beyond and against this frame. What impact does first-hand survivor testimony have on students’ understanding of the Holocaust? In the survey, students were asked if they had ever heard a survivor talk about their experience of the Holocaust and, across all year groups, 49 per cent indicated that they had (survey question 79). By point of comparison, 24.2 per cent said they had visited a museum to learn about the Holocaust, 18.8 per cent had participated in an event to mark Holocaust Memorial Day and 9.4 per cent had visited the site of a former concentration camp or death camp. The survey also asked those students who had been given these opportunities to decide how far they agreed that the experience had either: helped them understand how and/or why the Holocaust had happened; made what happened during the Holocaust feel ‘more real’; been upsetting; or been boring. Of these, 89.4 per cent agreed or strongly agreed that hearing a survivor speak had made the Holocaust ‘feel more real’, 87.5 per cent indicated they had found the experience upsetting, and 81.8 per cent agreed it had helped their understanding of how or why the Holocaust took place. It was also clear that most students found the talks interesting and engaging, as 90.2 per cent disagreed or strongly disagreed that the experience was ‘boring’. As the current cohort of students is likely to be among the last who will be able to hear first-hand survivor testimony, the research team felt it important to examine students’ experience of such encounters more fully, so a series of eight specifically targeted
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CENTRE FOR HOLOCAUST EDUCATION What
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What do students know and understan
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iv About the UCL Centre for Holocau
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vi Foreword by Sir Peter Bazalgette
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viii Foreword by Professor Yehuda B
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2 Executive summary ■■ Many stu
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Olivia Hemingway, 2014
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8 Introduction ■■ What forms of
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10 Introduction the fate of the Jew
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12 Introduction two reasons here in
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14 Introduction Figure 1.1 Variatio
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16 Introduction Holocaust are never
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18 Introduction ■■ the inclusio
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20 Introduction ■■ The chapter
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24 Methodology Of particular note w
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26 Methodology were asked questions
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28 Methodology Vocabulary test We e
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30 Methodology Table 2.2 Breakdown
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32 Methodology Focus group details
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136 Who were the victims? many stud
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140 Who were the perpetrators and w
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204 Considerations and recommendati
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Appendix 1: The Survey 225 Appendix
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Appendix 1: The Survey 227 How do y
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Appendix 1: The Survey 229 Word qui
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Appendix 1: The Survey 231 Explorin
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Appendix 1: The Survey 233 Do you r
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Appendix 1: The Survey 235 42. Who
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Appendix 1: The Survey 237 The Nazi
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Appendix 1: The Survey 239 64. What
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Appendix 1: The Survey 241 71. If y
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Appendix 1: The Survey 245 87. Have
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Appendix 2: Attitudinal scales used
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Appendix 3: Coding frameworks for f
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Appendix 4: Schools that participat
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References 259 Assmann, A. (2010)
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References 261 Carr, E.H. (1964) Wh
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References 263 Emler, N. and Ohana,
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References 265 Howitt, D. and Crame
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References 267 Levstik, L.S. (2000)
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References 269 Resnick, L.B. (1989)
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References 271 Snyder, T. (2009)
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References 273 Yeager, E., Anderson
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Centre for Holocaust Education UCL
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What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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