What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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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