What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Encountering representations of the Holocaust
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follow-up focus-group interviews were also held.
Students who had recently listened to a survivor
talk were invited to explain, in their own terms,
what the experience of meeting and listening to a
Holocaust survivor meant to them and how they
felt it had contributed to their understanding of and
engagement with this history.
Again, one of the most regularly and promptly
volunteered responses was that hearing a
first-hand account delivered ‘face-to-face’ had made
the Holocaust ‘seem more real’. Indeed, this was
the most common, consistent and enthusiastically
asserted reaction irrespective of gender and
year group:
Yes, it is like it was his life. So if someone else tells
it, it doesn’t feel like it was his life. If someone has
a story, sure you can just tell it and it will still have
like an impact but then if you hear it from the person
who actually is the story, then it kind of actually
makes it more real and it makes you understand
more (Aasif, Year 9, YH1).
…because if it’s kind of like from a textbook or a
video it doesn’t really seem real to you. But then
since it’s an actual person, face-to-face, talking to
you, it seems a lot more real, because they’ve been
through it and their presence is there
(Chloe, Year 9, SW1).
Before you see someone who has gone through
it, who has actually been to one of the camps, you
kind of – for me anyway – I was in a bit of disbelief.
Because you kind of don’t believe it until you
actually … hear a first-hand view of actually what
happened there (Dafna, Year 12, LON2).
Arguably, recognising how survivor testimony
made the Holocaust seem more real to these
students emphasises how ‘unreal’ the Holocaust
might continue to feel to others who had not shared
this experience. This may be especially true for those
students who only encounter its history through
text and/or film. Some students referred to ‘a fairytale’
or ‘story-book’ like quality to this ‘pre-survivor
encounter’ history:
It just seems so unrealistic, that such a major event
happened and occurred, I mean you wouldn’t
believe it, you would think it was something out of a
story book or something (Roland, Year 12, LON1).
It wasn’t a story, it was something that actually
happened, because it can seem a bit like a
children’s story or a fairy tale, although not a very
happy one (Simon, Year 9, SW1).
With the experiments that went on it seems a bit,
you know, Captain America? You know, the bad
one. And it is like that, because that is so unrealistic.
And they did experiments on people and sewed
twins together? It just doesn’t sound right
(Jacob, Year 9, LON2).
In the books and like all the stuff that you read about
the Holocaust in class it is like real but sometimes
what you read is hard to believe because it is like so
extreme, but then like when you hear it from a real
live person who was actually there, it like cements
it that it did actually happen and it is not just like
exaggerated (Hannah, Year 9, LON2).
It is important here not to take such comments
out of context and consider them as a form of
denial of the historical record. Rather, they can be
seen to encapsulate what the philosopher Sarah
Kofman, refers to as an ‘inevitable incredulity’.
These comments by students also resonate with
those made by Gideon Hausner. Reflecting on
the Eichmann trial, at which he was the Israeli
prosecutor, Hausner described the pivotal role
of survivor testimony in making the otherwise
distant and ‘unbelievable’ events approachable
and meaningful to an audience who had not been
there. He recalled that:
It was mainly through the testimony of witnesses
that the events could be reproduced in court, and
thus conveyed … to the world at large, in such a
way that men would not recoil from the narrative
as from scalding steam, and so that it would not
remain the fantastic, unbelievable apparition that
emerges from the Nazi documents (quoted in
Wieviorka, 2006b: 390, emphasis added).
Woven through all of the group interviews was
the clear sense that students took a great deal from
meeting a survivor in person and hearing from them
first hand. Many students spoke of how a face-toface
encounter with a survivor made the Holocaust
seem less distant in time:
It was also very recent, if you think about it, it only
happened… like 70 years ago. You don’t really think
about it, like the lifestyle we live at the moment, you
wouldn’t think that people [were] treated that badly,
but it was really close, she was still like, I was still
able to meet her, I felt how close it was…
You wouldn’t really think that it was that close,
because you read about it in history and you think,
you don’t realise that it was that recent
(Deborah, Year 12, LON1).
…it is important in order to say ‘never again’ we
need to believe that it is possible that it could
happen in a recent time and the fact that there are
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