What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Encountering representations of the Holocaust
survivors around who are still living says to us, ‘No
we are not talking about, you know, eleven hundred
in Yorkshire or whatever, or the blood libel. We are
talking about really recent history, you know’. That
makes people think that it is relevant to them and
immediate and something that they need to look at.
(Natalie, Year 12, LON2)
Different survivors, with different stories and
different approaches to sharing their testimony,
capture students’ attention in different ways. Different
spaces inside or outside of school, be they large
assemblies or smaller meetings, sometimes in local
synagogues or community centres, encouraged
different modes of interaction with the speakers and
other members of the audience. However, it was
clear that the embodied presence of the witness –
their actually being there – was an important part
of the experience beyond simply the transfer of
information, or even the telling of stories. Young
people spoke of listening to a survivor in person as
a powerful, edifying, affective experience:
…and it gives you a different feeling, compared to
when you, like, read something or when you’re told
about something by someone who wasn’t really
there, it wasn’t like … it just has, like, a different
sense of feeling, because she was actually there,
and she was standing in front of us, telling us
about it (Malcolm, Year 12, LON1).
I think it is when like you can see them you know
you are, like, in the same room as them, you know
that they are saying it from their story, like, you
can see the emotion on their face, the tone of their
voice, you can tell by their emotions. Whereas in a
video, like, or anything else, you are not that faceto-face
kind of thing, you are not in that intimacy of
like what actually happened (Fred, Year 9, YH1).
Yeah, I feel, like, personally, like, quite honoured
to be able to hear them in person. Because there
is a difference between, like, hearing it on a
video and actually being in the same room
(Simon, Year 9, LON2).
Many students found the experience humbling
and expressed how touched they were by the
positivity of the Holocaust survivor in spite of his or
her catastrophic past and of the emotional disorder
that ensued:
Even at the end he still managed to make jokes
about his life and his wife and it was really funny and
I was crying and laughing … It was so inspirational
and moving about how he managed to survive
through that terrible time (Sandra, Year 9, YH1).
Rather than find that listening to trauma was
traumatic, the experience aroused in respondents
a heightened feeling of self-awareness and
momentousness. When her group was asked what
they remembered most about meeting the survivor
– apart from their actual story – Natalie (Year 12,
LON2) replied, ‘The atmosphere in the room. We
were utterly silent’. In another school, Richard (Year
9, YH1) reflected upon the enormous significance of
the physical presence of the survivor:
It’s just like, this guy’s in front of me. If he hadn’t
made a decision when he was like eight or nine
years old then he could of died in one of the most
horrific ways ever.
In addition, students were able to reflect on how
the survivors transcended fear and found strength
and purpose through facing and escaping death:
His look on life changed because of what he went
through, so he was no longer scared of death
because of what he had been through, he wasn’t
scared any more of anything that would normally
scare us because he knew what death was.
(Timothy, Year 9, YH1)
He had met it almost face to face and he seen it in
front of his eyes, so the fact that he wasn’t scared
of dying, he had seen death and wasn’t scared.
(Andrew, Year 9, YH1)
This sort of experience touches on the spiritual,
moral, social and cultural (SMSC) dimension of
young people’s learning. According to a recent Royal
Society of the Arts study (Peterson et al. 2014), this
area is commonly marginalised in schools and often
lacks an underpinning rationale. With 2013 Ofsted
guidelines raising the stakes regarding SMSC the
area should generate greater attention. A particular
issue rests perhaps with the complex and enigmatic
‘spiritual development’. Rowson (2013: 2) states:
The capacious term ‘spirituality’ lacks clarity
because it is not so much a unitary concept as a
signpost for a range of touchstones: our search
for meaning, our sense of the sacred, the value of
compassion, the experience of transcendence,
the hunger for transformation.
From what they said in the focus groups, it
appears that encounters with people who lived
through the Holocaust aroused a deep respect in
students – a sense of knowing about a life beyond
anything they ordinarily experience – touching on the
transformative and existential and resonating with
Rowson’s description.
It is hard to conceive of any technology that will be
able to replicate these students’ profound encounters
with an embodied, human presence. However, two
organisations in the field of Holocaust education –