Keywords

Introduction

A number of scholars, including Kinloch (2001), Kochan (1989), and Novick (1999), have cast doubt on whether the Holocaust contains any useful lessons. My own view is that we have much to learn from the Holocaust, particularly with regard to the nature of racism and the measures necessary to prevent genocide (Short 2003). Holocaust education can be said to fail insofar as these lessons are not learnt. It also fails if, for whatever reason, students learn inappropriate ones. In the course of this chapter I attempt to explain, with reference to empirical research, how such unsatisfactory outcomes can arise. I begin with the commonsense assumption that, other things being equal, students are more likely to learn useful lessons from the Holocaust the longer they are exposed to it. In a study conducted in the UK in the mid-1990s (Short 1995), I found that most teachers devoted between two and four hours to the subject with a substantial minority spending in excess of five hours. The time allotted included any preliminary activity undertaken as background to the history of the Jews in Europe between 1933 and 1945.

However, one respondent, teaching in a Catholic school, allowed a total of just 50 minutes, despite admitting that “an awful lot of our children are extremely antisemitic and this has to be countered by teachers looking at the Holocaust”. Another objected to the government insisting that the Holocaust be taught to an age group that he considered too young. When asked how long he spent teaching the Holocaust, he said, “I don’t teach it at all. I just tell them to read the section in the textbook”. Superficiality of this kind is problematic, not just because of the missed opportunity to learn significant lessons, but because of the danger that students will, instead, imbibe the implicit and malign message that racism, even in its most extreme form, is not something that need greatly concern them. In a replication of the study, which I conducted in Toronto (Short 2000a), teachers assigned an average of 5 hours to the Holocaust, although this figure again masked a wide variation.

Lessons Relating to the Nature of Racism

Arguably, the single most important lesson to extract from the Holocaust is that Nazism, in respect of its racial policies, is an unmitigated evil. If students are to regard it as such, they have to see the overwhelming majority of Jewish victims as wholly innocent of the charges laid against them. They may fail do so, however, partly because of what psychologists refer to as the just world theory: the belief that we all have a natural inclination to perceive the world as fundamentally fair (Lerner 1977). In regard to young children, Piaget (1932) suggested something similar with his notion of “immanent justice”. If people suffer, we assume that they must have done something to deserve it. When learning about the Holocaust, students in the West are particularly likely to make this inference if they subscribe to antisemitic stereotypes, a strong possibility given their ubiquity in Christian or nominally Christian societies, and the fact that that they are absorbed at an early age (Allport 1954).

Taken together, the belief in an equitable world and acceptance of antisemitic stereotypes not only help to explain the Holocaust but also to justify it, for the Jews are seen as getting what they deserve. To lessen the chances of students interpreting the Holocaust in this way—as the triumph of good over evil—it is essential that before they commence work on the topic, teachers set out to explore and, if necessary, to challenge their pupils’ perceptions of Jews and Jewish culture. Not to do so is to invite the failure of all subsequent teaching.

That said, it appears that teachers rarely carry out this critically important task. In the British study cited above, only 2 out of the 34 teachers in the sample actively investigated the way their pupils perceived Jews before teaching about the Holocaust. In neither case, though, was it clear whether they focused on religious as well as on secular myths. Some religious misconceptions, notably that the Jews killed Christ, can have lethal consequences. Others may be less harmful but, insofar as they suggest that Jews are an alien presence in the country, they lessen sympathy for them and thereby increase understanding for their persecutors. Rejection of “the other” as not legitimately belonging to the nation is the essence of what Barker (1981) terms “the new racism”.

Many of the teachers said they did nothing to undermine any misconceptions either because their pupils had none, or because they were dealt with elsewhere in the curriculum, either in religious education (RE) or in personal and social education. The following comments are illustrative.

We do not analyse any of the stereotypes before studying the Holocaust. I am not aware of any stereotypes. I would hope that with the work they do in RE, with visits to the synagogue etc., that’s all been dispelled.

We have the advantage that virtually all our pupils come from respectable middle-class homes where such prejudices aren’t likely to exist. I don’t set out deliberately to remove any pre-set ideas because I assume they don’t have them.

In Toronto the results were almost identical. None of the 23 teachers I interviewed examined their students’ beliefs about Jews and Judaism before starting work on the Holocaust with a view to deconstructing them if need be. The reasons for non-intervention were familiar.

I’ve never run into those misconceptions… In my experience, the students here don’t have any particularly strong feelings about Jews or any other ethnic group.

We really don’t have to [explore their views on Judaism] because the Catholic church and its teaching right now see the Jews as the chosen people and their religion is deeply connected to ours.

The just world theory is not only relevant to perceptions of the Holocaust; it applies equally to the way Jewish suffering is seen throughout the ages. Awareness of this history is likely to reinforce students’ tendency to assume that there is no smoke without fire and, for this reason, teachers should stress that the Jewish past is, in reality, far from a litany of unremitting torment. Whether or not they do so is currently unknown.

If we want students to reject antisemitism as morally repugnant, they have to learn more about the nature of racism in general than that it relies heavily on false or misleading stereotypes. In particular, they should know that racists rarely have a single target in their sights. As Gordon Allport (1954), the leading authority on the nature of prejudice put it, “One of the facts of which we are most certain is that people who reject one out-group will tend to reject other out-groups. If a person is anti-Jewish, he is likely to be anti-Catholic, anti-Negro, anti-any out-group” (p. 68). To get this point across, teachers need to address the full range of victims of Nazi persecution and do so in a non-tokenistic manner. In the British study, comparatively few teachers were asked if they talk about victims of the Nazis other than Jews. In every case they answered in the affirmative, but some admitted to doing so superficially. In Toronto, the entire sample was asked the question and a similar picture emerged. There were many references to “Gypsies”, homosexuals, and Slavs, but only one teacher mentioned Germans with disabilities and none spoke about Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Another lesson that students should learn about the nature of racism is that it does not arise in a vacuum. Its roots are deeply embedded in a culture and it thus poses a potential threat even when dormant. For students to understand this aspect of racism, teachers of the Holocaust ought to spend some time looking at the tradition of antisemitism in the western world and the role of Christianity in perpetuating it. More than half the British sample, however, either made no reference to the historical background or covered it quite inadequately. One teacher, when asked how long he spent discussing the history of antisemitism said, “almost [no time] at all. It doesn’t figure on the course”, whilst another admitted to spending “about five minutes”. Although many stated that they would mention that antisemitism was not just a 20th-century phenomenon, they nonetheless tended to restrict discussion of its form and development to Nazi Germany. They often insisted that this was not a matter of choice, but rather the result of time constraints. The data from Toronto were similar. Nearly half the sample said they just “touch[ed] on the role of the Church” and most of the others did nothing. The reasons were varied. One teacher cited the need to prioritise: “I don’t have time to do that. If there’s one thing I have to cut back on it’s that”. Another attributed it to the religious ethos of the school: “It’s difficult being in a Catholic school to make the association”. For a couple of teachers the problem was one of ignorance, not of church teachings, but of Jewish history. To compound this relative neglect, none of the textbooks used in the schools made any mention of the historic link between the Church and antisemitism.

Examining the link is important not just to illustrate a critical feature of racism, but to highlight the distinctive nature of antisemitism. The late Lucy Dawidowicz (1992) was among the first to argue that the specificity of antisemitism was often lost when students learnt about the Holocaust because the latter was seen only in terms of racism or prejudice. When I questioned British teachers about the advantages of teaching the Holocaust (Short 1995), the most frequent response (given by 20 out of the 34 teachers) was the need to alert students to the dangers of racism. Not a single teacher suggested its value in helping students understand the specific nature of antisemitism. Indeed, one teacher said, “we learn about the death camps, but we do it through the viewpoint of racism and not antisemitism” (pp. 172–173).

Dawidowicz wrote that “the trouble with this kind of universalization is that it… ignores the particular religious and historical roots that nurture specific prejudices” (p. 74). This is an important dimension of racism that students should know about. They should also know that racism, by its nature, is not restricted to any one group of people or to a particular place or time. While discussion of antisemitism over the centuries helps to drive this point home, reference should also be made to events immediately prior to the Holocaust, such as the Evian Conference of 1938 and the fruitless journey of the SS St. Louis, both of which showed that antisemitism in other countries was a major obstacle to the emigration of German and Austrian Jews. In neither my British nor my Canadian study were teachers asked if they mentioned these portentous events. However, in subsequent research (Short 2000b) that sought to discover what a group of 14- to 16-year-olds learnt about citizenship as a result of studying the Holocaust as history, I asked respondents to explain why the rest of the world was reluctant to accept Jewish refugees in large numbers. Significantly, only around a quarter of them attributed the reluctance to antisemitism. Their comments included the following:

They might have felt that their jobs and economies would have been taken over by the Jews if they came in large numbers.

Deep down they must have been scared that Hitler believed the Jews were responsible for ruining the economy and it was because of them that they lost the war and many countries wouldn’t want to take the gamble just [in case] he was right and then suffer the consequences.

That just a minority spoke in these terms is a concern if Germans are not to be stereotyped as singularly lacking in humanitarianism and uniquely evil in respect of racism and antisemitism. In the study, one girl said spontaneously of her experience of learning about the Holocaust that it had made her “more against the Germans”. This is precisely the sort of inappropriate lesson I alluded to earlier which can be said to constitute a failure of Holocaust education.

Finally, with regard to racism, students should understand that the Holocaust is not just an event of historical interest, but one that has a striking contemporary resonance. Stressing the latter is essential, partly for motivational reasons—students may be more likely to take the past seriously if they see it as connected in some way to their own lives—but mainly because far-right political parties retain a seductive appeal to those unfamiliar with where their underlying racist ideology can lead. The vast majority of teachers in the British study (Short 1995) did relate the Holocaust to current events, sometimes in respect to ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia (usefully undermining the myth that crimes against humanity only happen when Germans are involved), but more often in respect of a resurgent racism across Europe. One respondent observed that,

When you start talking about Hitler and the Nazis, the low-ability children say oh, is it like the National Front? I say yes and we talk about that and the rise of neo-Nazis in Germany and elsewhere in Europe and the fact that foreigners often get blamed for a country’s problems. At this point the children sometimes express their own racist views about immigrants coming over and taking our jobs and I try to question that.

In my Canadian study, the majority of teachers drew their students’ attention to atrocities committed in Rwanda as well as in the former Yugoslavia, but comparatively few referred to what was happening in Canada itself. Textbooks too, tended to eschew discussion of present-day racism in the country.

Lessons Unrelated to the Nature of Racism

Important lessons derive from the Holocaust independently of those relating to the nature of racism. They include the realisation that ordinary people are not necessarily reduced to the role of impotent bystanders in the face of evil. This lesson can be taught or inferred in the context of those who rescued Jews. I have in mind the well-known examples of Miep Gies, who cared for the Frank family and others in Amsterdam, and the Danish fishermen, who, in September 1943, ferried most of their nation’s Jewish community to safety in neutral Sweden. However, when teachers in the UK and Canada were asked if they talk to their students about rescuers, the topic seemed to have a low priority. In Britain, Oskar Schindler was often the only one mentioned by name, while in Canada barely a handful of respondents referred to Miep Gies and just a couple mentioned the people of Denmark (Short 1995, 2000a).

There are other lessons unrelated to racism that might prove valuable in preventing genocide and which we could reasonably expect students to learn The first concerns the role of commemoration and particularly the need for schools to teach and explain the Holocaust to future generations. This need arises from the suspicion that Hitler was prompted to give vent to his apocalyptic fantasies by a belief that the international community had forgotten about an earlier attempt at genocide. In a speech delivered to high-ranking army officers on the eve of Germany’s invasion of Poland, he is reputed to have said:

Ghengis Khan had millions of women and men killed by his own will and with a gay heart. History sees in him only a great state builder… and I have sent to the east… my “Death’s Head Units”, with the order to kill without mercy men, women and children of Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the Lebensraum that we need. Who, after all, talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians? (cited in Fein 1979, p. 4)

The notorious final sentence of this quotation suggests that a sine qua non of reducing the chances of a second Holocaust (or its equivalent) is that the subject be taught in schools. George Santayana (1905) might have overstated the case when he wrote that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it, but there is surely a greater probability of a catastrophe recurring if it is subsequently forgotten. Certainly, Holocaust deniers appear to be in no doubt that public awareness of the Nazis’ extermination policy is detrimental to their electoral prospects (Dalrymple 1992).

Reflecting on the Holocaust should also enable students to appreciate that the threat of genocide diminishes if powerful organisations such as the church condemn the persecution of potential victims. After the Nazis came to power, both Protestant and Catholic churches in Germany were remiss in this respect, although they were quite prepared to criticise the government openly on other matters. I refer to the 1941 campaign mounted by Count von Galen, Bishop of Münster, against the euthanasia programme and to the less well known opposition to the removal of crucifixes from Bavarian schools. Possibly fearing the consequences for his own church, the Pope condemned Nazi persecution, but did not mention the Jews by name and he said nothing at all when, in the autumn of 1943, the Jews of Rome were being deported.

We might also expect students who are familiar with the Holocaust to question whether overtly racist political parties have any role in a democracy, whether religious traditions other than Christianity might contain the seeds of hatred, and whether the Westphalia doctrine, whereby one country is denied the right to interfere in the internal affairs of another, ought to govern the conduct of international relations.

Learning from Genocide?

I turn now to a study I conducted in Britain (Short 2005) that focused explicitly on whether lessons unrelated to racism are, in fact, learnt by students participating in a Holocaust education programme. The research was undertaken in 2004 and originated in a week-long event organised by the Jewish community of an outer London borough to mark that year’s Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD), a national commemoration that takes place each year on 27 January, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In 2004, the theme for HMD was “Lessons learned; lessons still to be learned”. Students from eight secondary schools in the borough attended one of two local synagogues for half a day. They were given an introductory talk on the Holocaust, heard a survivor speak, and watched a video about the Rwandan genocide before splitting into small groups to reflect on what they had learnt. Discussion within the groups centred around the issue of intervention, as it affects both the politics of international relations and the conduct of individual lives.

The sample comprised 16 boys and 15 girls drawn from four of the schools involved, each having a culturally diverse catchment area. The students from one school (for Catholic girls) were aged 14–15; the others were a year older. All of them had previously engaged with the Holocaust. The questions they were asked included the following:

Do you think there are any lessons to be learned from the Holocaust?

Does the Holocaust have any lessons for (a) the international community; (b) for British society (including schools); (c) for your religion or for others; (d) for you as an individual?

Has the Holocaust affected your daily life in any way?

Do you think the Holocaust will affect your life as an adult?

The data analysis indicated that for many students, the benefits of participating in the day were largely restricted to developing their knowledge of the Holocaust and acquainting themselves with what had happened in Rwanda. I do not wish to imply that furthering their education in this way was anything other than worthwhile, but their greater familiarity with the genocides should not be allowed to obscure the fact that, overall, the students failed to learn lessons from the Holocaust and the events leading up to it.

It is not known whether teachers discussed these lessons with their students prior to the visit. The organisers of the day made plans for a discussion but only, as I have pointed out, in the context of intervention. That some important lessons of the Holocaust were mentioned by no more than a handful of students, while others were not mentioned at all, suggests that, for the most part, they were overlooked by both teachers and organisers. If this is so, it might well reflect a general lack of awareness in the country of the value of Holocaust education, for the textbooks and other instructional materials currently available there tend to contain little guidance on lessons. Typifying the dearth is the popular teaching pack Lessons of the Holocaust jointly produced in 1997 by the Spiro Institute and the Holocaust Educational Trust (SI and HET 1997). Despite the title, the section of the pack dealing with how students might benefit from reflecting on the Holocaust is limited to rather trite observations such as the following:

The Holocaust reminds us that hatred of others who are different from ourselves and whom we place beyond the pale of humanity can lead only to group violence and atrocity. It tells us that any society, however culturally, scientifically, and technically advanced, can become totally criminal once it loses the ability and the will to distinguish between right and wrong. (p. 22)

It was clear from the study that some students were able to distil meaningful lessons from what they had been taught. For example, there was a recognition of the need for bodies such as the United Nations to assume a more proactive and interventionist role in international relations, for the church to condemn serious wrongdoing, and for schools to promote tolerance. When asked whether they thought the Holocaust held any lessons for themselves, one girl commented on the morality of bystander behaviour. For her, the lesson was “not to ignore situations like they did in the Holocaust. We shouldn’t just ignore it when people are in trouble”. Likewise, a single student referred to the equally important value of thinking for oneself: “Just because someone says that something is right, it doesn’t mean that it is. I need to think for myself instead of following other people”.

Nearly two thirds of the sample maintained that studying the Holocaust had had no discernible impact on their daily lives. The rest had been affected in diverse ways. Two of the boys had become less inclined to tell antisemitic jokes while a couple of girls were generally less willing to stereotype. As to whether knowledge of the Holocaust would affect their lives as adults, the largest response category, once again, was students who said that it probably would not. A few, however, believed that as adults they would make a point of talking about the Holocaust, especially to their own children.

The fact that these lessons were referred to by so few students suggests that the majority cannot be relied upon to work them out for themselves. On the contrary, it seems that such learning requires an explicit focus. This conclusion is reinforced by the finding that some critical lessons were not alluded to by any of the students. There was no mention, for example, of the implications that the Holocaust might have for domestic politics on issues such as free speech or the proscription of overtly racist organisations. Nor was there any comment on lessons related to the key role played by Christian antisemitism in preparing the groundwork for the Holocaust. Consequently, no student pointed out that social cohesion might be fostered (and the likelihood of genocide lessened) by different faith communities examining their own sacred texts and liturgy in search of offensive references to “the other”.

As well as showing that lessons of the Holocaust will not emerge automatically as students assimilate new knowledge, the study indicated that organised events taking place outside the classroom will not necessarily facilitate the process despite the provision of ostensibly relevant activities such as listening to a survivor. It is hard to escape the conclusion that students need help not just in learning about the Holocaust, but also in learning from it. To this end, teachers might usefully consult the widely acclaimed American Holocaust education programme Facing History and Ourselves, renowned both for its comprehensive historical analysis and its commitment to explicating the lessons of the Holocaust (Shoemaker 2003).

Sins of Commission

Thus far, I have been principally concerned with students’ inability to learn lessons from the Holocaust as a result of teachers and textbooks neglecting particular issues. I now want to consider the danger of students learning inappropriate lessons as a result of teachers, textbooks, and other resources providing a misleading account of the Holocaust. In other words, I want to turn from the sins of omission to those of commission.

There is clearly greater scope for distorting students’ understanding of the Holocaust in countries where the subject is taught not just in history, but also in religious education. In the UK, teachers have discretion as to whether to include the Holocaust in the RE syllabus, but the obvious problem in deciding to do so is the implicit message that the Nazi persecution of the Jews was essentially an expression of religious oppression. In addition to this fundamental misconception, some RE teachers have been shown to tackle the Holocaust in a way that gives the impression that all the victims were committed to Judaism. In a study that I carried out in the London area several years ago (Short 2001), one teacher, when asked how she introduced the subject to 13- and 14-year-olds, said:

It begins with a study of the use of symbols in religions and it widens into how those symbols might be used in a religious [context] to show that someone belongs to a faith community. This leads to the area of prejudice, that sometimes belonging to a faith community might mean that you suffer from the prejudice of others and, as one example of this, we look at the story of Anne Frank and of the experience of the Jews in the Holocaust.

Another teacher, responding to a question on the role of religious education in respect of the Holocaust, insisted that:

What we want to do in RE is inform students in terms of giving them knowledge and understanding about what religion is. We also want to look at what religious belief is and what religious experience actually means to people. So, by dealing with an issue like the Holocaust, what we’re looking at is the experience that people had which was a direct result of being a particular member of a religion. (emphasis added)

As part of the study, I examined seven textbooks used by the RE teachers. They too tended to depict Jews as necessarily religious. One text actually begins its coverage by stating that “this section tells you about how Jews have been punished for their faith”, while another maintains that “Jews are brought together by their belief in God…” In fact, only one of the seven texts recognised that Jews are an ethnic group, pointing out that “some [of them] are religious; many are not”. Incidentally, the misconception that Jews are a monolithic entity loyal to the precepts of Judaism is also to be found in works of fiction recommended for young adolescents learning about the Holocaust (Goldberg 1996). For example, in Hans Peter Richter’s (1987) popular novella, Friedrich, all the Jewish characters are observant. Readers learn about the preparations for a Friday night (Sabbath) meal and are given a detailed description of Friedrich’s bar mitzvah. They also encounter a doctor described as “a middle-aged man in a dark suit” wearing a skullcap.

Holocaust museums cannot be relied upon to correct this misconception. At Beth Shalom, the first such museum in Britain, and one that attracts many school parties, a gallery dedicated to the history of the Jews contains a brief reference to Judaism. The importance of the Torah and Talmud is highlighted together with Judaism’s “emphasis on moral values and social justice [which] have provided a basis for others to emulate”. However, visitors are also told that “the lighting of the Shabbat [Sabbath] candles is very special to Jews wherever they may be”. This statement is not only far from the truth, but unfortunate, in that it once again encourages a perception of Jews as necessarily committed, in some degree, to Judaism.

History textbooks too can be guilty of sins of commission. As part of my research into British teachers’ attitudes and practices (Short 1995), I subjected seven books in widespread use at the time to a content analysis. Among other things, I found that a couple could be faulted for reinforcing antisemitic stereotypes, or at least for presenting misinformation. The most widely used, for instance, states that “prejudice against the Jews grew during the economic depression.... Many Germans were poor and unemployed and wanted someone to blame. They turned on the Jews, many of whom were rich…” Now this assertion, whilst not contrary to fact, hardly gives an accurate account of the state of German Jewry at the time, for it makes no mention of the Ostjuden: the Jews from eastern Europe who, according to Landau (1992, p. 92), “frequently fell victim to unemployment and economic distress”. Another book claims that “Hitler’s attempt to exterminate a race of people was only discovered once the Allies entered Germany and Poland”. This is a regrettable statement, not only because it is historically incorrect, but because, by concealing the fact that the British and American governments knew what was going on from the middle of 1942, it effectively denies students an opportunity to assess the Allies’ culpability for the extent of the devastation wrought by the Holocaust. Other instances of misleading text include the tendency for some books to talk about Jews and Germans, implying that Jews were an alien presence in the country rather than fully fledged citizens (as was the case prior to 1935) whose human rights were subsequently violated by their compatriots. There is also the matter of Kristallnacht (the night of broken glass), referred to in all seven books in the context of the shooting in Paris of the German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath. However, all but one of the books provide a misleading narrative in that they fail to explain why the diplomat was shot—essential information if students are not to be left with the impression that Kristallnacht was a justified response to an unprovoked attack.

Intellectual Immaturity as an Explanation of Failure to Learn from the Holocaust

The reasons discussed so far to explain why students might not learn from the Holocaust relate to the allocation of insufficient time, the provision of inadequate or misleading content, the neglect by teachers of critical subject matter, and their failure to engage with students’ perceptions of Jews and Jewish culture before embarking on the Holocaust. In this penultimate section of the chapter I want to consider another factor, that of age-appropriateness, for I contend that Holocaust education can also fail if it is delivered to students who, because of their age, are unlikely to possess the conceptual sophistication necessary to understand its essence. The issue is not just a theoretical one, for some Holocaust curricula (such as that of the American state of New Jersey) begin in kindergarten (Sepinwall 1999), and the subject is not infrequently taught in primary or elementary schools. In Scotland, for example, Maitles and Cowan (1999) looked at how teachers of 9- and 10-year-olds tackled the Holocaust. Their overall assessment was positive, but they did not interview any of the pupils and so it is not possible to ascertain, with any degree of confidence, what they learnt and how, if at all, they might have benefited from their experience.

There has long been a school of thought within developmental psychology that emphasises the intellectual limitations of young children. It is most often associated with the work of Jean Piaget, yet, over the past 30 years or so, his account of cognitive development has often been tested and found wanting (e.g., Donaldson 1978) and the more optimistic views of the Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, on the value of adult instruction, are now in vogue. Teachers have consequently been urged to raise their expectations of children’s abilities in all areas of the curriculum and it would seem that some Holocaust educators have been affected by the prevailing mood. However, this newfound confidence in young children’s intellectual reach is not supported by research that is relevant to Holocaust education. Specifically, children aged 8 and 9 have been shown to possess no real concept of a Jew (Short 1991). The findings come from a study based on a class of 28 children (7 girls and 21 boys) all of whom attended a non-denominational and virtually “all-white” school adjacent to a substantial Jewish community in southeast England. At an early stage in the interview the children were asked if they had ever heard the word “Jew” or “Jewish”. Among those answering in the affirmative, some clearly had no idea what either word referred to.

  • Claire: (8 years, 6 months) I think so, once. I heard someone say it.

  • Michael: (8:7) Yes. Is it a language?

  • Pamela: (9:1) Yes. In a book I think. Was Jews a name?

  • Paul: (8:6) I heard it in Assembly once.

  • Interviewer: Can you remember what was said?

  • Paul: No.

Those who did possess a rudimentary concept of a Jew still demonstrated a fair amount of confusion. A number of them, for instance, saw Jews as necessarily alien and viewed the notion of a British Jew as incomprehensible.

  • Interviewer: Have you ever heard the word “Jewish”?

  • Peter: (9:2) Yes.

  • Interviewer: What have you heard?

  • Peter: People from Jerusalem. They’re Jewish.

  • Interviewer: So, if you are born in England, can you be Jewish?

  • Peter: Yes, if you go to Jerusalem for a long time.

Thinking along similar lines, Matthew (9:2) maintained that we do have Jewish people in England because “they could come here for a holiday”. Asked if it was possible for someone Jewish to be born in England, he said it was not.

It would appear from these comments that many 8- and 9-year-olds have no concept, or virtually no concept, of a Jew. One wonders, therefore, what the children in Maitles and Cowan’s study learnt from their lessons on the Holocaust, for they were only a year older. The same question arises in relation to some of the resources used to teach the Holocaust to young children such as the well-known teaching pack produced by the Anne Frank Educational Trust (AFET 1996). Most of its suggested activities are directed at teachers of 7- to 11-year-olds and have the twin purpose of providing information about Anne’s life and assisting children to become more tolerant and more appreciative of the benefits of living in a democratic society. I will focus on the one activity recommended for 5- to 7-year-olds. It is suggested that schools hold an assembly for children in this age group with the aim of introducing them “to Anne Frank as someone who was special and to explore and celebrate friendship as a special relationship”. A story is to be read to the children which starts as follows:

There once lived a girl called Anne Frank. She was born in the city of Frankfurt in Germany on 12 June, 1929. In that country there were people who hated Jews. They were called Nazis. Four years after Anne Frank was born, the Nazis and their leader Adolf Hitler became the most powerful people in the land. Anne Frank and her family were Jews and so they knew that soon their lives would be in danger. They moved to another country called Holland where they could feel safer.

In view of the evidence indicating that 8- and 9-year-olds have almost no conception of a Jew, one wonders what 5- and 6-year-olds will make of this story. One wonders too, how a teacher would respond if a child, quite reasonably, were to ask, “What is a Jew and why did the Nazis not like them?” There can be no meaningful engagement with the Holocaust if students lack the concepts necessary to understand it.

Concluding Thoughts

In this chapter I have outlined some of the ways in which Holocaust education can be said to fail. Initially, I noted the importance of the time factor, arguing that other things being equal, there is likely to be a direct correlation between the benefits students derive from engaging with the Holocaust and the length of time schools devote to it. After considering a range of lessons that should be learnt, particularly in respect of racism and the reasons why they might not be, I focused on the learning of inappropriate lessons—the sins of commission. Finally, I looked at why children in primary or elementary school are unlikely to gain much from studying the Holocaust. However, in seeking a full explanation of students’ failure to learn from the Holocaust, it may be necessary to move beyond the issues I have examined thus far. For example, the fact that teachers in more or less the same situation have been shown to vary widely in the amount of time they assign to the Holocaust suggests the importance of teachers’ personal commitment in determining what is learnt from the subject. If this speculation is well-founded, timetabling the Holocaust (in secondary schools) across a range of subjects, rather than just in history, might help to obviate the problem. As I pointed out earlier, it is also possible that teachers fail to address certain lessons simply because they are unaware of them. If this is the case, the answer would appear to lie in better teacher training, an aspect of Holocaust education that has been ignored for too long.