Recent educational surveys have concluded that students’ understanding of
the Holocaust is deeply troubling . .
A majority of school students do not know what the phrase anti-semitism
means, while many have an understanding of the Holocaust that is based on
myths, inaccuracies and misunderstandings.
Only 37% of a recent study of 8000 students aged 11-18 knew what antisemitism was- meaning that while we all know that Jews were the primary
victims of the Holocaust a majority could not explain why they were murdered.
Furthermore, when asked what happened when the British Government knew
about the mass murder of the Jews, more than a third of students mistakenly
believed that this led to Britain declaring war on Germany.
25% of those surveyed thought that Britain knew nothing of the killings until
the end of the war and 18% believed wrongly that Britain had drawn up some
form or rescue plan to help people who were incarcerated in the death camps.
The reality is that only 7% of those surveyed knew that it is fact that our
government never made it a war aim to save the Jews for their terrible fate.
Few students (less than 10%) understood that the German people were in
many ways responsible for what happened. Most students saw the Nazis as an
elite group of people loyal to Hitler rather than a political party which had
significant wide spread support across the German population.
A vast majority of students thought that German soldiers were shot if they
refused to carry out orders to kill Jewish people and this is why they could not
stop the murders from happening- but there is very little evidence to back up
this explanation for the massacre of innocent people.
Many students assumed that the Jews formed a significant percentage of the
German population during the 1930’s but in fact the percentage of Jews in
Germany was little over one percent.
A summary of the research states that students across all age groups frame d
The Holocaust in remarkably similar ways- their descriptions focused almost
entirely on what perpetrators did to their victims.
Overwhelmingly the version of events ran as follows- Hitler and the Nazis killed
the Jews in the camps. Other aspects, such as the scale of the Holocaust and
where and when it happened- or more importantly how and why it happenedwere rarely touched upon.
These false impressions have not really been addressed. Perhaps this is
because the details of what actually happened are too painful or too extreme
for us to understand fully. We do not need to know all the background of
events at that time to know that the Holocaust and what happened at this
terrible time in our history demonstrated the dangers of hatred, prejudice and
racism in its purest form.
What almost all young people who were surveyed were agreed upon is the fact
that the Holocaust is something we should never forget. The problem is that,
in common with many of our views of the past, we do not know or understand
all that much about it.
The one positive coming out of the lessons to be learned from this disgraceful
episode in our recent history is that the lessons we have learned ensure that
the message of the dangers of hatred and racism are messages we must keep
focusing on to ensure similar events on whatever scale are reduced or perhaps
over optimistically eliminated from our society.
What many experts are concerned about is that very little time is given over in
schools to examine in more depth how and why the Holocaust happened
because if we do not investigate and understand the causes we cannot
possibly hope to identify deeper solutions to ensure such dark events never
happen again.
It is not enough to realise that what happened was evil and wrong- we need to
understand more the motivations and circumstances that led to the Holocaust
if we are to genuinely embrace the desire to avoid repeats in our modern
world.
Even today we are commemorating, and only scratching the surface of
‘educating’ with regard to this dark chapter in our History.
This deeper education continues through the work of valuable organisations
such as the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and the Lessons from Auschwitz
campaign. Last year noted the 150th organised visit to the Auschwitz and
Birkenau concentration camps and over 30.000 British students have now
visited the site to gather first hand impressions of the experience of
concentration camp life, if life can ever be used to describe the horrors that
occurred there.
The booklet I have provided for you today is designed to educate and inform,
but also to act as a chilling reminder that we have not really learned the
lessons of our past, as genocide still infects our world in its poisonous way. It
also shows you that the path to such brutal acts does not just happen by
chance but is a process that develops if it is allowed to and that process begins
with the simple fact that differences between people is not respected and this
leads quite quickly to division, conflict and pain for those who are for whatever
reason not accepted.
The power-point framed behind you captures the thoughts of our two seniors,
Niamh and Katie, who participated in this year’s experience of a walk around
the camps and witnessed the experiences of those who were murdered,
alongside testimony from some who survived. The words and images provide a
haunting reminder of how this sad episode in our history is so moving and
encourages us to reflect on our own situations as we see how ordinary, normal
people were treated so abysmally.