‘Taking pupil and student Holocaust teaching into the community’: a case study jointly conducted by the University of Portsmouth and Mayville High School, Southsea

ABSTRACT

Recent surveys have shown that a very large part of the British population do not know about the Holocaust in any meaningful detail. This article argues for a more pro-active engagement with Holocaust teaching by outlining the successful collaboration between the University of Portsmouth and Mayville High School in Southsea. It focuses on the students’ and pupils’ creative responses to the multi-disciplinary Holocaust teaching that they experience and argues that this creative work directly reflects their learning experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Holocaust Education
• literature
• history

In September 2020, The Guardian featured an article by Harriet Sherwood announcing ‘Nearly two-thirds of US young adults unaware 6m Jews killed in the Holocaust’.¹ The article outlined what it referred to as ‘shocking levels of ignorance about the greatest crime of the twentieth century’, with 48% of the surveyed young US adults (aged between 18 and 39) unable to name just a single concentration camp, 63% not knowing that 6 million Jews had been killed during the Holocaust, and a particularly worrying 11% of respondents believing that the Holocaust had been caused by the Jews themselves. The findings caused outrage, disbelief and concern, calling for a more concerted nation-wide effort to improve Holocaust teaching and education, with 64% of the survey respondents themselves demanding that Holocaust education be compulsory in schools.² What the article did not refer to, however, was that in January 2019, Sherwood had already published another article for The Guardian, reporting that a similar survey in the UK, specially commissioned for Holocaust Memorial Day, had found that ‘One in 20 British adults do not believe the Holocaust happened, and 8% say that the scale of the genocide has been exaggerated’.³ The article cites similar findings in other European countries (France, Austria) and features comments from prominent Holocaust scholars and campaigners as well as survivors asking for more concise education on the subject.

What both articles, worrying as they are in content, are united about is their call for more and, importantly, better education. In England, the Holocaust has been a compulsory subject since the introduction of the first National Curriculum in 1991. Andy Pearce has persuasively shown that it has, since then and via various curricular revisions and restructures, gained in importance and prominence.⁴ In its most recent incarnation of 2014, the national curriculum firmly retains Holocaust education as part of the History provision for Key stage 3 but gives it the biggest prominence it has ever had, as the only named component to be covered in a wide-ranging unit on ‘Challenges for Britain, Europe and the wider world 1901 to the present day’.⁵ In addition to school teaching on the Holocaust, there are other initiatives, such as the annual Holocaust Memorial Day, led by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, with public commemorative and educational events that are aimed to further raise awareness of the Holocaust and to ensure that it is part of the collective socio-cultural consciousness. That it is taught is, consequently, a given. The big problem, however, is how it is taught.

In its current state, the curriculum intends the Holocaust to be taught so that new generations of students can learn from the past. This mission statement is reinforced by, for instance, the Prime Minister’s Commission into Holocaust Education, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, or the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation.⁶ While these are all praiseworthy motivations and important institutions, the problem is that there are no guidelines for how to achieve these aims. Teachers are not given any statutory advice on how to approach the topic in a way that is suitable for the target age group of 11- to 14-year-olds; pupils are, by and large, not given any specific information on why the Holocaust is singled out in this manner in their history schedule. There is also no specification as to how long the subject ought to be covered – it might be dealt with in a couple of sessions, or stretched across a few weeks; it might be taught in splendid isolation in history classes, or supplemented by additional teaching in other subjects such as RE or English literature (via problematic texts such as John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas [2006] that have made it on to the national curriculum for Keystage 3). The reality for many pupils is that the Holocaust is taught out of context, without detailed background information on its ideologically driven development that was not only enforced by power-hungry dictators but by and large supported by the majority of the German population and that was, crucially, allowed to happen while the rest of the world looked on.⁷ As Alice Pettigrew has argued, this means that ‘the Holocaust has been presented via the national curriculum as though self-evident and uncontentious’.⁸ This, however, leaves the average 11–14 year old, generally without prior knowledge of the Holocaust, at best bemused, at worst confused or even misinformed. In 2015, the Centre for Holocaust Education at University College London released research based on over 9,500 interviews and surveys conducted with British pupils aged between 11 and 18 that aimed to find out just how much they know about the Holocaust.⁹ The result was sobering. Despite ‘key teaching’ on the Holocaust, pupils knew next to nothing, and what little knowledge they had was either based on generalizations or verging on the factually incorrect. Tom Lawson, for instance, outlines that pupils believed the only person responsible for the Holocaust was Hitler; that they believed only German Jews were murdered in the Holocaust; that they had not heard of any other killing centres aside from Auschwitz. He summarizes that most British school children believe that Britain specifically entered the war with Germany once they knew about the Holocaust or that, alternatively, Britain only found out about the Holocaust after the war.¹⁰ Of course both of these conceptions are wrong – but they also contribute to feed a cultural myth of the Holocaust that is, problematically, not always based on fact. As Lawson points out, students seem to primarily believe that the genocide on the European Jews was a ‘state crime which neither seeks nor relies on popular participation in any way’.¹¹ The actual beneficial learning effect is thus questionable, as students do not critically engage with the fact that the Holocaust could only happen because of active participation of or at the least acceptance by the civilian population and international collaborators. Lawson questions ‘if Holocaust education is supposed to challenge individuals to think about how they might react in the face of leaders who proclaimed and perpetrated exterminatory violence, then it does not appear to have had much impact.’¹²

This important point links to the overarching principles behind educational ideologies: what are the aims of education in the first place? Andy Pearce has outlined the three main ideological points in relation to education: the ‘“classical humanism” … predicated on the precept of “cultural heritage” that encourages pupils to gain ‘knowledge and understanding’; the progressive approach that foregrounds pupil-led discovery and individual impulses; and the reconstructionist approach that is ‘utilitarian’ and that places emphasis on ‘social values’ and ‘functionality’.¹³ Pearce’s summary refers to the work of Richard Pring who, in The New Curriculum (1989) describes reconstructionist curricula as aiming to produce ‘the knowledge, the skills and the attitudes necessary for the world of work’.¹⁴ In Pearce’s assessment, Holocaust teaching in the current curriculum tends ‘towards some sort of amalgamation of classical humanism and reconstructionism’¹⁵ – i.e. pupils are being given some information about existing knowledge but this is mainly provided in order for them to have a vague sense of shared values. This, we argue, is a reductive approach that does not allow for real and meaningful engagement with the Holocaust that allows pupils to successfully learn from the past.

The next logical question, then, would be: what should an ‘ideal’ Holocaust education look like? It probably is not possible to give a concise and all-encompassing answer to that question, certainly not within the scope of this article. After all, what is ‘ideal’ for one pupil might not be for another. But the important thing, it seems, is to find a common ground that allows all pupils to, in the first instance, acquire some basic and factually grounded knowledge about the Holocaust and, importantly, the events leading to it and, following on from that, to facilitate the time and space for pupils to meaningfully engage with that knowledge. What we will do in the remainder of this article is to offer a largely reflective piece by two practitioners, one based at a HE institution, the other in a school context. We will start by describing – briefly – the various teaching methods that we have, over the past few years, developed both at the University of Portsmouth, targeting third-year Literature students, and at Mayville High School in Southsea, predominantly addressing Key Stage 3, but also Key Stage 4 pupils taking History for their GCSEs.¹⁶ We will then offer what we term two Case Studies – one focusing on the work done by University of Portsmouth students, the other on Mayville High School pupils. These Case Studies, again, do not claim to be all-encompassing. We have selected a few examples of student and pupil work that we have considered worth pointing out to illustrate the widely differing approaches our students and pupils take to their creative tasks. These selections do not imply that other examples were not noteworthy; merely that these ones stood out for their particularly innovative and creative approach to the set task. We have preserved students’ and pupils’ anonymity throughout. Inevitably, much of the ensuing article will be subjective and narrative in tone: we do not wish to prescribe our approaches, merely share what we consider to be good and potentially innovative practice. Neither of us are Education Scholars; we work from the perspective of being a Literary Studies academic and teaching practitioner respectively. However, what we would like to propose via these two case studies, and as we will summarize in our concluding section, is an immersive approach to Holocaust education that, in the first instance, provides the students with a sound knowledge basis starting with the ideology used by the Nazis that came to facilitate the Holocaust, and that, secondly, allows pupils and students with both the time and the space to engage with their acquired Holocaust knowledge in a reflective and creative manner that, ultimately, enables them to learn and commemorate in a more meaningful manner.

Case Study 1: the University of Portsmouth

The third-year module ‘Holocaust Literatures’ has been on offer as part of the English Literature provision at the University of Portsmouth since 2012. This module is currently available to all BA (hons) English Literature and BA (hons) English and Creative writing students, students on English & History and English & Media Studies pathways, as well as language students studying German and international exchange students to the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. It is a module that, generally, recruits extremely well. During our first session, students are asked to reflect on why they chose the module and what their expectations of it are. The dominant response, year in, year out, is that students wish to learn ‘more’ about the Holocaust. During our informal discussion in the first seminar, students generally admit that they know ‘some things’ about it, but that this is, for most of them, not detailed, chronological knowledge but merely snippets that they want to consolidate and build upon to gain a deeper understanding. In the first place, the challenge, then, is to ensure that all students have a shared basic knowledge: over the first two weeks, we focus on a general and wide-ranging introduction to the lead-up to the Holocaust, to the ideology underpinning it, introducing students to the main names and locations in the field. The rest of the 12-week teaching semester is then reserved to a study of various forms of representation – we do, for instance, spend some time discussing official commemoration via Holocaust monuments and memorials in different countries, and we also have one session dedicated to different approaches to Holocaust film. Our study of Holocaust literature is divided into three broad areas of writing: survivor accounts; second-generation narratives; and Holocaust fiction, often with a focus on the perpetrators of and bystanders to the atrocities. We generally read and discuss five very different texts together: Elie Wiesel’s Night [1956 in the French original] as a representative survivor account; Art Spiegelman’s Maus [serialized between 1980–1991], a graphic novel about the author’s parents’ experiences during the war and the Holocaust in Poland; Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader [1995 in the German original], a novel that provides a perspective on the perpetrators as well as the second-generation of Germans that feel the need to shoulder their parents’ and grandparents’ unacknowledged guilt; Rachel Seiffert’s series of novellas The Dark Room [2001] that offers three very different German perspectives: that of Helmut, a disabled boy who grows up during the 1930s and is excluded from being an active member of the Nazi movement on the grounds of his disability, of Lore, a 12-year old who, in 1945, has to lead her younger brothers and sister across Germany to find shelter with their grandmother after both their parents have been imprisoned on suspicion of war crimes, and Micha, a third-generation German who, in the early 2000s, starts obsessively investigating his grandfather’s involvement in atrocities against the Jews of Belarus; and, finally, Patrick Modiano’s The Search Warrant [1997 in the French original] that tries to piece together the story of one French victim of the Holocaust and that does, in the process, asks searching questions about the very process of writing and researching history. This way, the students learn about different perspectives in the commemoration and representation of the Holocaust: from survivor and second-generation accounts to assessments of perpetration. In addition, we also link the students’ Holocaust learning to contemporary events: we generally start every seminar with a look at recent newspaper articles that talk about, for instance, the rise of antisemitism in the country; the increase of extremism; the dangerous trend to belittle or even deny the Holocaust; recent German court cases trying to bring now very aged peripheral participants of the Holocaust – an accountant of Auschwitz, for instance, or a secretary in the telephone exchange – to justice. Some practitioners might find these links to contemporary events problematic; however, in our estimation they are of particular importance to show students that they are not only learning about historical events far removed in time, but that they actively begin to see parallels to contemporary events, or to realize that those events did not only happen in isolation in the past but that they could, worryingly, happen again. This ‘contemporary’ section in particular, spurs the students on to do their own research, and within a week of using these newspaper articles I generally receive student emails pointing out further news coverage that they have themselves discovered. Of course packing all this into a mere twelve weeks is a tall order. But the aim is to equip the students: to give them an overview about Holocaust historiography and various approaches to Holocaust commemoration and literature, and to, hopefully, spark their interest in the subject to enable them to carry on their studies privately, once the semester is finished. Most years, some students also cover the Holocaust in their final-year dissertations; and several students have, in the past, gone on from this module to engage in further, postgraduate study in the area of Holocaust Literature.

In order to facilitate time and space for the students to critically reflect on what they have learnt, the first assessment is a group presentation with a creative portfolio. Each group, consisting of a maximum of four students, is allocated an additional text which means that, in the course of the two designated presentation weeks, the whole cohort hears about additional texts that might spark their interest and that they might pick up to read at a later time. These texts include further survivor accounts, for instance Primo Levi’s If this is a Man [1947 in the Italian original] or Wladislaw Szpilman’s The Pianist [originally 1946]; additional second-generation narratives, for example Lisa Appignanesi’s Losing the Dead [1999]; experimental novels such as W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants [originally 1992] or Laurent Binet’s HHhH [2010] that focus on the problems of writing historical narratives; or texts such as Audrey Magee’s The Undertaking [2014] that focuses on the bystanders within the general German population and highlights their slow descent into passive acceptance or active participation in the Holocaust. Groups then have at least six weeks to approach their task – and this work is entirely student led. It is up to each group to divide up the work and to decide which angle they want to take; the condition is that all groups provide some contextual information on their respective text, and that they reflect how this text fits into the broad area of Holocaust literature: is it a survivor text? Is it written from the second-generation perspective? Is it pure fiction? Does it introduce the perpetrator perspective, or does it shed any more light on the bystanders to the Holocaust? Some groups stick to a traditional format, with each student allocated a few minutes on a specific theme; other groups present their work in form of a dialogue; others involve the audience. A few years ago, one group, for instance, had been allocated the text The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz by Denis Avey of 2011. This text was written by a former British soldier who claims to have been a PoW in a camp adjacent to Auschwitz, and who gives his account – decades after the event – of having swapped uniforms with an Auschwitz inmate to see for himself what was going on behind that barbed wire. At the time of publication, the book and its author received considerable public attention and acclaim – but there were also dissenting voices who doubted Avey’s claim.¹⁷ My students came to see me to express their frustration with the coursework: there were three of them, and they said that they could not ‘agree’ on a reading: one of them believed Avey, another didn’t, and the third was as yet undecided. They did not know how to come to a consensus. I told them that this was not a requirement – and that they could use their divided opinions as the basis of their presentation. When they delivered their presentation a couple of weeks later, they did so in the format of a court case: one student spoke for the persecution, accusing Avey of fraud, another student took over his defence, and the student who had, originally, been on the fence acted as the presiding judge who, eventually, invited the Grand Jury – everybody else in the room – to pass their verdict. It was a very effective way of presenting a text that also divided the opinion of so many experts. It was also an effective way of involving the rest of the students actively in a presentation.

While the presentation part of the assessment does not normally cause many issues – by their third year, most students feel reasonably confident about giving presentations – most students really worry about the ‘creative portfolio’ part of the assessment. For this part, they have to submit their written-up presentations in addition to providing a 500-word group-authored self-reflective assessment of the task. This is something that, most of them, have not encountered before as part of their assessment, and this unknown quantity worries them, in particular as it forms part of the assessment in their final semester of their all-important final year. After having spent over two years of their degree writing objective and critically detached articles, they are taken aback by this assignment’s emphasis on their own responses to the task. They are encouraged to engage with the burgeoning theoretical area of Affect Theory, pioneered in particular by the American anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, in order to formulate their responses.¹⁸ Affect Theorists encourage work that highlights ‘something that moves, that triggers personal reactions’.¹⁹ In this way, I ask students to self-reflectively engage with their own emotional responses to their respective presentation text: Did they feel sad, confused, angry or mournful about what they read? Crucially, they have to ask themselves why they think that they reacted in this particular way. That way, they actively think about what they have learnt about the Holocaust in preceding works; they think about their own expectations at the start of the module, and their specific expectations before reading their assigned text. Crucially, they begin to formulate responses that, albeit self-reflective, are based on information and knowledge that they have acquired and learnt to process.

When it comes to the creative component, they contact me saying they have ‘no idea’, or that they have ‘too many’ ideas that they can’t harness. Some are worried that, unintentionally, they might do something that could be considered disrespectful to their text and, ultimately, to the memory of Holocaust survivors. They don’t want to do anything that could be considered ‘gimmicky’. Once they have overcome that hurdle, most of them are determined to take their lead from the texts they have been working on and to let that influence the way they present their work. At this point, they feel more confident about addressing their own emotive responses to a text. In the past, some students have presented their work inside little suitcases, reflecting on the deportation experience that they have read about in the text, recreating memorabilia inspired by objects or artefacts the book mentions. Others create scrapbooks that actively combine textual excerpts with their own responses to them. Yet others produce newspapers that provide different perspectives and angles on a specific text: a group working on Ferdinand von Schirach’s novel The Collini Case (2011 in the German original, 2012 in its first English translation) produced several newspaper articles, presenting the accused, Fabrizio Collini, who has murdered the German industrialized Jean-Baptiste Meyer in seemingly cold blood, and his young defendant, Caspar Leinen. The format of the newspaper clippings, mixing tabloid and broadsheet styles, allowed the students to present different perspectives and opinions about the trial depicted in the novel in a particularly engaging way. It also allowed them to critically think about issues of guilt versus victimhood as, in this particular case, the seeming ‘victim’, the man who has been murdered, turns out to be a perpetrator of war crimes, his ‘murderer’, in turn, having been affected by those war crimes half a lifetime before.

Another example involved a group of students working on W.G. Sebald’s book The Emigrants of 1992 (1996 in its first English translation). Rather than being a novel, Sebald presents a series of four novellas, charting the lives of four different Germans. At first reading, the students argued that it did not seem to be a Holocaust text at all as the novellas don’t even mention the word ‘Holocaust’. They were confused by the many narrative gaps that were in the text but they soon realized that these gaps had a purpose: through them, Sebald bemoans the death of Jewish culture through the Holocaust, as well as highlighting the notion of a post-war ‘conspiracy of silence’ in Germany. The students’ work took the shape of a small coffin that represented the ‘burial’ of Jewish culture. Within the coffin, they buried a poster of Sebald, showing the author with his eyes blacked out and surrounded by slogans that seemed to deny his right to speak about the Holocaust – such as ‘your father was a Fascist’ or ‘you have no right to speak’. They also drew pertinent links to contemporary events, including the slogan ‘#Germandeathcamps that links to current political events in Poland denying Polish involvement in the Holocaust and trying to shut down any kind of historical debate. Importantly, the students’ project showed that silence, irrespective of whether it is self-inflicted or imposed, only results in the truth being buried again and again.

Every year, student feedback on the module is extremely positive and highlights the same point: the students’ appreciate being given chronological and more detailed historical background information alongside the ability to study a wide variety of texts. But what stands out for them most is their creative engagement with their presentation text. The fact that they can focus on this one text and assess their own emotional responses to it by presenting it in a creative way means that they feel they have engaged in a more meaningful way with the subject of the Holocaust, and also means that this one particular text will always be a memorable one for them.

It was this overwhelmingly positive feedback that prompted me, in 2016, to approach one of the local schools in Southsea and offer a collaboration in the area of Holocaust education. Pupils at Mayville High School in Southsea are lucky to get extended and intensive Holocaust education, both towards the end of their KS3 provision, but also again during KS4. Once a year I supplement their History lessons by telling them about cultural commemorations of the Holocaust, introducing them to a number of different literary approaches to the topic, most prominently Art Spiegelman’s ground-breaking graphic novel Maus which introduces them to the idea of creatively engaging with the topic of the Holocaust. For the past three years Mayville have now also introduced a creative project – which is showcased in the following Case Study.

Case Study 2: Mayville High School, southsea

I have now been teaching the Holocaust in an educational setting for over a decade and, anecdotal evidence shows that, even at a young age, most pupils have already heard something about concentration and death camps via a variety of media, such as Social Media and streaming services. Unfortunately, many misconceptions arise from pupils’ pre-existing ‘knowledge’ of the Holocaust, and these need to be further addressed in order to reach a fuller understanding of the horror of Nazi-administered control and the ‘twisted road’ to the Holocaust.²⁰ Pupils often claim that they ‘know’ the reason for Hitler’s hate of the Jews – a nurse, a doctor, a landlord in his early life. These Hitler myths run deep through the history of the man and the Third Reich. At Mayville High School, we thus try to tackle these myths and misconceptions head-on in our history lessons to ensure that pupils gain a balanced understanding of the social, political and cultural events leading towards the Holocaust that steer clear of further cementing unsubstantiated myths. We use the broad framework of the National Curriculum²¹ but, crucially, and in the course of many weeks’ teaching, further supplement it with carefully chosen content that, in particular, teaches pupils about the ideological background to the Nazi regime.

At Mayville, History is consistently one of the most popular GCSE option choices. Anecdotal feedback from past and present pupils shows that they are always particularly excited about studying two areas of predominantly German history: ‘Germany 1890 – 1945’ and ‘Conflict and Tension 1918 – 1939’. Pupils often comment that they are, in particular, eager to learn more about the Nazis. This is an interesting statement on their part that shows that there is genuine curiosity about an area of history that has often been glamourized by TV or film, or, more recently, also by online games. At the time of making their GCSE choices, our pupils already have a solid understanding of the Holocaust and the Nazi era via their teaching in previous years, and the following will focus on what we cover in particular in Year 9, at the end of KS3, when pupils study twentieth-century history which also covers Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, the Second World War and – briefly – the Holocaust. Branded as ‘the most massive and disastrous catastrophe’ in Jewish history, the Holocaust and everything it stands for is widely accepted as a difficult subject to study and it is therefore particularly important that our students gain a basic understanding of the ideology that led towards the Final Solution.²²

Initially, it is important for our pupils to have a grasp of the conditions in Germany post-First-World War. Having an understanding of the political instability – in terms of the general sentiment towards politicians, the murders and uprisings that happened across Germany during the time and the sway towards extreme left- or right-wing ideologies – helps develop an understanding of the economic and social issues of the era. We look at the Ruhr Crisis and how the synergy between political and economic issues greatly affected social problems. Next, our pupils focus on the Munich Putsch and the importance of Hitler’s trial for increasing the general population’s interest in Nazism and its ideological beliefs. That way, they can gain an insight into what Ian Kershaw has termed Hitler’s ‘main line political track’, which ran from Pasewalk to Auschwitz.²³ We focus on Hitler’s rise to power via his fluctuating election results in the 1920s and 1930s by looking in particular at his use of propaganda and public performances via speeches and gatherings.²⁴ It is crucial that pupils realize that the majority of Germans may have been wooed by his domestic policies to start with, but that many might have felt uneasy about his views on the Jews. That way, pupils begin to understand that many voters might have compromised, willing to disregard unpalatable policies if that suited their own particular situation. It is in particular this focus on propaganda that pupils find fascinating. By linking these sessions to contemporary events and, for instance, the power of Social Media and ‘fake news’, pupils can see how relatively easy it had been for Hitler and the Nazi leadership to manipulate the population into first accepting and then sharing their ideology. That way, they can understand the threat of populism – past and (crucially) present – more clearly and hopefully develop tools to see beyond coercive rhetoric.

These studies set the scene for looking at the Jewish persecution in more detail. We discuss the long history of European anti-semitism and how Hitler’s policies harnessed this deep seated antipathy and distrust from the beginning. Moving into the mid and late 1930s, we focus on the Nazis’ oppressive policies towards Communists, political opponents, homosexuals, ethnic minorities and the ‘asocial’, as well as looking in more detail at anti-Semitism and its impact on day-to-day life in Germany.²⁵ We start with imagery, for instance a photograph of benches with the slogan ‘Jews Forbidden’, before moving on to the more complex Race Laws first announced at the Nuremberg Party Rally in 1935 that heralded a more systematic removal of rights for Jewish citizens. This way, pupils learn that Nazi ideology set in motion a process that prepared the way for the Holocaust; that, step by step, Jewish lives became impacted more and more, and that the civilian population in Germany agreed to either actively go along with and support Nazi policies or, alternatively, at the very least to turn a blind eye to the increasingly repressive persecution that soon turned to murder and extermination.

By the time we reach September 1939, our pupils should understand that the start of the war prompted yet another escalation of Nazi anti-Semitism: our focus turns towards a study of the Ghettos and mass deportations across Europe. The use of archive footage and photographs to illustrate the bricking up of and the conditions within the Ghettos clearly shows the pupils that the Nazis no longer even pretended to ‘care’ for the Jews they forced to live in horrendous conditions and that hunger, disease and death were accepted on an ever-larger scale. We next focus in more detail on the liquidation of the ghettos and move towards concentration and extermination camps. Sometimes, the simple use of a map can really be eye-opening to pupils to illustrate the scale of the transport network that was used to supply an ever-increasing number of concentration camps and satellite camps. ‘I didn’t realise there were that many … I’ve only heard of Auschwitz’ is a familiar refrain as pupils begin to realize the extent of the Nazis’ extermination policies.

The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 is the next focus for investigation. The process of teaching pupils this ‘quantum leap’ of moving from individual mass killings in the East towards the systematic mass murder of millions is a challenge and must be thought about carefully. From an initial focus on the ‘Operation Barbarossa’ in the East our lessons show the close connection between overwhelming prisoner numbers on the Eastern Front and the Holocaust. Historians such as Ian Kershaw (2000) have accepted that some blanket empowering directive from Hitler to kill the Russian Jews lay behind Heydrich’s verbal instructions of 2 July 1941. Indeed, Steve Hochstadt suggests that ‘the Holocaust and the war on the Eastern Front were intimately connected’.²⁶ This is the most important component in pupils’ understanding of the relationship between hate-filled speeches, anti-Semitic Laws, Ghettoization and mass transit to the death camps of Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. To further illustrate this point, we look at changing ideas on historiography, and we assess the argument of intentionalism and structuralism, parallel to studying the events of the Wannsee Conference that arrived at the ‘Final Solution’, as well as the massacre of Babi Yar. Through such studies (see for instance also Kershaw, 2000), pupils begin to understand that Hitler was not solely responsible for the Holocaust but that he found hundreds if not thousands of willing henchmen who were prepared to murder for him. We use a group exercise utilizing Venn diagrams to show just how many people would have been required to plan, organize and execute a massacre such as the one at Babi Yar. This really makes it clear for the pupils that it is too facile to simply allocate responsibility for the Holocaust just to Hitler.²⁷

In Key Stage 4, as part of the ‘Germany 1890 – 1945’ unit, we further engage with the ideology and historical events outlined above, but it is at this point that Mayville pupils are asked to also produce a creative piece alongside a 1,000-word self-reflective assessment on the memorials to Holocaust victims around the world. Despite this rather unusual approach that seems to take pupils away from mere text-book study, it is important to abandon the natural teacher approach of modeling and examples and, instead, give pupils free rein with the task within a certain set of key expected outcomes. This empowers pupils to use their own skills of research and creative thinking which allows them to engage with the topic of the Holocaust and its aftermath in a deeper and more meaningful way. We argue that giving students free rein in their approach to this task allows them to really think about the points they have taken away from previous teaching sessions: what has stayed with them in particular? Rather than responding in ways they are accustomed to – sitting an exam, writing an essay – this creative task helps them to interrogate their own responses to learning about the Holocaust. Creative responses help them to think outside the normal subject-specific constraints. They can choose whether they want to work in pairs or individually. They have three weeks to complete the work outside of the classroom. While rare, when required, Vygotsky’s ‘Zone of Proximal Development’ is implemented to help pupils move smoothly from understanding the instructions to developing their creative work.²⁸ Having carried out this work a number of times now in preceding years, we are always genuinely delighted at the pieces that pupils have created, and would like to briefly showcase some of these here.

One piece of work submitted was an analysis of the analogy of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox film to the Holocaust: the pupil ear-marked specific characters as culprits and aligned their personality with members of the Nazi party. For instance, she used the character of Walter Boggis as physically resembling Herman Göring, Nathan Bunce as Himmler as he is the, in her words, ‘meanest and nastiest man in the village’, and Franklin Bean as Hitler, as he is the ‘leader of the operation’ and ‘is obsessed with murdering Mr Fox and his like’. This particular pupil found the use of visual analogy very helpful to understanding the deep-seated hatred of the Jews by the Nazis that led to the implementation of the Holocaust. Another pupil drew on the experience of a family member who was a survivor of the Holocaust to recreate the perspective of being in a concentration camp. She produced an insightful piece that ably combined the importance of historical testimony and oral history in a diary format. A pairing of male pupils produced a powerful poster, providing a simple mathematical calculation of numbers of the population of Hampshire, visitors to the 2017 Spanish F1 Grand-Prix, 2017 London marathon runners, attendance of the 2017 Coachella, and the combined 2017 home attendances for Tottenham Hotspur, Arsenal and Manchester United to arrive at the total number of Jews murdered in Europe. Other pupils focused more on artistic creations: one pupil produced a charcoal portrait of Elie Wiesel with his famous quote ‘to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time’, an insightful reflection on the importance of remembrance.²⁹ Another student produced a skillful painting of a Star of David, filled with the blue-and-white stripes of the stereotypical concentration camp clothing, its outline traced with the names of victims and survivors of the Holocaust that she had painstakingly researched online. This particular student said that it was in particular this creative work that allowed her to immerse herself more in the subject and that linking the historical events she had learned about to the names and faces of individuals she encountered during her research assured that this knowledge would always remain with her. Finally, another pupil group produced a suitcase, something that is often used as a symbol for deportations in Holocaust presentations. However, on opening the suitcase it became clear that the pupils had gone beyond producing a mere symbol but that they had, inside the suitcase, produced the story of a family and the hopes they had had about their ‘resettlement’ in the East. The pupils showed the perspective of each family member, displaying insight into how different age groups consider and comprehend events unfolding around them. Most importantly, this piece of work really highlighted the hypocrisy behind the Nazis’ use of euphemistic terms such as ‘resettlement’ for the Final Solution.

All of this work, the lessons at KS3 and their continuation at KS4, the independent research in order to prepare the creative and self-reflective assessments, culminate for pupils when they can take part in a four-day school trip to Berlin. While there, the pupils’ itinerary is solely focussed on their historical studies, with the Holocaust being central to this. A visit to the Reichstag, as a literal and metaphoric place where democracy gave way to dictatorship is followed by a walk to the Holocaust Memorial. In between guided talks, pupils are given time to reflect on their learning by themselves, in particular during their visit of the museum that is integrated into Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial: some pupils walk through relatively quickly and have questions on the meaning and choices made by the designers; others reflect quietly and spend more time on the historical displays that focus in detail on the plight of individual families. For pupils, this is a very different experience to reading, watching and discussing the Holocaust in school. Their school-learned knowledge of the Holocaust acquires a more meaningful shape here, and is further cemented by visits to the Jüdisches Museum where they respond strongly to the ‘Voided void’, of the Holocaust tower, or the Topography of Terror that transmits a tangible sense of horror to pupils. The clear and understandable exhibits inside are excellent for pupils of all abilities to comprehend and piece together the timeline of events leading to the persecution and extermination of the Jews. Often pupils will sit outside and reflect on what they have read and seen, understanding that the outside part is a major part of remembrance. This is a trip to Berlin and due to logistics it is not possible to take pupils on an excursion to Auschwitz. However, the final visit undertaken by pupils brings everything they have studied, examined, discussed and seen together: Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. While Sachsenhausen was principally used for political prisoners, it is symbolic of Nazi oppression and a training ground for methods of execution used in the death camps. Walking from the train station, through the town to the camp makes pupils realize just how ‘visible’ Nazi persecution had been to the general public. As we arrive at the gates, many exclamations of astonishment can be heard: ‘it’s next to houses!’; ‘I thought it would be out in the woods, far from anyone!’ After a brief introductory talk, pupils are given three hours to explore the camp in twos or threes. Of course, no teaching of the Holocaust can ever make us comprehend the full extent of the horrors that took place in the concentration camps. However, during their visit to the memorial site of Sachsenhausen pupils have the opportunity to realize the enormity of the Nazis’ crimes against the Jews of Europe that, ultimately, no textbook can ever prepare them for. As a rule, teenagers are not known for their muted responses, but the pupils’ hushed tones or total silence during and after the visit are a sign that they have understood the significance of their tour. Reflection and words often come later, possibly in the evening or next day. During all of these visits and excursions, the students guide themselves – there are no booked tour guides. Pupils are encouraged to use their own initiative and instincts in exploring these sights, to discuss with their friends, and to choose ways that best fit their individual learning styles to engage with what they see. The Berlin trip is thus a key component of the Mayville pupils’ studies – a culmination of several years’ worth of teaching, individual research and creative engagement with a topic that they have a genuine interest in studying.

Community work and concluding remarks

We have, above, referred to examples of student and pupil work that we consider outstanding, valuable or excellent and we are aware that there might be an inherent value statement in these. In short, we might be confronted with questions about how we judge or reward ‘excellence’. It is, consequently, worth noting that students and pupils are not receiving grades for their creative work. It is an additional component to their portfolio (at University level) and their coursework (at school) that is voluntary. We consequently do not link our judgement of ‘excellence’ to academic grades that might, for instance, disadvantage those students who are not creatively inclined. Instead, we provide feedback to the students that emphasizes that, in their work, we have recognized their deep and thoughtful engagement with the topic of the Holocaust, rather than the artistic execution of the project. It would therefore be a real shame to keep all this ‘excellent’ creative pupil and student work contained just within their school and university settings. Since 2019, we have collaborated further by bringing this creative work out into the wider community. We are lucky to have been welcomed by the D-Day Story Museum in Southsea that allows us to exhibit our students’ and pupils’ work annually as part of their Holocaust Memorial Day commemorative events. Both pupils and students are present on the day to enable them to not only talk to each other about their work, but also to discuss it with members of the public, a process they embrace enthusiastically. The fact that representatives of the local Jewish community, the Mayor, the local Member of Parliament and other political leaders, other teachers, representatives from the University as well as the local press attend the day’s events fills them with pride and a sense of achievement. That way, they can take real ownership of their work. In a way, this day is the culmination of both pupils’ and students’ hard work, and something that they aspire to contribute to every year.

So – what have we learnt from our respective teaching and our students’ and pupils’ creative work so far? We strongly believe that our students and pupils benefit greatly from having the time to work independently on the Holocaust and to apply their learning in a creative context. To return to Andy Pearce’s summary of the three educational ideologies, we believe that we follow the classic humanist approach by providing our students and pupils with a lot of subject knowledge to start with.³⁰ We also – in the spirit of reconstructionism – make it clear to them what they should take away from those lessons, and how they should think about the lessons from the past in the future. Importantly, though, we then apply the ‘progressive’ approach by giving the students and pupils time and space to follow their own instincts by developing their own creative projects and portfolios. Using a creative portfolio with university students, especially students of literature in their final year, was a risky process to start with: students were understandably concerned about having to engage with a new mode of assessment so close to completing their degree. It took a number of years for this assessment to really take off and for students to become increasingly comfortable with a creative form of assessment, which was probably aided by various colleagues similarly introducing creative assessment components earlier during the students’ degree. Now students are positively competing with the preceding year groups in creating ever more impressive portfolios. What matters most, though, is to see and read the student feedback at the end of the teaching semester. Every year, the students agree that the portfolio, while initially causing them some angst, had allowed them unprecedented engagement with their respective group texts; they are unanimous in their assessment that this one particular text would stay in their minds for a very long time. One group of students stands out in particular: after producing a stunningly beautiful scrapbook on Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, the three participating students said that they would ‘never forget this particular book’. Students are always unanimous in insisting that this form of assessment needs to remain on the module so that future students can similarly benefit from it.

At Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4 the scale of the work carried out by pupils is more limited in scope to the University of Portsmouth students. However, they maximize their resources and produce stellar pieces of reflective work. Producing their creative work without much teacher input fills pupils with pride and increases their confidence. They feel empowered that it is their own work and that they are in control. Pupils often announce that I will be ‘surprised’ or ‘pleased’ with what they are producing. Feedback from pupils is ubiquitously positive, showing in particular a sense of pride in their individual pieces. The pupil who produced the Fantastic Fox/Holocaust metaphor took great pride in using this to illustrate the Nazi hierarchy to other pupils during the revision sessions leading up to the GCSEs. Often the quality of the art work is of such a high standard that it can also be used for Art GCSE, the work invariably passing back and forth between the History and Art departments. During Open Days I exhibit the previous year’s Holocaust work and have had pupils bring family members, sometimes a Grandparent, to show off their work and to receive plaudits. Mayville is a ‘family’ school in a geographically small city and teachers come across ex-pupils very regularly. Ex-History pupils always mention their Holocaust piece as central to their memories of Key Stage 4, often wondering if I still have it displayed in my classroom. While the pupil feedback process is relatively informal, the pervasive comments show how their work, and what it represents, is close to their hearts.

In our opinion, then, successful Holocaust teaching should combine the factual (historical events) and the practical (what to learn from those lessons) with the emotive (a creative engagement which empowers students to engage with the subject matter in a more personal but meaningful way) in order to allow for a more lasting effect of their lessons. There are a lot of pressures on both teachers and academics to tick a variety of boxes and to cram all the required subject matter into lessons that never seem to be sufficient for that task. Pupils, in particular, can be overloaded with information that they have to process and learn. However, with a subject such as the Holocaust, it really is vital to not just tick a required box in the curriculum but to take the time to ensure beneficial and meaningful learning.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christine Berberich

Dr Christine Berberich is Reader in Literature at the University of Portsmouth, UK.

Tim Booker

Tim Booker is Head of Year 11 at Mayville High School, Southsea.

Notes

1 Sherwood, “Nearly Two-thirds of US Young Adults Unaware 6m Jews Killed in the Holocaust,” n.p.

2 See Ibid.

3 Sherwood, “One in 20 Britons Does Not Believe Holocaust Took Place, Poll Finds,” n.p. Surveys such as these are always slightly problematic: inevitably, they can only record the views and opinions of a small group in society, yet they are considered representative. As such, the findings of this 2018/2019 survey needs to be looked at with some critical caution.

4 See Pearce, “The Holocaust in the National Curriculum After 25 Years,” 239ff.

5 Department for Education, The National Curriculum, 4.

6 See, for instance, Lawson, “Britain’s Promise to Forget,” 347. See also: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/prime-ministers-holocaust-commission-report, https://www.hmd.org.uk/ and https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/uk-holocaust-memorial-foundation. See, for instance, also Pearce and Chapman, “Holocaust Education 25 Years On,” and Pettigrew, “Why Teach or Learn About the Holocaust?”.

7 See, for instance, Lawson, “Britain’s Promise to Forget.”

8 Pettigrew, “Why Teach or Learn About the Holocaust?,” 264.

9 See Pearce and Chapman, “Holocaust Education 25 Years On,” 226.

10 See Lawson, “Britain’s Promise to Forget,” 348ff.

11 Ibid., 355.

12 Ibid.

13 Pearce, “The Holocaust in the National Curriculum After 25 Years,” 235.

14 Pring, The New Curriculum, 100.

15 Pearce, “The Holocaust in the National Curriculum After 25 Years,” 235.

16 GCSE stands for General Certificate of Secondary Education and is the common British school-leavers’ examination in year 11.

17 See, for instance, Broomby, “The Man Who Smuggled Himself into Auschwitz,” n.p. and Walters, “The Curious Case of the “Break into Auschwitz”,” n.p. for differing opinions.

18 See Stewart, Ordinary Affects.

19 Berberich, Campbell and Hudson, “Introduction: Affective Landscapes,” 1.

20 See Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz, Nazi Policy Toward German Jews, 1933-1939.

21 See Department for Education, The National Curriculum.

22 Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews 1933-1945, 20.

23 Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, 97.

24 See, for instance, https://www.dw.com/en/how-the-nazis-used-poster-art-as-propaganda/a-55751640***

25 See Burleigh and Wipperman, The Racial State, 136–97.

26 Hochstadt, Sources of the Holocaust, 114.

27 See, for instance, Pettigrew, “Why Teach or Learn About the Holocaust?”.

28 See Chaiklin, “The Zone of Proximal Development in Vygotsky’s Analysis of Learning and Instruction,” 39.

29 Wiesel, Night. Transl. Marion Wiesel, xv.

30 See Pearce, “The Holocaust in the National Curriculum after 25 Years.”