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Mary Richardson,  Becky Hale, Tom Haward and Kwaku Adjepong.

We concluded our Holocaust Memorial Day blog about teaching ‘difficult’ histories with the proposition: ‘We could assess these kinds of knowledge, but is it appropriate to do so?’ Since then, we have been exploring this idea further.

Our current focus on assessing how students understand and learn about ‘difficult histories’ arose from research (2019-20), led by the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education,to explore teaching about the Holocaust in English secondary schools, which surveyed more than 1,000 teachers. The original study was not about assessment, but we found that teachers were keen to explore ways to reflect on their teaching and their students’ experiences of learning about the Holocaust. However, some noted that care is necessary when considering how assessment could happen, as this interviewee stated:

…we need to give them the emotional space to actually realise what the topic’s about, and the impact it has on people, and I think if we start bolting on assessments to it we lose some of that ability for them to actually self-reflect. (more…)

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Tom Haward, Becky Hale and Mary Richardson. 

“I have always felt that it’s not appropriate to assess Holocaust work as we do other topics,”

…said a history teacher who participated in the recent national study conducted by the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education(CHE) in England. This comment reflects a persistent concern about teaching “difficult history” in schools and, as we observe Holocaust Memorial Day today, underlines the value of keeping such content visible in our curriculum. Assessment of challenging content has been a quandary for educators for decades and we wonder whether this view of assessment is specific to teaching about the Holocaust, or perhaps it is something experienced when teaching other ‘difficult’ content, for example the transatlantic slave trade, or the value of citizenship education?

But what do we mean when we describe something as a ‘difficult history’ and how do we explain it? What is difficult about it? Are we talking about the nature of the content, or the educational challenges associated with teaching this material to young people? And how do we distinguish ‘difficult history’ from an array of terms such as emotive history, challenging content, violent pasts, difficult knowledge and controversial content?  In exploring such questions, we are examining how teaching about the Holocaust has been described in the past because reports such as the Historical Association’s 2007 TEACH Report suggest that (more…)

Rebecca Hale

A survey exploring knowledge of the Holocaust has exposed limited awareness in the UK of some of the most fundamental aspects of this history. Conducted by the Claims Conference, a non-profit organisation which secures compensation for Holocaust survivors, the survey was based on interviews with 2,000 randomly selected adults. Less than half of the respondents knew that six million Jewish people were killed and only one-quarter were aware of the meaning of “Kindertransport”, the rescue of children from Nazi territories.

I am a researcher at the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education and was a member of the taskforce for the Claims Conference United Kingdom Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Study. My research explores teaching and learning about the Holocaust in English secondary schools.

Absence from schools

The lack of knowledge revealed by the survey is partly due to patchy school teaching of the Holocaust. Before the 1990s, Holocaust teaching and learning in the UK was neither widespread nor popular. Generations of (more…)

Ruth-Anne Lenga. 

We find ourselves in extraordinarily troubling times. The Covid-19 pandemic has affected all of us.

Perhaps, now more than ever, it is important to remember defining moments of our collective history, in the hope we might be inspired by the actions of individuals who risked their lives to save others and take heart from the courage and strength of those who faced horrific challenges and survived in spite of extreme hardships.

This week marks the 75^th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp by the British army on April 15 1945 which freed the 50,000 innocent men women and children – mainly Jews – incarcerated there. UCL’s Centre for Holocaust Education today publishes a series of blogposts by Jonathan Dimbleby – whose father Richard Dimbleby was with the troops as a war correspondent, Lord Pickles and our own Arthur Chapman to mark this anniversary.

Nothing prepared the war-hardened British soldiers from the 11th Armoured (more…)

Lord Alf Dubs wrote this piece for UCL’s Centre for Holocaust Education.

Until I left Prague for the UK on the kindertransport in June 1939, I lived in Prague with my parents.

The Germans occupied Prague in March 1939. My father, who was Jewish, left immediately for the UK. In June, my mother, having been refused permission to leave, put me on a kindertransport train with a knapsack of food for the journey – which I forgot to open. I can still clearly see my mother in my mind standing on the platform waving me off, surrounded by German soldiers in uniforms and swastikas. Of course for many of the parents waving their children off that day, it was the last time they ever saw them.

We travelled in carriages of 6-8. We had hard wooden seats to sit and sleep on. It was no great hardship for us – we were children and didn’t mind sleeping on the benches. Children fleeing war today face much greater hardship than we did back in 1939.

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Ruth-Anne Lenga
The UCL’s Centre for Holocaust Education’s good friend and advocate Ben Helfgott has been given a Knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.
We are, of course, delighted. Ben has influenced our work considerably. When we established the Centre 10 years ago he was always on the end of the phone advising us, helping us, pummelling us with questions that would help us shape our vision and rationale.

At least twice a year I find an excuse to escort him into schools, helping to contextualise (more…)

Andy Pearce
This year, on Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, the New York Times poignantly announced the ‘Holocaust is Fading From Memory’. Referring to a study commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the newspaper reported a raft of findings pointing to ‘critical gaps both in awareness of basic facts as well as detailed knowledge of the Holocaust’ amongst a significant proportion of adults in the United States. Particular issues emerged amongst ‘Millennials’, prompting alarm that ‘today’s generation lacks some basic knowledge about these atrocities’ and fear this will worsen as the survivor generation continues to pass away. For its sponsors, the survey highlighted the importance of Holocaust education.
The themes of teaching, learning, and remembering the Holocaust overarching the Claims Conference survey are ones which an international group of experts and myself have explored in my latest book, Remembering the Holocaust in Educational Settings. They are also issues that colleagues and I at the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education shed light on through landmark research in 2009 and 2016.
The latter of these projects saw us publish a study into students’ knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust, drawing on data from (more…)

Andy Pearce. 
On 15 April 1946, nearly three-quarters of the 9,000 Holocaust survivors housed in the Displaced Persons camp at Bergen-Hohne made the short journey to the former site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The occasion was the first anniversary of Liberation Day – the moment twelve months earlier when British forces entered the camp and uncovered all manner of horrors and shocked many the world over. Like all commemorative events it was a highly politicised affair. As a stone memorial to Jews who had died in Belsen was unveiled, Norbert Wollheim – the Deputy Chairman of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the British Zone – took the opportunity to publicly criticise the British for their continued recalcitrance towards Jewish immigration into Palestine, and not doing enough to prevent the destruction of Europe’s Jews during the Holocaust.
In the seventy years since, the liberation of Bergen-Belsen has held a position of pre-eminence in British collective memory of the Holocaust. As the work of Tony Kushner has shown, since 1945 Belsen has had a “particular resonance and centrality in the British imagination” – acting as a cultural reference and point of access for British approaches to the Holocaust. The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh’s visit to the site last year, together with the intense media coverage given to the monarch’s meeting of survivors and former liberators, only further reinforced this symbolic power. Meanwhile, the government’s decision to fund a digital scanning project of Bergen-Belsen – part of an on-going (more…)

Sylwia Holmes. 
‘I didn’t stop being racist because of (learning about) Holocaust […] I’ve always not been racist.’ (Ella, Year 12 student, Peterborough).
In popular, political and even educational discourse, it has become a commonplace to assert that it is crucially important for young people to learn about the Holocaust as an intervention against racism and prejudice in the present day. But in a focus group interview exploring secondary school students’ attitudes towards encountering this history, Year 12 student Ella begins to turn that proposition on its head.
Ella was one of more than 9,500 students consulted by UCL researchers as part of a three-year national study investigating ‘What students know and understand about the Holocaust’. Drawing primarily on survey responses (more…)