Mediating Difficult Knowledge Through Children's Holocaust Narratives in Primary Education

Abstract

Holocaust narratives for upper-primary readers require teachers to balance historical specificity, interpretive accessibility, and the risk of either euphemistic avoidance or shock. This qualitative text-analytical study compares Rose Blanche, The Harmonica, Number the Stars, and Once to examine how literary form regulates access to difficult historical knowledge. Across the corpus, five analytically distinct but interacting dimensions recur: calibrated explicitness, witness position, child agency, multimodal design, and paratextual framing. The study integrates these dimensions into a theoretically derived planning matrix that makes explicit the questions teachers may consider when selecting, sequencing, contextualising, and discussing Holocaust narratives. The analysis suggests that educational suitability is not a fixed property of a text but depends on how its omissions, focalisation, images, symbolic structures, and paratexts are mediated. The matrix identifies textual affordances and planning demands; it does not predict pupil outcomes and  has not yet been empirically tested in classrooms