Auschwitz appears in all four history textbooks currently available for grade eight and used in Croatian schools. The corpus is therefore complete rather than sampled. Yet the name does not perform the same historical or educational function in each book. Some presentations reconstruct
a complex of camps through space, process, perpetrators, victims, and testimony; others condense it into an example of extermination or a symbol of Holocaust memory. This article examines what these representations make visible - and what they leave outside the frame.
When a Textbook Says "Auschwitz"
What historical reality becomes available to a fourteen-year-old reader when a textbook uses the name Auschwitz? The question is less straightforward than it seems. The word may refer to a town, the main camp established in 1940, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the entire complex of camps and subcamps, a centre of mass killing, a system of forced labour, the site of liberation in January 1945, or a general symbol of the Holocaust. Each of these meanings is historically relevant, but they are not interchangeable.
Croatian pupils encounter Auschwitz in the eighth grade, within narratives of Nazism, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the persecution conducted by the Ustasha regime in the Independent State of Croatia. Four textbooks are currently available and used in Croatian schools: Povijest 8, Klio 8, Moja povijest 8, and Vremeplov 8. Analysing all four makes it possible to compare the full range of representations officially available to pupils, rather than drawing conclusions from a sample or from a single publisher.
All four textbooks mention Auschwitz and preserve the centrality of Jewish persecution. They also name other groups imprisoned or murdered there. Their main difference is therefore not simple presence or absence. It lies in the connections established among place, chronology, human agency, infrastructure, individual lives, and student activity. A textbook can provide several accurate facts and still leave Auschwitz spatially vague. It can show
a victim's face without giving that person
a voice. It can describe gas chambers without naming those who organised deportation, selection, and killing. It can offer a rich set of images but ask pupils only to recall a number.
The comparison below examines five related issues: the historical function assigned to Auschwitz; the distinction between Auschwitz I, Birkenau, and the wider complex; the visibility and individualisation of victims; the naming of perpetrators and the reconstruction of deportation, selection, forced labour, and mass killing; and the work that images, sources, and questions ask pupils to perform. The aim is not to rank the textbooks. A larger number of units is not evidence of higher quality. The purpose is to identify four different narrative logics and to consider their implications for historical understanding.
WHAT WAS EXAMINED?
The analysis covered all four current Croatian grade-eight history textbooks: Povijest 8 (Alfa), Klio 8 (Školska knjiga), Moja povijest 8 (Alka script), Vremeplov 8 (Profil Klett). The corpus included authorial text, maps and plans, photographs and captions, written sources, testimonies, biographies, summaries, and student tasks. Thirty functionally distinct units were identified. They were compared across six dimensions: the historical function of the camp; victims and individualisation; perpetrators and responsibility; the process from deportation to selection, forced labour, and killing; the function of media and sources; and the cognitive demands of tasks. Three contextual units in Vremeplov 8 were analysed separately because they explain the Final Solution and the industrialisation of killing without naming Auschwitz directly. Numerical counts document scope and segmentation; they are not used to rank the books. All page references in this article refer to the printed textbooks.
A separate historiographical check compared numerical, chronological, spatial, and terminological claims with current information from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
One Name, Four Narrative Functions
Textbook Povijest 8 constructs what may be called a spatial-process multimodal model. Across four printed pages, Auschwitz is developed through a map, an authorial explanation, a group of written testimonies, photographs of gas-chamber infrastructure and confiscated shoes, a photograph of Hungarian Jews awaiting selection, a labelled plan of the camp, and images of barracks and the Birkenau gate (pp. 118-121). The parts reinforce one another: the text explains the camp system, the plan locates functions, photographs provide material traces, and testimonies introduce both prisoner and perpetrator perspectives. Auschwitz consequently appears primarily as a concrete historical complex, although the phrase "most notorious" and the connection to 27 January also give it a symbolic and commemorative function.
Textbook Klio 8 offers a condensed symbolic-example model. Its entire Auschwitz presentation is concentrated on one page within an overview of the Holocaust (p. 118). Auschwitz-Birkenau is named as one of the extermination camps used in the Final Solution; statistics establish its scale; and
a photograph of children surviving the camp gives the site an immediately recognisable human image. The presentation is information-dense, but it does not reconstruct the internal geography of the complex or distinguish Auschwitz I from Birkenau. Auschwitz functions above all as an example of the Nazi extermination system and as an emblem of Holocaust suffering.
Textbook Moja povijest 8 combines
a geographical-biographical and commemorative model. A map places Auschwitz-Birkenau in the European network of camps and ghettos; the main text connects the site with deportations from the Independent State of Croatia and through the San Sabba camp in Trieste; the biography of the young Zagreb performer Lea Deutsch localises persecution through an individual life; and the photograph and summary return to liberation and 27 January (pp. 145-146). The route towards Auschwitz and the postwar memory of its victims are especially visible. The internal process of selection and killing is much less developed.
Textbook Vremeplov 8 presents a multi-voiced actor-process model. Auschwitz appears across a broader narrative that moves from the Final Solution and the search for more efficient methods of killing to the camp complex, transport routes, prisoner biographies, perpetrator evidence, and liberation (pp. 124-134). The textbook includes the Polish prisoner-photographer Wilhelm Brasse and Czesława Kwoka, Maksymilian Kolbe, the SS administrator Karl-Friedrich Höcker, the Croatian survivor Oleg Mandić, the Dutch Romani girl Settela Steinbach, and Lea Deutsch. This model makes victims, perpetrators, helpers, and survivors visible as differently positioned actors. Its strength is the connection between large processes and individual cases; its account of the functional differences among the main parts of the complex remains less explicit than its biographical and processual detail.
These models demonstrate why counting pages or units cannot settle the comparison. Klio 8 concentrates several functions on
a single page. Povijest 8 places four survivor and perpetrator voices within one complex
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Auschwitz appears in all four history textbooks currently available for grade eight and used in Croatian schools. The corpus is therefore complete rather than sampled. Yet the name does not perform the same historical or educational function in each book. Some presentations reconstruct
a complex of camps through space, process, perpetrators, victims, and testimony; others condense it into an example of extermination or a symbol of Holocaust memory. This article examines what these representations make visible - and what they leave outside the frame.
When a Textbook Says "Auschwitz"
What historical reality becomes available to a fourteen-year-old reader when a textbook uses the name Auschwitz? The question is less straightforward than it seems. The word may refer to a town, the main camp established in 1940, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the entire complex of camps and subcamps, a centre of mass killing, a system of forced labour, the site of liberation in January 1945, or a general symbol of the Holocaust. Each of these meanings is historically relevant, but they are not interchangeable.
Croatian pupils encounter Auschwitz in the eighth grade, within narratives of Nazism, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the persecution conducted by the Ustasha regime in the Independent State of Croatia. Four textbooks are currently available and used in Croatian schools: Povijest 8, Klio 8, Moja povijest 8, and Vremeplov 8. Analysing all four makes it possible to compare the full range of representations officially available to pupils, rather than drawing conclusions from a sample or from a single publisher.
All four textbooks mention Auschwitz and preserve the centrality of Jewish persecution. They also name other groups imprisoned or murdered there. Their main difference is therefore not simple presence or absence. It lies in the connections established among place, chronology, human agency, infrastructure, individual lives, and student activity. A textbook can provide several accurate facts and still leave Auschwitz spatially vague. It can show
a victim's face without giving that person
a voice. It can describe gas chambers without naming those who organised deportation, selection, and killing. It can offer a rich set of images but ask pupils only to recall a number.
The comparison below examines five related issues: the historical function assigned to Auschwitz; the distinction between Auschwitz I, Birkenau, and the wider complex; the visibility and individualisation of victims; the naming of perpetrators and the reconstruction of deportation, selection, forced labour, and mass killing; and the work that images, sources, and questions ask pupils to perform. The aim is not to rank the textbooks. A larger number of units is not evidence of higher quality. The purpose is to identify four different narrative logics and to consider their implications for historical understanding.
WHAT WAS EXAMINED?
The analysis covered all four current Croatian grade-eight history textbooks: Povijest 8 (Alfa), Klio 8 (Školska knjiga), Moja povijest 8 (Alka script), Vremeplov 8 (Profil Klett). The corpus included authorial text, maps and plans, photographs and captions, written sources, testimonies, biographies, summaries, and student tasks. Thirty functionally distinct units were identified. They were compared across six dimensions: the historical function of the camp; victims and individualisation; perpetrators and responsibility; the process from deportation to selection, forced labour, and killing; the function of media and sources; and the cognitive demands of tasks. Three contextual units in Vremeplov 8 were analysed separately because they explain the Final Solution and the industrialisation of killing without naming Auschwitz directly. Numerical counts document scope and segmentation; they are not used to rank the books. All page references in this article refer to the printed textbooks.
A separate historiographical check compared numerical, chronological, spatial, and terminological claims with current information from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
One Name, Four Narrative Functions
Textbook Povijest 8 constructs what may be called a spatial-process multimodal model. Across four printed pages, Auschwitz is developed through a map, an authorial explanation, a group of written testimonies, photographs of gas-chamber infrastructure and confiscated shoes, a photograph of Hungarian Jews awaiting selection, a labelled plan of the camp, and images of barracks and the Birkenau gate (pp. 118-121). The parts reinforce one another: the text explains the camp system, the plan locates functions, photographs provide material traces, and testimonies introduce both prisoner and perpetrator perspectives. Auschwitz consequently appears primarily as a concrete historical complex, although the phrase "most notorious" and the connection to 27 January also give it a symbolic and commemorative function.
Textbook Klio 8 offers a condensed symbolic-example model. Its entire Auschwitz presentation is concentrated on one page within an overview of the Holocaust (p. 118). Auschwitz-Birkenau is named as one of the extermination camps used in the Final Solution; statistics establish its scale; and
a photograph of children surviving the camp gives the site an immediately recognisable human image. The presentation is information-dense, but it does not reconstruct the internal geography of the complex or distinguish Auschwitz I from Birkenau. Auschwitz functions above all as an example of the Nazi extermination system and as an emblem of Holocaust suffering.
Textbook Moja povijest 8 combines
a geographical-biographical and commemorative model. A map places Auschwitz-Birkenau in the European network of camps and ghettos; the main text connects the site with deportations from the Independent State of Croatia and through the San Sabba camp in Trieste; the biography of the young Zagreb performer Lea Deutsch localises persecution through an individual life; and the photograph and summary return to liberation and 27 January (pp. 145-146). The route towards Auschwitz and the postwar memory of its victims are especially visible. The internal process of selection and killing is much less developed.
Textbook Vremeplov 8 presents a multi-voiced actor-process model. Auschwitz appears across a broader narrative that moves from the Final Solution and the search for more efficient methods of killing to the camp complex, transport routes, prisoner biographies, perpetrator evidence, and liberation (pp. 124-134). The textbook includes the Polish prisoner-photographer Wilhelm Brasse and Czesława Kwoka, Maksymilian Kolbe, the SS administrator Karl-Friedrich Höcker, the Croatian survivor Oleg Mandić, the Dutch Romani girl Settela Steinbach, and Lea Deutsch. This model makes victims, perpetrators, helpers, and survivors visible as differently positioned actors. Its strength is the connection between large processes and individual cases; its account of the functional differences among the main parts of the complex remains less explicit than its biographical and processual detail.
These models demonstrate why counting pages or units cannot settle the comparison. Klio 8 concentrates several functions on
a single page. Povijest 8 places four survivor and perpetrator voices within one complex