Millennials & The Holocaust: Mortifying Statistics

One of my first blog posts was about my experience writing about visitor-survivors in museums. Part of this included my own experiences as a visitor to Oswiecim. Growing up with history as my favorite subject to study, I remember clearly remember learning about the horrors of the Holocaust, including the terrifying details of concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Dachau, Majdanek, Ravensbruck, Terezin and Treblinka… I remember reading Maus by Art Spiegelman, diary entries from Anne Frank and Night by Elie Wiesel.

You can understand, then, how I would be absolutely SHOCKED to read this tweet by the Washington Post:

In reading the post, I continued to be stunned and amazed about the following statistics in their article:

1. 66% of millennials could not identify what Auschwitz is

2. 22% of millennials in the poll said they haven’t heard or didn’t know if they heard of the Holocaust

3. 41% of respondents & 66% of milliennials could not come up with a correct response identifying it as a concentration camp or extermination camp

However…

1. 68 % said anti=Semitism is present in America

2. 51 % said there are many or a great deal of neo-Nazis in America

3. 58% said they believe something like the Holocaust could happen again

The only hope I could hold on to when reading this article is the fact that the poll showed 93% said that “all students should learn about the Holocaust in school.).

Not but a few tweets down, I read an article posted by NPR: “Poland’s constitutional court is due to make a ruling this month on a law that criminalizes attributing crimes during Nazi occupation to Poland.”

The content of this tweet isn’t new news—at least to me. However… it is still so terrifying. Instead of embracing, making reparations and creating systems of never allowing this history to repeat itself, the world is “forgetting” about the Holocaust… In the United States we see a decline in the newer generation’s knowledge of this dark part of the past… In Central Europe (Poland, but also the Czech Republic, Hungary, Austria…) we see instances of government intervention in the memory and remembrance of what transpired ¾ of a century ago…

We all know that without proper remembrance and studying of the past, history is doomed to repeat itself. This information that I’ve shared with you all genuinely has me worried for the future of mankind’s interaction with one another… As a prospective educator, I don’t think I can emphasize the importance of remembering the past… especially events such as the Holocaust. I am disheartened, but there’s little room for that. Action is the only thing we can do to change these statistics. Education is the key to a brighter future, and we all must do what we can to educate ourselves and each other.