San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
New threats to Holocaust remembrance
It was not his scraggly beard or long hair that made me stare at the photograph of the Jan. 6 rioter on the U.S. Capitol steps. It was Robert Keith Packer’s shirt that grabbed my attention.
“Camp Auschwitz,” it read. And below that, the phrase “Work Brings Freedom,” an obvious reference to the German saying at the gate of Auschwitz and other concentration camps, “Arbeit Macht Frei.”
It is open for debate whether Packer’s shirt was more antiSemitic than the Proud Boys T-shirts emblazoned with “6MWE,” code for “Six Million Wasn’t Enough,” referring to the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Ugliness knows no bounds. Both are disgusting displays of hate.
However, there is a frightening irony about Packer’s “Camp Auschwitz” shirt. Presumably, Packer knows what Auschwitz was. An alarming number of Americans do not.
Last fall, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany released its first 50state survey on Holocaust knowledge of two important groups of Americans, and the results were discouraging.
According to the Claims Conference, 56 percent of millennials (people born from 1981 to 1996) and Generation Z (those born from 1997 to 2012) were unable to identify Auschwitz although 1.1 million people died there during World War II.
Forty-eight percent could not name a single one of the more than 40,000 concentration
camps or ghettos established before and during the war. An alarming 55 percent of Texas millennials and Gen Z could not name one concentration camp. The extermination camp Treblinka, where upward of 925,000 victims perished in 16 months, was a name known to only 1 percent of American millennials and those in Gen Z.
Additionally, 36 percent of millennials and Gen Z thought 2 million or fewer Jews were murdered in the Holocaust when, as the Proud Boys woefully remind us, the real number was 6 million. When you add the “others”
— Roma and Sinti, the disabled, Jehovah’s Witnesses, communists, political opponents of Nazism, Soviet prisoners of war and homosexuals — the total was more than 11 million lives lost.
The Claims Conference has some fascinating findings buried in its report. For example, 13 percent of Texas millennials and Gen Z believe that Jews caused the Holocaust. In other words, about 1 in every 8 think the victims were the perpetrators.
“The results are both shocking and saddening, and they underscore why we must act now while Holocaust survivors are still with us to voice their stories,” reported Gideon Taylor, president of the Claims Conference.
“We need to understand why we aren’t doing better in educating a younger generation about the Holocaust and the lessons of the past,” he said. “This needs to serve as a wake-up call to us all, and as a road map of where government officials need to act.”
There is a lot of ignorance about the Holocaust in our society. We are at a critical time in remembering the Holocaust. Every day we lose additional survivors and with them, their stories of torture, starvation and survival. We must commit to keeping the history of the Holocaust alive.
I teach a course on the social history of the Holocaust at my university and my students tend to be eager learners. It makes teaching the course rewarding, as almost everything I teach and they read is new to them. They don’t need me constantly reminding them of the importance of remembering the Holocaust, however. They see it, and they get it.
That’s obviously not the case with millions of us. We do need reminding.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day was last Wednesday. That’s the date in 1945 when Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz. I suspect that very few of us remembered this past Wednesday with a candle, a poem or a prayer. To those, I ask: Stop sometime today for just a couple of minutes of quiet to remember the victims of the Holocaust. Millions of victims deserve our remembrances.