A ‘disturbing lack of awareness’ surrounding Holocaust, survey finds
Over 10 per cent of respondents believed mass slaughter of Jews was myth
A Jewish group that commissioned a survey on Holocaust awareness in the Netherlands said Wednesday that the results showed “a disturbing lack of awareness of key historical facts about the Holocaust,” prompting calls for better education in the nation that was home to diarist Anne Frank and her family.
The survey commissioned by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany found that the number of respondents who believe the Holocaust is a myth was higher than in any of the other five nations previously surveyed.
In the survey, 23 per cent of adults under age 40 and 12 per cent of all respondents indicated they believed the Holocaust was a myth or that the number of Jews killed has been greatly exaggerated.
“Not only is this downright shocking, it’s very serious,” Dutch Justice Minister Dilan Yesilgöz-Zegerius said on Twitter. “Almost a quarter of the Dutch people born after 1980 think that the Holocaust is a ‘myth’ or that it is heavily ‘exaggerated.’ As a society, we have a lot of work to do. And fast, too.”
The survey also found that 54 per cent of all respondents — and 59 per cent of those under age 40 — do not know that six million Jews were murdered. Some 29 per cent believe that the figure is two million or fewer.
“It’s terrible,” Max Arpels Lezer, a Dutch survivor whose mother was murdered at Auschwitz, told The Associated Press.
“They should know their own national history — that so many Jewish people were murdered during the Holocaust and I think it’s a shame,” he added.
Of the 140,000 Jews who lived in the Netherlands before the Second World War, 102,000 were killed during the Holocaust. Another 2,000 Jewish refugees in the country also were killed in the genocide.
Despite that grim history, 53 per cent of those surveyed do not cite the Netherlands as a country where the Holocaust took place. Only 22 per cent of all respondents were able to identify Westerbork, a transit camp in the eastern Netherlands where Jews, including Anne Frank, were sent before being deported. The camp is now a museum and commemoration site.
The survey found that 60 per cent of respondents had not visited the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam. The canalside building is where Anne, her sister, parents and four other Jews hid from the Dutch capital’s Nazi occupiers from 1942 until August 1944, when they were discovered and subsequently deported.