In U.S., knowledge of the Holocaust and its lessons scarce
A survey released on Holocaust Remembrance Day this past spring discovered that many American adults lack a basic knowledge of the Holocaust.
It turns out that 41 percent of Americans, and 66 percent of millennials, cannot identify Auschwitz, the infamous concentration/extermination camp in Poland where 1.1 million persons perished during World War II.
Additionally, more than half of all Americans think Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany through force. He didn’t. He was democratically elected.
The survey, commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, was especially striking to me because I teach a course on the social history of the Holocaust.
The Holocaust was the deliberate effort by Nazi Germany to murder every single Jew in Europe. In the end, more than 6 million Jews perished, along with millions of Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals, political opponents of Nazism, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others.
If there is one consistent comment I hear from students, it is that prior to my course, they had rarely been taught about the Holocaust. The good news is that the survey found that 93 percent of respondents said students should learn about the Holocaust in school.
But what if you are not a student? How do you learn about the Holocaust?
Here are four simple suggestions:
Visit the Holocaust Memorial Museum of San Antonio. It is free to the public and is located at the southeast corner of Wurzbach Parkway and Northwest Military Highway.
Check out Holocaust books from the San Antonio Library. Elie Wiesel’s “Night” and Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl” are both excellent.
Watch good documentaries and movies. Alain Resnais’ “Night and Fog” is one of the greatest documentaries ever made, and it’s only 32 minutes. “Schindler’s List” is superb. Surf the web — with caution. Holocaust deniers are abundant and many sites are just not very good. However, the website for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (www.ushmm.org) is the premier online source for reliable information on the Holocaust.
There is one other way to learn more about the Holocaust, although it takes time and money — go to where it happened.
This is not especially easy since South Texas is a long way from Europe. But with some financial planning and scheduling, there is no substitute for putting your feet on the ground where the Holocaust happened.
In recent years I have been fortunate to visit extermination camps in Poland, concentration camps and euthanasia centers in Germany, and many Jewish ghettos. You don’t visit Auschwitz. You experience it
Sometimes these experiences are quite powerful. Last month, accompanied by a close friend of nearly 60 years, I arrived at the Wöbbelin concentration camp, just outside the small town of Ludwigslust, Germany. Wobbelin was a subcamp of the much larger Neuengamme concentration camp.
Wobbelin was only open in the spring of 1945. Most of the prisoners who died at Wöbbelin were intentionally starved to death.
At Wöbbelin we attended the 73rd anniversary of the camp’s liberation, which was on May 2, 1945. Of the many people we met, two men had a special status. Both were 92-year-old Polish Jews who had survived Auschwitz and Neuengamme before their liberation at Wöbbelin.
They were there to give testimony to what they had endured, but they were not hateful. They spoke passionately and specifically about the horrors of the camp, but also candidly about the “new” Germany and how it has reckoned honestly and forthrightly about the years of the Third Reich.
I was struck by their lack of spite and their desire to celebrate life. It was a vitalizing experience to be with two men who had survived the atrocity of the Holocaust, not only physically but spiritually as well.
The lessons of the Holocaust go beyond the idea that if we do not remember it, we risk repeating it.
One lesson might be, as
Anne Frank put it, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”