The Imperative of Holocaust Education

Abstract

When I began my career almost 50 years ago, I emphasized in my speeches that one day there would be no Holocaust survivors to say, “I was there,” or to show their concentration camp tattoos, or to recount their first-hand testimony of being the victims of the worst brutality known to humankind. Sadly, we are almost at that point.

Twenty-two years into the 21st century, the biological clocks of these witnesses are winding down, and each year, many are taken from us. Fortunately, some are still able to speak in schools, at commemorations and in interviews, to tell their stories. And the many programs and projects devoted to recording thousands of testimonies over the past few decades have created a permanent record of the suffering they endured, much of which is accessible over the internet.

And yet, the passage of time and the increasingly short concentration spans of younger generations make us anxious about the future. Grandparent survivors, who helped to create a chain of continuity about Holocaust remembrance, are now in their late 80s and 90s.

But what of those families who either never had, or no longer have, that connection? In the United States, only 16 states have mandatory Holocaust education programs. A good number of universities have Holocaust studies programs, but unless you are a student seeking to obtain a degree in the subject, or if you are just interested in taking a course or two, the likelihood is that you’ll never encounter a discussion about Hitler’s campaign to eradicate the Jewish people.

Over the past 30 years or so, the callous and careless use of the word “genocide” and the trivialization of such terms as “concentration camp” and comparison of mundane, everyday matters to the Holocaust is tearing away and weakening the uniqueness of what the Jewish people experienced between 1933 and 1945. Viewers of the popular television situation comedy “Seinfeld” will recall a character nicknamed “the Soup Nazi,” a surly restaurateur who featured take-away soups. This kind of casual, off-handed minimization of the perpetrators of the worst possible crimes is not a laughing matter. Worse, if one has no context of exactly who the Nazis were, and what they did, you could wind up repeating these trivializations, all the while further exacerbating the problem.

In 2020, the Claims Conference (the Conference on Material Claims Against Germany), the organization which has, for the past 70 years, provided Holocaust survivors with financial and other material assistance, and which funds numerous Holocaust education and remembrance programs, issued a groundbreaking study about Holocaust awareness. It was a global survey, focusing on Millennials and Generation Z-ers and their knowledge of basic facts about the Holocaust. The results were disturbing: 63% of the respondents did not know that six million Jews were murdered; 36% thought it was two million or fewer. Almost half of those surveyed could not name a single concentration camp. Most shocking: 11% thought that Jews themselves were responsible for the Holocaust.

If these real-time results are surfacing when there are Holocaust victims and concentration camp liberators still among us, one can only speculate about the future. But an equally serious threat to remembrance is upon us, and it is growing in intensity: Holocaust denial.