The Holocaust is Not Myth

The Holocaust is Not a Myth

Recently, I gave a talk at a high school here in Lynchburg.  There were about a hundred students in the lecture hall.  They were there to learn about the Holocaust, so they could write poems about it for a contest that’s run every year by the Holocaust Educators of Central Virginia.  

Before I started talking about the war and reading poems about my Polish, Catholic parents and their experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany, one of the teachers who organized the reading asked the students if they knew about the Holocaust.

About two thirds of them raised their hands.  A third didn’t raise their hands. They admitted that they didn’t know about the Holocaust, didn’t know about why it happened or what it was like or who the victims of the Holocaust were.

I wasn’t shocked.  In my 40 years of writing about my parents and their experiences, I’ve given a lot of lectures about the Holocaust and World War II and what happened to so many people. I’ve had students and teachers and adults who weren’t either students or teachers come up to me after these readings to tell me that they had no idea that so many Jews and non-Jews were killed by the Germans.  

No, for a long time, I haven’t been shocked by how many people don’t know about the Holocaust and what happened to the Jews and those people like the Poles and the gypsies and the mentally handicapped who were also considered untermenschen, subhumans, by the Germans.

I wasn’t shocked, but I was disappointed when the students in that lecture hall said they didn’t know about the Holocaust.

I was even more disappointed this morning when I read an article in The Economist that said that about 20% of students in the United States believe that the Holocaust is a myth while about 25% feel that the Holocaust has been exaggerated.

I want to know why the parents and teachers of these students aren’t telling them about the Holocaust and the World War that resulted in an estimated 80 million deaths, 3% of the total population of the earth at that time.

80 million deaths, and most of the people who died weren’t soldiers. Although 25 million soldiers died, the rest of the dead were civilians, mothers and fathers and their children.  

The people who say that the Holocaust is a myth are most likely also saying that World War Two is a myth or an exaggeration.

What can be done about this lack of knowledge?

In 1979, Congress authorized an annual national commemoration of the Holocaust called “The Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust.”

I don’t think this annual commemoration is enough.  

I read this morning that last week a bipartisan group of senators introduced a bill to reauthorize the Never Again Education Act, an act that provides federal funding for Holocaust education.

I doubt if that will be enough either, but we can only hope that it will help.

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My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/holokaust-nie-jest-mitem/

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