Eighty years after Auschwitz, survey reveals shocking lack of Holocaust awareness

Krakow: Primo Levi wrote, just two years after his release from Auschwitz on January 27, 1945: “I am constantly amazed by man’s inhumanity to man”.

The Jewish Italian writer struggled for the rest of his life with the vast existential questions raised by the moral void of the Holocaust. And as the world prepares to mark the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, the few remaining survivors of the concentration camps are approaching the end of their own lives as new wars make their warnings as relevant as ever.

A visitor walks past a gas chamber and crematorium, where someone has left a rose, at Auschwitz.Credit: AP

Monarchs, presidents and prime ministers will be among those who gather in Poland at the largest and most notorious of the Nazi extermination camps, where 1.1 million people – mainly Jews – perished, either from asphyxiation in the gas chambers or from starvation, exhaustion and disease.

But none of them will be let near a microphone, in a first for a major anniversary of the liberation. The Auschwitz museum has banned all speeches by politicians at the event, which will mark 80 years since the day Soviet troops liberated the camp in 1945.

Only Auschwitz survivors will speak in what is likely to be the last major commemoration when many are still alive and healthy enough to travel.

“We want to focus on the last survivors that are among us and on their history, their pain, their trauma and their way to offer us some difficult moral obligations for the present,” Piotr Cywinski, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, said. “There will be no political speeches at all.”

In Germany, 99-year-old Auschwitz survivor Albrecht Weinberg displays the concentration camp tattoo on his arm.Credit: Getty Images

This milestone falls against an international backdrop of looming and open conflicts and a rise in antisemitism across the Western world.

“Never before in the postwar period has remembrance been as important as it is now … I think we are at an enormous turning point. That’s why I think in these times we need some very tangible points of reference,” Cywinski said.

Auschwitz should be one of those points, he says. He expects about 50 survivors of Auschwitz and other camps to attend the events on Monday afternoon.

A new survey found last week a majority of people in seven countries believe a mass genocide against Jewish people similar to the Holocaust could happen today. Concern was highest in the United States, where more than three-quarters (76 per cent) of all adults surveyed believe a genocide of the same scale could happen again, with the UK at 69 per cent and Germany at 61 per cent.

The report by the Claims Conference, which represents Jewish victims of Nazi persecution and their descendants – which surveyed people in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Austria, Germany, Poland, Hungary and Romania – also exposed a global trend of fading knowledge of the Holocaust.

The study in eight countries also found that nearly half of American adults could not identify any Holocaust killing sites and that just over half of Romanians believed the 6 million death toll had been “greatly” exaggerated.

It also showed that almost half of young adults in France don’t even know what the Holocaust is.

Of concern was one in nine young Germans being unaware of the Holocaust and a quarter unable to name a single concentration camp, death camp or ghetto. Since 1992, all secondary schools have been obliged to teach classes on the Holocaust, and in some states, pupils must visit concentration camp memorials.

“Survivors, our most powerful educators, will not be with us much longer – and this [finding] is a stark warning that without urgent and sustained action, the history and lessons of the Holocaust risk slipping into obscurity,” Greg Schneider, Claims Conference executive vice president, said.

Across countries, the survey found a sizeable share of the population does not believe the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust has been accurately described. Data was collected from a representative sample of 1000 adults in each country in November.

Alex Ryvchin and his wife Vicky at their former home, which was vandalised as antisemitic attacks surge in Sydney and Melbourne. He will attend the Auschwitz commemoration. Credit: James Brickwood

Alex Ryvchin, who will attend the event through his role as co-chief executive of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, said amid an uptick in antisemitism at home, the milestone was an opportunity to reflect on how it could happen.

“We must encourage others to learn about the progression from words and slogans and chance to dehumanisation of communities and then to violent acts,” he said. “And one of the things that you learn is that it doesn’t take the majority of a society to turn on Jews. It takes a small, determined minority and an apathetic majority.”

At least 3 million of Poland’s 3.2 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, accounting for about half of the Jews killed in the Holocaust.

On this occasion, the powerful will sit and listen to the voices of the former prisoners while there is still time to hear them.

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