Millennials seem to be less educated about the Holocaust than the average adult in the United States, according to a recent survey.
The genocide claimed the lives of approximately 6 million Jewish people, but a survey by Schoen Consulting reported 41 percent of millennials think less than 2 million people died, as opposed to 31 percent of U.S. adults who think the same. The survey also showed 66 percent of millennials, as opposed to 41 percent of all U.S. adults, could not identify what Auschwitz, the largest concentration camp built by the Nazis, was.
Jonathan Judaken, a history professor at Rhodes College, said ignorance about genocide has perpetuated the problem.
“Not only can it happen again, but what is tragic is that it has happened again and again,” Judaken said. “We did not learn the lessons of the mass murder perpetrated by slavery. We did not learn the lessons of the mass murder that came before the Holocaust.”
Judaken said many other genocides have been ignored and mishandled by governments, including the U.S., throughout the 20th century.
“Genocide and mass murder shadow the whole bloody 20th century following the Holocaust, and organized mass death is happening right now in Syria,” Judaken said. “Unfortunately, no country takes it as a moral imperative to stop genocide. America has failed time and again to do much.”
The Holocaust was particularly malicious because Jewish people were slaughtered solely because of who they were, Judaken said.
“What makes it different from every other genocide in history was the intention to kill every Jew, man, woman and child, everywhere they were, utterly dehumanizing the victims, and then using industrial systems of killing, both by bullets and especially by gas,” Judaken said.
Judaken said he thinks it is important for millennials and college students to know about the Holocaust so they can understand individual freedom relies on other people’s freedoms.
“Yehuda Bauer, a great scholar of the Holocaust, once said that the key lesson to learn from the Holocaust is that you should never be a perpetrator, never be a bystander, never be a victim,” Judaken said. “If you don’t even know about the Holocaust, you are doomed to become one or all of these things: perpetrator, bystander or victim.”
Bluma Zuckerbrot-Finkelstein, the director of community impact for the Memphis Jewish Federation, also said genocides similar to the Holocaust are happening right now.
“While the lines between genocide, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and other terms are open to debate, what is currently happening to the Rohingya Muslims and what happened in Rwanda, Darfur and elsewhere certainly conjure up similarities with the Holocaust,” Zuckerbrot-Finkelstein said.
Zuckerbrot-Finkelstein said she thinks society needs to understand what led up to the Holocaust.
“We need to examine and understand what led to the Nazis’ genocidal actions and the lack of significant resistance to them in order to ensure that those patterns of behavior do not recur,” Zuckerbrot-Finkelstein said. “In an age of Holocaust denial and ‘fake news,’ we all have a responsibility to transmit the truth of the Holocaust and to take actions regarding the lessons derived from it.”
Zuckerbrot-Finkelstein said she wants University of Memphis students to understand both the Holocaust and the lessons it teaches are extremely relevant today.
“You more than likely know someone who either targets people because of their minority status or some distinctive trait, or you know someone who has been victimized,” Zuckerbrot-Finkelstein said. “It starts with bullying, moves into dehumanization, and it then morphs into something uglier and more dangerous. Now more than ever in our increasingly polarized country, we must learn the lessons of the past and stem this tide.”
