Half of American Adults Cannot Name a Concentration Camp

On January 27, 1945 - 80 years ago today - the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp. According to the German Federal Agency for Civic Education, the Nazis murdered one million Jews there. In the extermination camps Bełzec, Sobibór and Treblinka, an additional 1.6 to 1.8 million Jews were killed. In the Chełmno (Kulmhof) extermination camp, 152,000 were murdered and in the Lublin-Majdanek concentration and extermination camp, the number was 60,000 to 80,000.

While the horrors of the Shoah, as the Holocaust is called by Jewish people, remain an omnipresent trauma among the population of Israel as well as among the remaining survivors and their descendants even 80 years on, the memory is fading in the rest of society. A survey by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) shows: Of 1,000 Americans questioned, almost half (48 percent) could not name a single concentration camp.

The situation is somewhat better in countries that housed concentration camps, for example Germany, Austria, Poland and Hungary, with only between 7 and 18 percent not being able to name a single such camp. The memory is particularly present in Poland, the country on whose territory most of the extermination camps were located.

Between those aged 18-29, this number rose to a worrying 26 percent in Germany and Hungary, however. Around a quarter of all adults in the United Kingdom, France and Romania was also not able to name a concentration camp, with more than half of Romanian young adults unable to do so.