Much was made recently of the survey result (see page four at the link) indicating that 41% of Americans do not know what Auschwitz was. The general theme of the coverage was that this number was a worrisome indication that the Holocaust is being forgotten.
I'm all for Holocaust education, and do a bunch of it myself. But I'm not sure that the statistic actually demonstrates the worrisome meaning ascribed to it. If we flip the number around, we see that 59% of Americans do know that Auschwitz was a "concentration camp" or a "death camp."
Consider these things:
- Fifty-eight percent of Americans don't know that the Battle of the Bulge occurred in World War II.
- Eighty percent of Americans can't pick out James Madison as the "Father of the Constitution" from a list also including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin.
- Eighty-three percent of Americans don't know what the Emancipation Proclamation did.
Auschwitz was liberated going on three generations ago in a foreign land. Its victims included almost no American citizens. And yet three in five Americans know what it was. In the context of pervasive historical ignorance, this number strikes me not as distressingly low, but reassuringly high.
Arguably, the study documents not the vanishing but the persistence of Holocaust memory. We must keep up our efforts at teaching, but there's a firmer foundation for those efforts than for most any other historical episode. I take comfort in that.
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