King Willem-Alexander places a stone in an act of remembrance when unveiling a brand new monument within the coronary heart of Amsterdam’s historic Jewish Quarter on Sept. 19, 2021, honoring the 102,000 Dutch victims of the Holocaust.
Peter Dejong/AP
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Peter Dejong/AP
King Willem-Alexander places a stone in an act of remembrance when unveiling a brand new monument within the coronary heart of Amsterdam’s historic Jewish Quarter on Sept. 19, 2021, honoring the 102,000 Dutch victims of the Holocaust.
Peter Dejong/AP
THE HAGUE, Netherlands — A Jewish group that commissioned a survey on Holocaust consciousness within the Netherlands mentioned Wednesday that the outcomes present “a disturbing lack of expertise of key historic info in regards to the Holocaust,” prompting requires higher schooling within the nation that was house to diarist Anne Frank and her household.
The survey commissioned by the New York-based Convention on Jewish Materials Claims In opposition to Germany discovered that the variety of respondents who imagine the Holocaust is a fantasy was larger than in any of the opposite 5 nations beforehand surveyed, with 23 % of adults underneath 40 and 12 % of all respondents believing the Holocaust is a fantasy or the variety of Jews killed has been drastically exaggerated.
It additionally discovered that 54% of all respondents — and 59% of these aged underneath 40 — have no idea that 6 million Jews had been murdered. Some 29 % imagine that the determine is 2 million or fewer.
“It is horrible,” Max Arpels Lezer, a Dutch survivor whose mom was murdered at Auschwitz, instructed The Related Press.
“They need to know their very own nationwide historical past — that so many Jewish folks had been murdered in the course of the Holocaust and I believe it is a disgrace,” he added.
Of the 140,000 Jews who lived within the Netherlands earlier than World Battle II, 102,000 had been murdered within the Holocaust. An extra 2,000 Jewish refugees within the Netherlands additionally had been killed within the genocide.
Regardless of that grim historical past, 53% of these surveyed don’t cite the Netherlands as a rustic the place the Holocaust happened. Solely 22 % of all respondents had been capable of establish Westerbork, a transit camp within the jap Netherlands the place Jews, together with Anne Frank, had been despatched earlier than being deported. The camp is now a museum and commemoration web site.
The survey discovered that 60% of respondents haven’t visited the Anne Frank Home museum in Amsterdam — the canalside constructing the place Anne, her sister, dad and mom and 4 different Jews hid from the Dutch capital’s Nazi occupiers from 1942 till August 1944 after they had been found and subsequently deported.
Anne and her sister, Margot, died within the Bergen-Belsen focus camp. Of the eight Jews who hid within the secret annexe in Amsterdam, solely Anne’s father, Otto, survived the Holocaust.
Eddo Verdoner, the Netherlands’ Nationwide Coordinator on Combating Antisemitism, mentioned in an announcement it was “stunning to see that 23% of Millennials and Gen Z imagine the Holocaust is both a fantasy or has been exaggerated.”
He mentioned the discovering “factors to a rising hole in data and consciousness. We should do higher in our faculties to struggle Holocaust distortion wherever we discover it.”
Greater than three-quarters of these surveyed — 77% — mentioned that it is very important proceed to show in regards to the Holocaust, partially so it does not occur once more, whereas 66% agree that Holocaust schooling needs to be obligatory at school.
“Survey after survey, we proceed to witness a decline in Holocaust data and consciousness. Equally disturbing is the development in the direction of Holocaust denial and distortion,” Claims Convention President Gideon Taylor mentioned in an announcement.
“To deal with this development, we should put a higher concentrate on Holocaust schooling in our faculties globally. If we don’t, denial will quickly outweigh data, and future generations may have no publicity to the important classes of the Holocaust.”
Solely half of respondents mentioned they supported current speeches by Dutch leaders to acknowledge and apologize for the nation’s failure to guard Jews within the Holocaust. The quantity dropped to 44% amongst respondents aged underneath 40.
Three years in the past, Prime Minister Mark Rutte apologized for the failure of officers within the Nazi-occupied nation throughout World Battle II to do extra to forestall the deportation and homicide of Jews. In 2021, he opened a Holocaust monument in Amsterdam. On the time, Rutte referred to as the period “a black web page within the historical past of our nation” and mentioned the monument additionally has an essential up to date message “in our time when anti-Semitism is rarely distant. The monument says – no, it screams – be vigilant.”
A Holocaust museum is scheduled to open close to the monument subsequent yr.
The survey, with a margin of error of two%, concerned interviews with 2,000 Dutch adults aged 18 and over throughout the Netherlands in December. The Claims Convention negotiates restitution for Holocaust victims.
