THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — A Jewish group that commissioned a survey on Holocaust awareness within the Netherlands said Wednesday that the outcomes show “a disturbing lack of expertise of key historical facts concerning the Holocaust,” prompting calls for higher education within the nation that was home to diarist Anne Frank and her family.
The survey commisioned by the Latest York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany found that the variety of respondents who imagine the Holocaust is a myth was higher than in any of the opposite five nations previously surveyed, with 23 percent of adults under 40 and 12 percent of all respondents believing the Holocaust is a myth or the variety of Jews killed has been greatly exaggerated.
It also found that 54% of all respondents — and 59% of those aged under 40 — have no idea that 6 million Jews were murdered. Some 29 percent imagine that the figure is 2 million or fewer.
“It’s terrible,” Max Arpels Lezer, a Dutch survivor whose mother was murdered at Auschwitz, told The Associated Press.
“They need to know their very own national history — that so many Jewish people were murdered in the course of the Holocaust and I believe it’s a shame,” he added.
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Of the 140,000 Jews who lived within the Netherlands before World War II, 102,000 were murdered within the Holocaust. An extra 2,000 Jewish refugees within the Netherlands also were killed within the genocide.
Despite that grim history, 53% of those surveyed don’t cite the Netherlands as a rustic where the Holocaust took place. Only 22 percent of all respondents were in a position to discover Westerbork, a transit camp within the eastern Netherlands where Jews, including Anne Frank, were sent before being deported. The camp is now a museum and commemoration site.
The survey found that 60% of respondents haven’t visited the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam — the canalside constructing where Anne, her sister, parents and 4 other Jews hid from the Dutch capital’s Nazi occupiers from 1942 until August 1944 once they were discovered and subsequently deported.
Anne and her sister, Margot, died within the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Of the eight Jews who hid in the key annexe in Amsterdam, only Anne’s father, Otto, survived the Holocaust.
Eddo Verdoner, the Netherlands’ National Coordinator on Combating Antisemitism, said in a press release it was “shocking to see that 23% of Millennials and Gen Z imagine the Holocaust is either a myth or has been exaggerated.”
He said the finding “points to a growing gap in knowledge and awareness. We must do higher in our schools to fight Holocaust distortion wherever we discover it.”
Greater than three-quarters of those surveyed — 77% — said that it is vital to proceed to show concerning the Holocaust, partially so it doesn’t occur again, while 66% agree that Holocaust education needs to be compulsory in class.
“Survey after survey, we proceed to witness a decline in Holocaust knowledge and awareness. Equally disturbing is the trend towards Holocaust denial and distortion,” Claims Conference President Gideon Taylor said in a press release.
“To deal with this trend, we must put a greater deal with Holocaust education in our schools globally. If we don’t, denial will soon outweigh knowledge, and future generations could have no exposure to the critical lessons of the Holocaust.”
Only half of respondents said they supported recent speeches by Dutch leaders to acknowledge and apologize for the country’s failure to guard Jews within the Holocaust. The number dropped to 44% amongst respondents aged under 40.
Three years ago, Prime Minister Mark Rutte apologized for the failure of officials within the Nazi-occupied country during World War II to do more to forestall the deportation and murder of Jews. In 2021, he opened a Holocaust monument in Amsterdam. On the time, Rutte called the era “a black page within the history of our country” and said the monument also has a crucial contemporary message “in our time when anti-Semitism isn’t distant. The monument says – no, it screams – be vigilant.”
A Holocaust museum is scheduled to open near the monument next yr.
The survey, with a margin of error of two%, involved interviews with 2,000 Dutch adults aged 18 and over across the Netherlands in December. The Claims Conference negotiates restitution for Holocaust victims.
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