What Holocaust? New generation is ignorant of history

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Years ago, I got the idea for a novel about the last living survivor of the Holocaust. He would be a child survivor, born in 1939 as a hidden child in a Jewish ghetto, and would live there until his family went to Auschwitz. How a little boy managed to survive that place after losing his parents is the stuff of novels, and it is.

It’s titled “The Last Witness,” and I published it last year.

Along with flashbacks showing how the worst memories of the protagonist’s life occurred before he was 5 years old, the book describes his contemporary struggle in the future, the year 2039, when he is 100 years old. The world of 2039 is one in which people are pretty ignorant and complacent as far as the Holocaust is concerned.

One publisher said he had to “suspend disbelief” with my premise that a generation down the road would know so little about the Holocaust, which prompted me to do a video on the subject. Last fall I interviewed university students in Toronto, asking them about the Holocaust and World War II. What they didn’t know would, literally, fill a book.

Here we are in April 2015, with Yom Hashoah commemorating those who perished in the most heinous crime of human history. At the same time, today — never mind 2039 — it seems that young people know next to nothing.

Most students I spoke to that afternoon in Toronto had no idea what happened at the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. They didn’t know who FDR and Churchill were. Hardly any could identify the Allies; one thought the Allies were Germany and Russia. The only student who knew how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust was Jewish himself. Another said, “I’ve heard of the Holocaust but I can’t explain it.”

We live in a time when anti-Semitism is growing throughout Europe, far-right and far-left political parties are on the rise, and thumb-your-nose-at-the-world carnage is being waged by the Islamic State terror group. Add what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine, and the specter of a new Cold War is upon us.

Do young people know about the Cold War? Do they know about the Armenian genocide, which this year is 100 years old? Do they know why Turkey continues to deny that it ever took place?

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