Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day and this year it commemorates the 75th Anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz–Birkenau Nazi death camp.
It is estimated that more than 1.1 million Jews perished at Auschwitz and when you add in the death tolls of the other notorious concentration camps such as Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, more than six million Jews were executed on Hitler’s orders for the simple reason that they were Jewish.
The Holocaust was a crime against humanity that has no historical equivalent.
The frightening fact is that as time marches on, the horrors of the Holocaust are being forgotten, diminished and more and more frequently outright denied.
A recent study in France conducted by Schoen Consulting revealed that some 25 per cent of French millennials and gen-Z youth had never heard of the Holocaust – and France is home to the third-largest Jewish population in the world.
Twenty per cent of French youth responded that holding anti-Semitic views was ‘acceptable’, which was twice that of the percentage of the French general population.
Before we isolate this as a case of French ignorance, it should be pointed out that another study, also by Schoen Consulting, found a similar level of Holocaust ignorance among Canadian and American respondents to the survey.
In fact, a disappointing 49 per cent of Canadians could not name a single Nazi concentration camp. Ignorance among our youth lies with our education system and therefore it can and must be corrected.
There are those who seek to manipulate this knowledge vacuum through the total revision of this very dark period in mankind’s history.
In early January both Israel and Poland issued a joint statement from their foreign ministries condemning Ukraine for its public glorification of Holocaust perpetrators and ‘anti-Semitic ideologues.’
The incident that sparked the Israeli and Polish rebuke was Ukraine’s public celebration of the 111th birthdate of Stepan Bandera. As the WWII leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its military arm, the UPA, Bandera collaborated with Hitler’s Nazis.
Holocaust historians hold Bandera responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews and over 100,000 Poles.
In response to the joint Israeli and Polish condemnation, Ukrainian Ambassador Gennady Nadolenko warned Israel to stay out of “internal issues of Ukrainian politics.”
The Israeli Foreign Ministry shot back, saying that “individuals responsible for the murder of Jews in the Holocaust and in the pogroms, as well as the anti-Semitic ideologists of the Ukraine National movement have recently been subject of public glorifications in Ukraine.” The Israeli Foreign Ministry “condemns those phenomena.”
It may be recalled there was some controversy last August when uniformed Canadian soldiers were paraded at a monument dedication in the Ukrainian village of Sambir. What made this incident controversial was the fact that the monument was being dedicated to 17 members of Stepan Bandera’s OUN fighters, who Israel and Poland vehemently condemns as Holocaust collaborators.
It is one thing for Canadian citizens to have a collective ignorance of the extreme horrors of the Holocaust, it is another matter altogether when Canadians in uniform are paraded to honour the memory of those Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers who perpetrated this atrocity.
May we never forget, never revise and never deny the magnitude of the inhumanity of Hitler’s Holocaust.
