I’ve written about so many special days and moments on our calendar, and yet I’ve never written about days that mark the memory of the Holocaust, such as the liberation of Auschwitz, recalled on Jan. 27. The Holocaust was familiar to me at an early age, as my parents had a kosher grocery store and many of our customers were Holocaust survivors. It took no effort to see the tattooed serial numbers on our customers’ arms.

It is hard to fathom that some people question whether the Holocaust even happened. The Economist reports in a 2023 poll that 20% of young Americans (18-29) thought the Holocaust was a myth, with 30% unsure, while a survey from the Guardian reports a common perception that 2 million, not 6 million, Jews were killed in the Nazi camps.

It turns out there is a link between Holocaust ignorance and antisemitic views. The American Jewish Congress asked four questions to assess Holocaust knowledge. Specifically:

When did the Holocaust take place? How did Adolf Hitler come to lead Germany? What was Auschwitz? How many Jewish victims were there?

Only 26% of U.S. adults surveyed could answer all four questions.

The American Jewish Congress’s director for combating antisemitism, Holly Huffnagle, reports that Americans who answered three or more of the four questions correctly “were more likely to know what antisemitism is, that it has increased in our country in the past five years, and to say that it’s a problem in the United States.”

Why is there a lack of Holocaust knowledge, particularly among younger generations? It is thought that a large reason is their having grown up on social media, where antisemitism and Holocaust denial are prominent.

Adding to the distortions is the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel, in which 1,195 Israelis and foreign nationals were killed, and 251 were taken hostage. Rather than fostering empathy, this attack accelerated Jewish hate crimes globally to an unprecedented degree. The Anti-Defamation League reported 10,000 antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2023, and more than double that in 2024.

As I consider the degree of ignorance and antisemitism that surrounds us, I return to a memory of the last funeral I attended of a Holocaust survivor in June 2024. Channah was a grandmother, living in my town, Newton, who died at 93. She was born in a village in Czechoslovakia, and at a young age, Channah and her family were taken to Auschwitz.

Channah was the only one in her family to survive. Channah shared that when she got off the train, Josef Mengele was there, sending her to the right and her family to the left. She never saw her family again.

Upon liberation, Channah emigrated to Israel, where she studied nursing and met a man who would become her husband, also a Holocaust survivor.

May we take the memories of Channah and others like her, and light a path of knowledge, healing and hope.

Jill Ebstein is the editor of the “At My Pace” series of books and the founder of Sized Right Marketing, a consulting firm./InsideSources.com.