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Thank you for sharing this, it's touching :)
What percentage of that 23% actually knew what the holocaust was, and did not need it explaining or doing a search? >


More than half the respondents to the American organisation’s survey did not know six million Jews were murdered and 29% believe the death toll was below two million. >

I wonder how the survey was done. To assert something is exaggerated versus not knowing the true number are very different things. >

There's a big difference between "How many people do you think were killed during the Holocaust?" as an open ended question as opposed to "Do you think the number of holocaust deaths were exaggerated"?
There's a big difference between someone that is just ignorant and someone that believes in lies.
That being said, far too many people deny how big and horrible it was. >

Sadly I'm one of those people who doesn't know the number of people who died during the holocaust. I probably heard it at some point, but it's just not something I kept in memory. Now that I hear it's 6 million people, without any context, it sounds like a really big number. I can see why some people might think it's actually less if just randomly asked in a survey. >

They killed so many people - that using a single bullet per person was deemed too costly and slow.  Think about that for a second - they industrialized genocide - it gives you a different perspective to think about it as a factory designed to produce dead bodies.
The horror is so hard to wrap your head around - the level of dehumanizing that occurred is frightening. >


The doctor looks around and says, "Dachau. Why does it still stand? Why do we keep it standing?"
There is an answer to the doctor's question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes; all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's Earth.


Rod Serling, Deaths-Head Revisited, The Twilight Zone >

Damn. Just...damn.
I'm Gen X. I suppose the last generation to grow up with the WWII gen. I had all four of my grandparents until I was in HS when I lost the first. I lost the last when I was fifty. I was a total white bread American...and then I married a Jewish girl with grandparents of her own with Auschwitz numbers on their arms. 
I can't begin to explain what it was like to listen to their stories. Luckily, I speak very bad German and even have a litle Yiddish under my belt. So,I spent HOURS upon hours sitting and listening to these two. They were SO gracious and so forethcoming and willing to tell their experiences.
The odd thing was that neither my future wife at the time nor her sister were interested in the least to hear the stories. (I think it was both painful and a little bit embarassing to them at that age.) I remember one of the most embarassing moments of my life was when I overheard my wife's grandmother talking to her one day. She said, "Marry him! Will a good Catholic boy have a Jewish girl?"
I felt like complete dirt. This woman had been beaten into a kind of crap that was never going to leave her by a bunch of shitheads that claimed to be protecting my "race". 
If anything, the monuments to the past need to stay as reminders that. even when we try to do good, we still carry the guilt of the dickheads in our past. We should never let that go. We should be willing to bear it  because it is what reminds us that we - all of us -  have a responsibitlity to do better every day. Guilt can be a powerful motivator if we keep in mind that - even if we didn't do the things of the past - we could always fail to do the right thing in the present if we aren't very, very careful.