As people gather around the world to remember the six million Jews who died during the Holocaust, a new survey finds that about half of Canadians canât name a single concentration camp or ghetto.
The telephone and online survey of 1,100 Canadian conducted on behalf of the Azrieli Foundation finds that just under 49 per cent canât name one of the roughly 40,000 death camps. Meanwhile, 22 per cent of millennial respondents (ages 18 to 34) werenât sure if they had even heard of the Holocaust.
was released just before Sundayâs International Day of Commemoration for Holocaust Victims, which coincides with the 74th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
More than 1.1 million people â mostly Jews but also homosexuals, Polish prisoners and Roma people â were killed at the complex in Poland between 1940 and 1945 using forced starvation, gas chambers and other tools of genocide.
David Korn was only five years old when he was sent to a Christian orphanage in Slovakia to avoid the Nazis, who were rounding up Jews and placing them in concentration camps.
âOne week after they put us in the orphanage, they were deported to Auschwitz. My mother and father died in Auschwitz,â Korn told CTV Atlantic on Sunday at a memorial event in Halifax.
âItâs very important that people remember what happened because hopefully it will not happen to somebody else later.â
Angela Orosz, who was born in Auschwitz on Dec. 21, 1944, spent Sunday remembering her mother, who managed to hide her from camp guards for more than a month.
âShe had the will power to go through hell and give life and raise me,â Orosz told CTV Montreal. âShe was a true hero.â
Orosz said she worries that memories of the Holocaust are fading, particularly as incidents of
âSo many people never heard of the concentration camp,â she said. âWe have a big job to do.â