Anne Frank this stranger. One of the symbolic figures of the horror of the Holocaust, a large proportion of Dutch youth are practically unaware of who she was and what she stood for.
And this despite the fact that his story took place right there, in the Netherlands. But if you ask the under 40s, three out of ten of them (32%) will not be able to tell you that she died in a concentration camp, and if you ask all adults, more than one in four of them (27%) will express the same ignorance. No joke.
The Conference on Jewish material claims against Germany (also known as the Claims Conference) asked these questions, for investigations to be published on the occasion of the day of remembrance, the anniversary that on January 27 of each year celebrates the victims of the Holocaust.
The date chosen is not accidental. On January 27, 1945, the Red Army entered the Auschwitz concentration camp, revealing the horror of the genocide to the world. A short distance from the anniversary, not even the Claims Conference polls are random. They were conducted in six countries (Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Austria, France and the Netherlands), and the results that emerge from the country that belonged to Anne Frank certainly stand out, overwhelmed by history, the one with a capital S made of occupation, collaborationism, deportations, but also of aid and assistance, wherever possible.
The extreme synthesis is offered by a worried Greg Schneider, executive vice president of the Claims Conference. “One of the most troubling trends we continue to see in these polls is the increase in the number of people who believe the Holocaust was a myth or that the number of Jews murdered is exaggerated.” The data, after all, says this. In the Dutch case, 12% of all respondents believe that the Holocaust is “a myth or that the number of Jews killed has been greatly exaggerated”, while 9% declare themselves “unsafe”. A situation that changes if we take only the Millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) and the even younger generation Z (1997-2012). Among them, the rate that considers the Holocaust an exaggeration reached 23%, with those who are uncertain at 12%.
There is more. More than half of respondents of all ages (54%) are unaware that the systematic elimination of Jews has resulted in six million victims. The same amount of people (53% of all Dutch respondents) do not name their country as a place where the Holocaust occurred, despite the fact that there were several transit camps in the Netherlands used to deport over 70% of the population Jews of the country in concentration camps, and even though Anne Frank was hidden in Amsterdam.
The problem lurks in young people, who as Dutch are also young Europeans. There is a 22% of under 41 who consider it “acceptable” for an individual to support neo-Nazi views.