General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsEighty years after Auschwitz, survey reveals shocking lack of Holocaust awareness
Monarchs, presidents and prime ministers will be among those who gather in Poland at the largest and most notorious of the Nazi extermination camps, where 1.1 million people mainly Jews perished, either from asphyxiation in the gas chambers or from starvation, exhaustion and disease.
But none of them will be let near a microphone, in a first for a major anniversary of the liberation. The Auschwitz museum has banned all speeches by politicians at the event, which will mark 80 years since the day Soviet troops liberated the camp in 1945.
Only Auschwitz survivors will speak in what is likely to be the last major commemoration when many are still alive and healthy enough to travel.
We want to focus on the last survivors that are among us and on their history, their pain, their trauma and their way to offer us some difficult moral obligations for the present, Piotr Cywinski, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, said. There will be no political speeches at all.
https://www.theage.com.au/world/europe/eighty-years-after-auschwitz-survey-reveals-shocking-lack-of-holocaust-awareness-20250126-p5l796.html
Archive: https://archive.md/mwiC1
January 27 is Holocaust Remembrance Day; the day Auschwitz was liberated by Russian troops. The survivors grow fewer each year. Unfortunately many younger people are unaware of the Holocaust. It was a long time ago but was an act of such horror and consequence that it should never, ever be forgotten.
LudwigPastorius
(11,426 posts)Definitely related:
https://www.axios.com/2023/01/07/holocaust-genocide-education-state-laws
Igel
(36,485 posts)TX:
As of 2021 (it was only slightly changed from the previous revision):
(12) History. The student understands the causes and impact of World War II.
The student is expected to:
(12)(A) describe the emergence and characteristics of totalitarianism;
(12)(B) explain the roles of various world leaders, including Benito Mussolini,
Adolf Hitler, Hideki Tojo, Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston
Churchill, prior to and during World War II; and
(12)(C) explain the major causes and events of World War II, including the
German invasions of Poland and the Soviet Union, the Holocaust, the attack on
Pearl Harbor, the Normandy landings, and the dropping of the atomic bombs.
California:
10.8 Students analyze the causes and consequences of World War II.
1. Compare the German, Italian, and Japanese drives for empire in the 1930s, including
the 1937 Rape of Nanking, other atrocities in China, and the Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939.
2. Understand the role of appeasement, nonintervention (isolationism), and the domestic distractions in Europe and the United States prior to the outbreak of World War II.
3. Identify and locate the Allied and Axis powers on a map and discuss the major
turning points of the war, the principal theaters of conflict, key strategic decisions,
and the resulting war conferences and political resolutions, with emphasis on the
importance of geographic factors.
4. Describe the political, diplomatic, and military leaders during the war (e.g., Winston
Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Emperor Hirohito, Adolf Hitler, Benito
Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower).
5. Analyze the Nazi policy of pursuing racial purity, especially against the European
Jews; its transformation into the Final Solution; and the Holocaust that resulted in the
murder of six million Jewish civilians.
6. Discuss the human costs of the war, with particular attention to the civilian and
military losses in Russia, Germany, Britain, the United States, China, and Japan
I rather prefer TX's take on the Holocaust: Explain it. The California one focuses on fewer than half the victims. Jews were the largest group singled out, and gave its name to the subset that included just Jews but which was far more expansive, with gays, Roma, lots of German political dissidents and "upstart" Poles and other Slavs included for all sorts of reasons, so Yad Vashem has nearly 13 million names and memorializes all the victims of the Nazi death camps.