IS THAT YOUR FINAL ANSWER?

Ignorance of the Holocaust (Uriel Heilman, Jerusalem Post, January 2nd, 2005)

The majority of respondents in a new survey about knowledge of the Holocaust said they did not know what Auschwitz was—but Holocaust experts are questioning the study's methodology and the accuracy of the results.

The survey, conducted by the International Society for Sephardic Progress, questioned passersby in public areas in Orlando, Florida in a poll that was hastily planned after a BBC study found that 45 percent of respondents in Britain said they had not heard of Auschwitz. The Orlando poll found that 63 percent of 840 respondents did not know what Auschwitz-Birkenau referred to, with the highest levels of ignorance among the 21-30 age group.

"It's a benchmark on our own community," said Shelomo Alfassa, executive director of the International Society for Sephardic Progress. "England does not have an exclusive on not knowing what the Holocaust is. It's just as bad as here."

Alfassa said it was his group's first-ever study.

Scholars and officials at some institutions involved in studying the Holocaust and anti-Semitism said the Florida survey—in which questioners approached people coming out of supermarkets, courthouses, post offices and shopping malls in Orlando, Florida's sixth-largest city—did not appear to be reliable.

That sure is one heck of a question to be asked by a stranger at the end of a tiring shopping trip. Methodology aside, the underlying assumption is that a detailed historical knowledge of the Holocaust is a civic virtue and that the more people who have such knowledge, the less likely is a repeat. At, bottom, this is a secular, rational idea summed up in the old aphorism that those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it.

As the last actual Holocaust survivors pass on, it will, like the Inquisition, move slowly from factual history to collective myth, something that has been occurring for some time now. Much good has and will continue to come from this, but it is naive to believe that studying the horrors of history makes us less inclined to inflict horrors, just as it is fallacious to believe that trying to feel the pain of others keeps us from inflicting pain. Any “history” that is taught with such a single-minded mission is bound to become factually distorted and politically correct, as the desperate quest of many intellectuals to find ever-widening concentric circles of guilt for the Holocaust shows.

Learning about the Holocaust is important the same way that learning about slavery is important–not so much to absorb detailed facts as to venerate formative memories. As civilized people, we can, do and should carry the moral burdens of past shames as well as past glories. But this is not because we are all basically good and noble and will learn the proper lessons from a rigorous factual study of past excesses, errors and confusions. It is because it shows in stark relief what we need to be reminded of daily–that we are capable of great evil when we come to believe we can fashion a better world unrestricted by objective morality. The Society in this story would be well-advised to worry less about how many concentration camps can be named by harried shoppers in Florida and more about more about how many modern folk submit in awe to the Commandments.