Monday will be Holocaust Remembrance Day. Since words fail me, 75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, I’ll add up some numbers. In no particular order.

40% – of German students under age 14 do not know that Auschwitz was a death camp

34% – of Germans between the ages of 18 and 34 say they know little about the Holocaust.

57% – of all French respondents and 69% of Millennials and Gen Z do not know that six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. ( Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany survey results.)

43% – of Americans know that Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany through a democratic political process. (More than half don’t, in other words.) And a similar share (45%) know that approximately 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Nearly three-in-ten Americans say they are not sure how many Jews died during the Holocaust, while one-in-ten overestimate the death toll, and 15% say that 3 million or fewer Jews were killed. Numbers sourced from the study below.

What Americans Know About the Holocaust

 1,879 – attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions across the country in 2018, including the Pittsburgh murders. The numbers have gone up since 2018.

1 – German president allowed to give a memorial speech this year at Yad Vashem

1 – Pope condems the barbaric resurgence of anti-Semitism

1 – White House gives media credentials again to a website that called impeachment a Jew Coup.

1– Prime Minister who exploits the Holocaust for political and personal gain.

700 – scholars and students protest the firing of the entire library stand at the Yiddish Institute YIVO.

YIVO lays off its librarians

1 – Jewish museum in Portland where you can learn so much more: http://www.ojmche.org

Photographs today from an old series of mine The Defiance in their Faces with themes around the fascistic rule of Germany.

In 1944, Dmitri Shostakovich completed his Piano Trio No 2, in memory of his close friend and mentor Ivan Sollertinsky. The third movement’s solemn structure is contrasted by Jewish themes in the fourth movement. News of the death camps had been reaching Moscow by this point, and the composer was also completing the score of Rothschild’s Violin, a work written by his pupil Veniamin Fleyshman, who had been killed in the siege of Leningrad in 1941. (Holocaust music.ort.org)