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Nearly half of young Americans can’t name a single Holocaust concentration or death camp
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2026
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Well, now I'm embarrassed. I'm from Europe and I can only name one... Other Europeans who can just list these camps?? Is it common knowledge for non-americans?
Honestly I think it pretty weird considering my own (US) education taught us about the camps. Auschwitz was a particular focus for whatever reason but we also learned Mauthausen and others. To be fair I've also been to Auschwitz and our elementary school had an assembly where survivors talked to us.
It was the largest and most streamlined of murder mills the NAZIs built. It also had a notorious sign "Arbeit Macht Frei" over it's entrance gate (which was on many of the mill gates, honestly) which means "work makes you free." A particular point of of the darkest irony considering the mills literally forced people to work with such cruelty that their only freedom from the abuse and torture was death.
NGL, it could be easier to get us back to that point and echo those horrors now, more than it's been since the end of the Second World War.. Generational amnesia - what with the liberating soldiers and victims of the camps themselves now mostly dead - being what it is.
Our great-grandparents saw and survived some hella fucked up shit.
My grandparents generation. Grandpa and grandma survived Churchill's famines in India, the independence and separation from Pakistan, and various other events.
The problem is the fucked up shit never stopped.
So very, very true.
I've read Anne Frank's Diary, I've been to the Museum Of The Second World War in Gdansk, visited similar museums in Germany, been to several historical WW2 sites in Germany, so I have definitely read and heard about other camps. But I have probably never thought much about the names of the camps.
If I would have time to think, I would be able to recall 2-3 of them. They are still a part of the games/movies/etc. So nothing what you can only stumble upon some dusty boring schoolbook.