A new poll shows that a nearly a third of New Zealanders know little or nothing about the Holocaust and less than half know that six million Jews were killed by the Nazis. Mark Jennings reports.
Next year will be the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz but what happened there and in other Nazi death camps is drifting from our consciousness.
Nearly a million Jews were killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Poles, Gypsies and Russian prisoners of war made up another 100,000.
Auschwitz was the most efficient killing machine but Treblinka and Belzec, two more death camps in Poland, were close behind with a combined 1.4 million victims.
There are thousands of survivors still alive today, including a small number in New Zealand, but our knowledge of the Holocaust is fading or increasingly, non-existent.
In a poll of 1000 New Zealanders taken last month, 27 percent said they knew little about the Holocaust, 28 percent said they were unsure about how much they knew and 2 percent admitted to knowing nothing.
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