Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 19, 1993 TAG: 9304190030
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: CHICAGO LENGTH: Medium
Those are among findings in a national survey to be officially released today by the American Jewish Committee. The survey attempts for the first time to systematically explore how much Americans know about the Holocaust and how they feel it is relevant to modern society.
By the number of well-publicized events across the nation this month, it seems that the German Nazis' systematic extermination of millions of Jews, Catholics, homosexuals and other targeted victims five decades ago is well-remembered.
But the American Jewish Committee study indicates that remembrance doesn't necessarily reach the general public. Findings among 992 adults and 506 high school students interviewed last fall show a "serious lack of knowledge" among "disturbingly large numbers of both adults and youth," said David Singer of the committee.
While many in the survey associated the Holocaust with death and tragedy, 38 percent of adults and 53 percent of high school students did not connect it with Jews, Nazis, Germany or Adolf Hitler.
Virtually the same percentages did not know that Auschwitz, Dachau and Treblinka were Nazi concentration camps where Jews were put to death.
The findings did not surprise Rabbi Byron Sherwin of Spertus College of Judaica, who has conducted Holocaust education classes for Illinois high school students.
Among those who come to Spertus in Chicago and the school's Holocaust museum, created in 1975 as the first such museum in the country, "many kids have not only had little exposure to the Holocaust, but little exposure to Jews," he said. "And it is hard for them to relate to life in the 1940s."
When Sherwin asked one student group what they thought life was like for Jews in the Nazi-occupied Warsaw Ghetto in Poland in 1940 and 1941, answers included: "No one had their own room." "No private bathrooms." "No air conditioning." "No snacks between meals."
None of the responses was intended as a wisecrack, Sherwin said. "Those conditions would be considered deprivations by most American teen-agers. When I told them what it was really like, it shocked them. They couldn't believe it."
Sherwin described Jewish "homes" as averaging seven people, but, he said, up to two dozen people lived "in one room about 20 feet square." Then he told them "the average temperature in Warsaw in January of 1940 was 13 below zero, and there was no heat. There were no toilets. People went to the bathroom outside."
He read to students a historical account of German-enforced food allocations for Jews in the ghetto of Lodz, Poland, in 1941: One cup of sugar, 10 cups of flour, a quarter-loaf of bread and 1 1/2 quarts of milk. The students asked if that was for one person per meal or per day. They were shocked when Sherwin told them that was per person per month.
by CNB