A personal memorial at the Birkenau death camp
World leaders gather this week to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Although the Nazis operated many deaths camps throughout Europe, Auschwitz was the largest and it has come to symbolize the horror of the regime’s atrocities in its purest form. Six millions Jews were murdered by the Nazis in World War II -- more than one million of them in Auschwitz alone. Millions of non-Jews perished alongside them -- there and in other death camps -- as part of a systematic liquidation campaign unequalled, in planning and scale, in recorded history. This is known as the Holocaust. If another Holocaust is to be avoided, historians warn, the lesson of what happened at Auschwitz and other death camps must be taught to future generations. But what do today’s schoolchildren know about the events of 60 years ago?
