Why We Put a Holocaust Cattle Car in the Yard

MORE THAN A REMINDER. Sometimes it takes seeing an actual object to experience the revulsion that the memory of the Holocaust should.

BY JACOB M. MILLER

The singsong hum of prayers was dominated by one person’s voice — a voice carrying a Yiddish accent of a bygone era, a voice steeped in the Old World Jewish communities known as shtetls, a voice that exuded the type of confidence only found among the old and wise.

That man’s name was Morton Friedman, and he had been proudly reciting those prayers for decades, even after he saw his community nearly entirely wiped off the map of Europe during the Holocaust.

I was lucky because I got to know him between prayer services a decade ago.

“Yankel,” he would say, using the Yiddish version of my name, “how are you doing today?” In the conversations that followed, he would share stories about surviving the concentration camps and seeking refuge aboard the S.S. Exodus along with thousands of other Jewish Holocaust survivors.

But as survivors of the Holocaust grow older and die, fewer and fewer people have the opportunity to learn about its atrocities firsthand. Because of this, public knowledge about the Holocaust is in serious jeopardy. Less than half of respondents in one recent survey of Americans knew how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust, or that Adolf Hitler came to power through a democratic process.

Holocaust denial is also on the rise: An estimated 19 percent of Twitter content on the topic distorts the truth or denies the events outright. In the Netherlands — the former home of Anne Frank, whose diary chronicles her persecution during the Holocaust — a recent survey found that 23 percent of adults under age 40 believe the Holocaust is a myth or exaggerated.

Perhaps as a result of these distorted retellings of history, antisemitic incidents in the U.S. are surging. Last month, the FBI report-

OP-ED