A recent survey concluded that about 66% of millennials do not know what Auschwitz is, and 20% do not know or are unsure if they’ve learned about the Holocaust. Those results are disheartening. The Holocaust is an event that should stick in your memory, and the images a haunting reminder of the evil that can reside within human hearts.

In 2019, it will be the 74 years since the liberation of Auschwitz on a cold January morning. As the Soviet troops first walked into the camp, they were greeted with the prisoners that could not undertake the forced death march behind the German lines and the children that were set aside for human experiments. Those remaining showed the tattoo on their wrists, denoting how they had become a number instead of a human being.

That is not even to mention those killed in Eastern Europe by the Einsatzgruppen. Death squads made up of mostly ordinary men who followed behind the frontline troops for a single purpose, to kill as many Jews as they could by shooting men, women, and children at point blank range over a bit. There are videos and images that demonstrate and document this crime against humanity in great detail.

Why are these haunting images being lost in the education of young Americans? Isn’t the point of learning history to avoid repeating the past? However, the human condition means that the past will always repeat. There is no avoiding this fact, but it hasn’t even been a century yet since the Holocaust. With all the documentation, documentaries and survivors still around, the history of the Holocaust should not be fading so quickly.

What happens when a generation forgets the Holocaust?