“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

A new nationwide survey shows a “worrying lack of basic Holocaust knowledge” among adults under 40, including over 1 in 10 respondents who did not recall ever having heard the word “Holocaust” before.

I’ve studied history. It’s one of my favorite subjects. I still study it. I’ve done an intense dive into World War 2, the history of Nazi Germany, how the center of a thousand-year history of European culture could have descended so rapidly to barbarism, how it could carry out mass genocide as a national industry… But all that study didn’t prepare me for my visit to Auschwitz a few years ago. As I stood in the remaining gas chamber, I could feel the weight of all that death that a thousand books and documentaries couldn’t make me feel.

And now I’m watching a society descend in the same ways to the same kind of barbarism, with all the same mindsets that made Nazi Germany possible. And a streak of anti-intellectualism, a demonization of learning and study, is bearing its fruit once again.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”