PHILADELPIHA (KYW Newsradio) -- A lot of people, including teachers, don't have a basic knowledge of what happened during the Holocaust, says Eszter Kutas, executive director of the Philadelphia Holocaust Remembrance Foundation.
"It's probably true that the Jewish community hasn't forgotten, but it seems like the world has -- or has removed too far from it that they don't have emotional connections to this piece of history."
Wednesday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, this year marking the 76th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.
Kutas says it's crucial to understand what led to the genocide of 6 million Jews and 11 million others.
"The Holocaust did not start with concentration camps. That's how it ended," she said.
"We can say that the Holocaust was probably the 20th century's largest moral failure. So, the question of 'How did this happen while everybody was watching?' is the topic that needs the biggest exploration."
Part of the answer, she says is the same thing that leads to radicalization today: lies.
Related
"If you hear something being repeated over and over again as a fact, you are more inclined to believe it."
Kutas says she sees similarities between America today and 1930s Europe.
"That there was massive efforts back then to really misstate facts, to portray certain people or certain groups of people as the enemy."
For this reason, she says, she is particularly concerned about the Anti-Defamation League's 2019 audit, the most recent data available, which shows anti-Semitic incidents more than doubling in the last five years.
"And that is not unrelated, for sure, to our political environment," she said.
"We also know that we have one of the highest number of hate groups registered by the Southern Poverty Law Center today. There are over 940 active hate groups. So you put these data points together and then you understand why do you see anti-Semitic and racist attacks on minority communities."