Three out of every 10 respondents in a new poll failed to identify that Jews were the primary victims of the Holocaust.
The Environics survey of 2,021 Canadians was conducted within the last month and results were released Monday—three days before the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
[…] When participants were shown a list of groups, nearly 30 per cent chose Poles, French, British and Russians as the principal victims of the Holocaust—or else they couldn’t or refused to identify any group at all.
Only 40 per cent of respondents correctly indicated that more than six million Jews died during the Second World War.
Responses appeared to vary with education: 57 per cent of those with less than high school education chose Jews; compared with 72 per cent among university graduates.
Paul Gowans, who teaches history at the South Carleton High School in Ottawa, said that he was never taught about the Holocaust during his student years.
He said after discovering the little information on the subject that appeared in Canadian text books, he vowed that if he became a teacher his students would be made aware of what happened—and how Canada stood by when it could have saved thousands of lives.
He highlighted to his students Monday that then Prime Minister Mackenzie King refused to allow 4,000 Jewish school children to come to Canada just prior to Hitler’s march into France.
All of those children became Holocaust victims.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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