"Remember, we must never forget," the French president, Emmanuel Macron, urged this Thursday.
Next to him were the main world leaders, including US Vice President Mike Pence and Russian President Vladimir Putin. His host in Jerusalem was the Israeli president, Reuven Rivlin, who has insisted: " It is a historic meeting , not only for Israel and the Jewish people, but for all mankind."
But there were also more humble and perhaps more important people in the meeting, such as Yona Amit, 81, who was hidden from the Nazis as a child, but lost several relatives in the Holocaust, including a cousin.
"We exchanged shoes when we played," Amit explained. Then his cousin was arrested: "They were all sent directly to Auschwitz," he tells about his relatives, "and among them my cousin, with my shoes, sent to the gas chambers."
“My shoes were kept among a mountain of shoes in Auschwitz. They were there. And I'm still here, ”he explained.
The meeting of world leaders, in which a hundred survivors participated, served to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the liberation by Allied troops during World War II of this concentration camp in Nazi Germany. There died more than a million people, mostly Jews.
However, less than half of Americans know how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust , according to a survey by the Pew Research Center published on the occasion of this commemoration.
Only 45% of respondents (11,000 people) knew that there were six million people, mostly Jews but also members of other communities (homosexuals, gypsies, etc.) whom the Nazis considered inferior.
"This raises an important question: Are those who underestimated the death toll are simply uninformed, or are Holocaust deniers , people with an anti-Semitic perspective who think that the Holocaust was invented or exaggerated by the Jews?" Asks the center research.
The president of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Getty Images
"While the survey cannot answer the question directly, the data suggests that few respondents express negative feelings against Jews," the study explains.
"On a thermometer of feelings, " he adds, "nine out of ten non-Jewish respondents who underestimate the death toll of the Holocaust express neutral or warm feelings toward the Jews," he concludes, a result similar to those who overestimated the death toll. or did not know or wanted to respond.
According to the survey, eight out of ten people describe the Holocaust as an attempt to annihilate Jews or relate it to concentration camps, Adolf Hitler or the Nazis. Seven out of ten know what happened between 1930 and 1950, and about two-thirds know that the Nazis created ghettos in cities and towns where they forced people of Jewish origin to live.
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