US Faces Rising Anti-Semitism But Youth Have Little Information About Holocaust - Veteran

The United States is facing rising anti-Semitism when the younger generations do not have enough information about the tragedy of the Holocaust, US World War II veteran Frank Cohn told Sputnik

WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 27th January, 2023) The United States is facing rising anti-Semitism when the younger generations do not have enough information about the tragedy of the Holocaust, US World War II veteran Frank Cohn told Sputnik.

January 27 marks the Holocaust Remembrance Day. On this day in 1945, the Soviet Red Army liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Auschwitz was the largest of the Nazi concentration camps where 1.4 million people died - 1.1 million of them Jews - and became one of the main symbols of the Holocaust.

"The rise of anti-Semitism is extremely troubling. I had not expected this to climb so sharply," Cohn said.

Cohn, who is Jewish, was born in 1925 in Germany. After the Nazis came to power in the 1930s, Cohn said he faced outright discrimination together with the other Jews in the country. In 1938, Cohn said he emigrated to the United States but returned to his homeland during the war as a US Army soldier.

For many years, anti-Semitism was "very much hidden" in the United States but now it has become a serious issue, Cohn said.

"You have it even in our Congress. This is certainly not healthy and needs to be watched because if it really gets out-of-hand it is frightening where it all will end up," he said.

Cohn noted that younger Americans do not know enough about the Holocaust, adding that this is a big failure of the US education system.

"There are exceptions, of course, where some teachers took the initiative, and there are some states that have prescribed lessons about it. I am always ready to respond when asked to lecture about it and have had many on-site, as well as Zoom opportunities to do so," he said.

Cohn pointed out that he could have written a book about the Holocaust given that 11 members of his extended family died during the war.

"I only knew two of them well enough to mourn them, one aunt and one uncle. The uncle had given me his gold pocket watch just before we were leaving and he told me that he was only lending it to me and that when he would come to the United States, I would have to return it to him.

Did he guess his fate back in 1938? He obviously wanted me to have it and he did not survive. This conversation still disturbs me to this day," Cohn said.

The veteran noted that the Holocaust became a tragedy not only for the Jews, but for the entire world, including Germany itself, in addition to being a tragedy for him personally.

"You know, for such a long time I failed to look at a personal impact, only that we managed to escape and that was it. In recent years, I started to think of all the close shaves that I had and that, in so many ways, I could have been killed," he said.

Cohn said that the Nazi German secret police, the Gestapo, was looking for his father, who had to sell the family store to emigrate to the United States in 1938. Only by purchasing a first-class ticket on a ship were Cohn and his mother able to avoid problems with US authorities upon and after arriving in the United States.

"We did not know this, but 1st Class passengers, upon arrival in New York, were invited to exit straight onto the dock instead of an Ellis Island processing center (which my mother worried about during the whole trip), where it might have been discovered that my father was already in-country and we were refugees, not visitors," he said.

Cohn said, however unlikely it may sound, he did not hear during the war about the horrific atrocities in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

"I had no information about the systematic plan to gas methodically and thus kill all the Jews of Germany and in the occupied territories. I learned of the real horror only after I returned to the States, after the war in 1946," he added.

The Holocaust, or the Shoah, is the genocide of European Jews by Nazi Germany and its satellite states from the late 1930s until 1945 that resulted in the death of around six million Jews.