Auschwitz

Despite Holocaust education being taught in schools across the UK, only 37% of children knew that the Holocaust claimed the lives of six million Jews and 25% do not know what Auschwitz was with some even thinking it was a beer.

The nationwide survey of 1200 secondary school children was undertaken by film company Miramax and the London Jewish Cultural Centre to mark the release of Holocaust film The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas has shown more work is needed in educating children of the impact of the Holocaust.

The survey also found that 20% of children thought the Final Solution, the Nazi effort to destroy all Jewish life, was peace talks to end the war.

The film about a German boy’s friendship with a Jewish child held in a concentration camp is to be used by charity Film Education to help increase children's knowledge of what happened in Nazi Germany.

"There is an assumption that British children understand what happened; but thousands clearly don’t," said Stephanie Rose, director of the Holocaust and Anti-racism Education Department of the London Jewish Cultural Centre. "After hearing survivors speak in their schools, our experience has been that many young people, despite having studied the Holocaust, respond with shock and surprise as if hearing such information for the first time."