Two-thirds of American millennials surveyed in a recent poll cannot identify what Auschwitz is, according to a study released on Holocaust Remembrance Day - the day commemorating the Warsaw Uprising.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center says part of it is because of the passage of time.
"The Greatest Generation, the perpetrators of the Holocaust, those few survivors, the bystanders, that's a generation that is a generation that is inexorably leaving history's stage."
And it's harder to reach the young now with social media dominating their attention.
"In general, as we all know, you create your own reality on social media and you can filter out or just simply not pay attention to things that, quote, unquote don't interest you, make you feel badly."
Plus, he says basic history is not covered in many schools.
"When you come through our museum, in our pre-presentation, we actually start with, 'Here's a map of Europe; this is what happened in the twentieth century. Kids are not prepared. Geography, world history, it's pretty abysmal."
He says that to have an impact, the telling of the story of the Holocaust has to be told in a way that kids can relate to.
"You have to put a human face on these events. Otherwise, the kids are just going to glaze over and say, 'How much of this do I have to memorize to in order to pass the test?'
(KABC)