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Article created by: Joachim West

I was recently shocked to read these words in The New York Times: “For seven decades, ‘never forget’ has been a rallying cry of the Holocaust remembrance movement.”

But a survey released Thursday, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, found that many adults lack basic knowledge of what happened; and this lack of knowledge is more pronounced among millennials, whom the survey defined as people ages 18 to 34.

Thirty-one percent of Americans and 41 percent of millennials believe that two million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust; the actual number is around six million. Forty-one percent of Americans and 66 percent of millennials cannot say what Auschwitz was. And 52 percent of Americans wrongly think Hitler came to power through force.

I first started working on this historical photo project several years ago, using contemporary reference images to colorize and restore pictures from the Holocaust. I did publish the colored pictures on my Facebook and my blog, but now I realize that that wasn’t nearly enough so I worked on the picture restoration a bit more, and I’m publishing them again here. It seems to me that black and white pictures colorized will help people to better empathize with the victims of the Holocaust and I hope that any artist that is interested in working with me to make more color pictures or even to improve the ones that I’ve colorized so far would please contact me. I am also interested in being contacted by anyone who could help me with this history picture project in general. This project is not for profit, but feel free to follow me on my Facebook, Instagram, Patreon or YouTube or check out my webpage.

More info: joachimwest.com | Instagram | patreon.com | youtube.com