We have spoken about this before, yet the situation keeps getting worse. Far too many people, including social media algorithms and those supervising the content, ignore or fail to recognize coded language and phrases connected to Holocaust denial. These messages are very often not subtle and can be easily identified by anyone who pays attention.

For example, the number 271k is now widely used by Holocaust deniers claiming that this was the “real” number of Jewish victims. It is nowhere near the historical truth, but the way it is used is as if to say it was “only” 271,000, so it is not as bad as we say it was. Their goal as we see it, is to normalize the idea that Jewish suffering was exaggerated and that the extermination of our people does not matter.

Another horrific trend is the mocking attempt to “calculate” the murder of Jews by counting gas chamber capacity and claiming the number of ovens could not have killed so many people. On social media, this is often referenced in a cruel metaphor comparing Jews to “brownies in the oven”. It is enough to read the comments under any post related to the Holocaust to see how widespread and shameless this denial has become.

Two weeks ago, we returned from a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. We walked the same grounds where over one million Jews, along with many non-Jews, were murdered. On that same day, Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, announced that after seven decades of research, they have now been able to identify the names of five million Jewish victims. We heard the news while we were at the concentration camp and it was, for all of us, a very emotional moment.

And yet even after 80 years, the destruction of Jewish life was so vast that the names of more than one million victims may never be known. This is the scale of the annihilation the Jewish communities across Europe endured.

The realization that so many might never have their names read or prayed for is something that we all feel very sad about. We have to confront denial every single time we see it, we owe it to those whose names we know and to the more than one million whose names may never be recovered.