We are in danger.

A recent study by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany has gained significant public attention, and rightfully so, for revealing Americans' lack of knowledge about the Holocaust.

The study, which consisted of 1,350 adult Americans, had some alarming results. It found that more than a third of all respondents and two-thirds of millennials could not say what Auschwitz was. Even more worrisome was the finding that just over 20 percent of polled millennials said they had not heard of or weren't sure whether or not they had heard of the Holocaust. 31 percent of all Americans said they believed that fewer than 2 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust — a significant understatement of the actual ghastly 6 million that were killed (without even accounting for the millions of non-Jews also killed in the genocide).

This danger has come in the form of what many Holocaust survivors long feared — that the world might somehow begin to forget one of the greatest atrocities that humanity has ever known. With America still the crucial player in international affairs, our slippage of memory could be deadly.

The truth is, if we forget the Holocaust, we give a much stronger platform to deniers (those people who adamantly argue against the existence of the Holocaust). Make no mistake, Holocaust deniers have already gained some footing.

In France, the runner-up in last year's presidential elections, Marine Le Pen, happened to have members of her party caught downplaying the Holocaust. In fact, Le Pen's father, Jean-Marie, who founded the Front National Party for which she ran, was expelled when (as recently as 2015) he referred to the Holocaust as a "detail of history."

And even in the American administration, we have not been immune to some whispers of denial. The White House was met with anger from the Jewish community in 2017 after failing to mention Jews or anti-Semitism in a statement released for Holocaust Remembrance Day (their response was to say they were being inclusive of all victims). Some members of Donald Trump's staff, most notably ex-White House chief strategist, Steve Bannon, have been accused of supporting the alt-right — a movement that has not shied away from accepting Holocaust deniers among its ranks.

There is truth in the old saying that "those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it." Something like the Holocaust seems so horrible — so downright evil — that it can be hard to imagine something like it ever happening. If we forget this terrible atrocity or mitigate its details, we will become less likely to believe something like this could ever happen again.

After all, people around the world likely weren't expecting mass genocide when Adolf Hitler first rose to power in Germany. We were totally unprepared for it, even though it certainly was not the first instance of genocide in human history (nor was it the last).

If we forget the Holocaust, we not only forget one of the worst evils ever to occur on this earth, but we also forget to keep our eyes open for the signs of something like this happening again.

Humans have a history of systemic persecution of people groups for reasons that are entirely arbitrary. We tend to repeat that pattern when we brush aside concerns with an air of complacency that says we are immune to such horrors. The German people who voted for and either supported or stood by as Hitler executed millions of Jews, along with others, were not a "different brand" of humans. They had a history of anti-Semitic fervor and were economically depressed. Hitler presented the Jewish people as the scapegoat that they were all too ready to accept.

They closed their eyes to the reality of just how evil humans can be, and in the process, became complicit in that evil. If we close our eyes to the reality of the Holocaust, we are at significant risk of the same.

As such, we can never forget it.