Last week, the rather striking results of a survey were published, which found that 41% of Americans and 66% of American millennials do not know what Auschwitz is. On the day the story came out, this particular American was feeling especially au fait with the Holocaust because I was visiting Auschwitz with my father. (Should any of you be looking for an effective if intense parent-child bonding trip, allow me to recommend an excursion to Auschwitz.) My grandmother escaped to America before the war, but the rest of her family were not so lucky. Most of her cousins were killed by the Nazis and her older brother, Jacques, was murdered in the camp in 1942, three months after he arrived there by train. His younger brother, Alex, managed to escape and walked to safety by following the tracks in the opposite direction. He died in 1999.

Our trip coincided with the March of the Living, a little covered annual event in which Jews from all around the world march between Auschwitz and Birkenau as part of Holocaust Memorial Day. Our hotel was filled with Israeli teenagers and elderly Americans; there were even Israeli flags outside Auschwitz, a sight that would have made my great-uncle Alex cry: the camp that killed his brother, in the country where his family were terrorised by pogroms for decades, now covered in the insignia of the Jewish homeland, a place he dreamed of as a Polish child.

So, after such an immersive day at the camps, that survey about the widespread ignorance of the Holocaust should have felt shocking. And in some ways it did. Yes, the Holocaust happened almost 80 years ago, but the most mainstream of movies, from Indiana Jones to Inglourious Basterds, have long used Nazis as a plot device, and there is, I believe, something called the internet. So if people don’t know about the Holocaust, it’s because they don’t really care. And in this regard, the survey felt utterly unsurprising, because we swim in self-serving ignorance about antisemitism these days.

The day I landed in Poland I saw a headline on my phone: “Ken Loach says Labour MPs who joined antisemitism protest should be ‘kicked out of Labour’,” it said, referring to the recent rally in Westminster at which hundreds of Jews protested against Jeremy Corbyn’s attitude towards antisemitism. Loach later said the reported quotes “do not fairly reflect what I said”. Yet he gave a TV interview last year in which, when asked about Jewish MP Ruth Smeeth’s claim that she had “really come up against antisemitism”, Loach dismissed such allegations as merely “mischief”. “The aim is to destabilise Jeremy’s leadership,” Loach said, apparently unaware that suggesting Jews make allegations about antisemitism for their political or personal benefit is, in fact, one of the oldest antisemitic tropes there is.

This month, local Labour party members heckled MP Thangam Debbonaire at a meeting in Bristol for having attended the Westminster rally. At the same meeting, a motion was proposed that said any suggestion of antisemitism within the Labour party is absurd. After all, it implied, not a tiny bit contradictorily, being suspicious of Jews is a logical emotion: “When people see inequality, ecological disaster and war alongside unprecedented wealth in the private hands of a few, it is reasonable they seek out explanations,” the motion read. Yes, why are all Jews wealthy war-mongerers?

It was odd coming to Poland just months after President Duda signed a law making it illegal to suggest the country was in any way complicit with the Holocaust, despite its long history of antisemitism and survivors’ testimonies about Poles handing Jews over to the Nazis. At Auschwitz, the signs stress German responsibility and Polish victimhood. There is even a gift shop, in case a trip to Auschwitz should make you desirous of buying some “I heart Poland” merchandise. My father and I then visited his mother’s home town, 18km away. Around the corner from the house in which she grew up was fresh graffiti: “Anty Jude.” Not even having Auschwitz down the road made that person rethink their antisemitism. In Germany, there are reports of rising antisemitic attacks, with a rap album featuring larky references to the Holocaust winning a prize last weekend. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán, the prime minister, has demonised George Soros, a Jew, to his political advantage.

I’ve heard many complaints about the focus on antisemitism on the left when there’s so much on the right. But it’s precisely because of the latter that the former is so shocking, as it feels as if you are abandoned by both sides. There were nine million Jews in Europe before the war, three million afterwards and only one million today, yet Jews are the victims who are never considered victimmy enough. Both the right and the left deflect – it was only Germany, it is only Israel – and then insinuate that Jews bring it on themselves. Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it, the saying goes. But you don’t even have to forget it – you just don’t have to care about it.

• This article was amended on 25 April 2018 to correct the current number of Jews in Europe from six million to one million.

