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It was something of a wake-up call for many in Russia. In December 2011, a pair of pretty, articulate, 20-year-old twins from Vladimir Oblast were asked on a television game show, “What is the Holocaust?” The two consulted together for a few awkward moments. One of them admitted frankly that the term “says nothing to them.” Finally, with time running short, Yevgenia Karatygina turns to the camera and says, “We think that the Holocaust is wallpaper paste.”
Video of the shocking scene was viewed hundreds of thousands of times online, and it provoked a serious discussion about how the Holocaust is taught in the schools of the country whose troops (along with those of other former Soviet republics) liberated the Nazis’ largest concentration and death camp at Auschwitz in Poland.
The sisters — Yevgenia and Ksenia — appeared on WNN news partner RFE/RL’s Russian Service in March 2012 with Holocaust Fund Chairwoman Alla Gerber. At the time, Yevgenia explained that they were taught a bit about the Holocaust in their school but that the sisters were more interested in other things.
“To be honest, such subjects in school were pretty dull. Not because the teacher was bad — he knew what he was talking about. But I didn’t want to devote my life to that — I wasn’t planning to study at some institute connected with history,” Yevgenia said. “So during those lessons I was doing my own thing. I was writing poems. Now we are writing music — we are into music.”
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