I read the report about Holocaust deniers ‘tainting’ the Lake District Holocaust Project’s exhibition at Windermere Library (Gazette, February 21). I would like to know how people find it acceptable to say the Holocaust did not exist and that Auschwitz was a holiday camp?

If they actually took a good look around Auschwitz, they will see there was nothing that resembles a holiday to not only the Jews but also other minorities.

I recently visited Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau and in one of the gas chambers in Auschwitz I saw there were scratch marks on the walls from people trying desperately to escape when they were being gassed. The adjacent room had two ovens where the bodies were later incinerated. What part of this could possibly be classed as a ‘holiday camp’?!

Eight per cent of Britons believe that the Holocaust was exaggerated. I walked through a room where there were 80,000 pairs of shoes - a third of the total the Nazis has plundered from prisoners and stores in the camps complex called ‘Canada’.

Another room was just filled with luggage with individuals' names on. None of those names survived more than six months of the war once interred within the confines of Nazi persecution.

If people had actually visited these sites and witnessed this first-hand, maybe their perspective of the genocide would change. The only way for this to happen is education.

Education is key to fighting racism. Don’t kill the man, but the idea. Ideology is at the forefront of all racial bigotry and if that can be dealt with effectively with sufficient education and relevant information then we may win the fight - not only on anti-Semitism but racism as a collective.

‘Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’

Thomas Gardner

Windermere