Rachel Maruskanic's great-grandfather was just another man in a photo on the family mantelpiece until she started learning more about the history of the Second World War.
Studying the Holocaust in history classes at Covenant Christian School sparked her own inquiries into the experience of Philip Kleine.
The dutch resistance fighter would blow up train lines and other assets to stymie the Nazis in Holland, at great personal risk.
"My mother told me once it sort of came down to a point where he was on his knees with a German who was holding a gun to the back of his head and they were about to shoot him," Miss Maruskanic said.
"But thankfully, because of the cold the gun misfired, and he was able to escape."
After the war, her great-grandfather found Holland to be uninhabitable and in a state of disarray. So with no English language skills, no family and no money, he came to Australia to start a new life.
He and other migrants were met with disdain from the Australians who dismissed him as German. Despite this he went on to become a fine instrument maker at the Australian National University.
While Miss Maruskanic is well aware of the circumstances around the Holocaust and Australia's connections to the horrors of this time period, the same cannot be said for many Australians.
A representative survey commissioned by the Gandel Foundation and conducted by Deakin University researchers found almost a quarter (24 per cent) of the population aged 18 years or older had little to no knowledge of the Holocaust with that portion rising to 30 per cent among millennials.
It found that men, baby boomers and people who read a non-fiction book about the Holocaust were twice as likely to have excellent Holocaust knowledge. Those who had visited a Holocaust centre or museum were 50 per cent more likely to have excellent knowledge than those who haven't.
Deakin University genocide studies scholar Dr Donna-Lee Frieze said she wasn't surprised about the outcome of the survey after teaching an undergraduate course on the Holocaust for 15 years.
Her biggest takeaway from the survey was that more than 70 per cent of respondents knew nothing about Australia's own connections to the Holocaust.
"One of the important occurrences that happened in Australia and that time was that not only were benevolent societies throughout Australia protesting against what was happening to Jews in Germany, but Aboriginal organisations were also protesting as well. So there's certainly a connection," Dr Frieze said.
Covenant Christian School director of curriculum and learning Jocelyn James said the Holocaust was covered by one dot point in the year 10 history curriculum and some units based on novels in the English curriculum.
"If you're running out of time during your World War II units, you might not really get to it, and you might not cover it very well, especially if a teacher feels underprepared to teaching such sensitive material," Mrs James said.
Amid the rise of the neo-Nazi movement, Miss Maruskanic said it was important for people today to understand where symbols and ideas come from.
"When you study history, it's not really a classroom subject that you take to graduate. It's about creating the empathetic connection and bearing witness to what has been and I think that a lot of that is very threatened," she said.
"The quality and value of history is at stake when people don't know about it, and they're not able to gain understanding and learning from it."
