THE shocking results of a recent survey that revealed 5 per cent of UK adults do not believe the Holocaust took place, and one in 12 believes its scale has been exaggerated, made me determined to do what I can to educate people about these most horrendous events in world history.

Are these results simply a side effect of the extreme right trying to re-establish itself; part of the deliberate confusion from some that portrays any criticism of modern day Israel and its treatment of Palestinians as anti-semitism; or just another failure of Mr Gove’s school history syllabus being more concerned with British kings and queens than with real history?

In one sense I am simply trying to catch up with my granddaughter Lizzie who, while in the sixth form, won a UN Holocaust essay competition, visited Auschwitz and became a Holocaust ambassador talking to many other young people lest they forget the horrors of this darkest period of world history.

In the last few weeks I have written in these pages about how the first nazi concentration camps and gas chambers were used for the disabled and how huge German capitalist companies — many of them still major brand names today — used the camps as a source of slave labour.

Here is another interesting story from those Holocaust camps and one with a cast of some unexpected characters. I was reminded of this by news of a new play, The Project, by my old mate Ian Buckley. Ian is a communist playwright and this, his latest effort, is set in a nazi camp in Holland at the time of the Holocaust. The play opens in London in March.

When the nazis invaded the Netherlands early in May of 1940 one of their first actions was to start the total annihilation of Dutch Jews. For the vast number who went to their death as part of the obscene final solution, their final steps on Dutch soil were along what they called the Boulevard of Misery — the central street of the Westerbork transit camp that led to the death camp trains.

Even behind prison camp walls the nazis discovered that it was often impossible to totally snuff out the human spirit. Nowhere was this better demonstrated than at Westerbork.

One of the most unique facets of life in Westerbork was the remarkable cultural cabaret scene that developed there actually in the camp.

Cabaret in the Weimar Republic years usually conjures up images of anti-establishment political satire, sexual liberation and much more. As Hitler and his nazis took to the streets Chaplinesque characters with ludicrous comb-overs and toothbrush moustaches pranced across the cabaret stages. Bertolt Brecht, starting his performing career in Karl Valentin’s political cabaret in the late 1920s, was part of this wave.

This challenging questioning cabaret attacked sexual repression, of all sorts. Songs like If my Best Girlfriend (Marlene Dietrich & Margo Lion, 1928) became the anthem for lesbians in the early ’30s. Sexual freedom, gay or heterosexual, was encouraged. The aim was to liberate people, and to push against stifling bourgeois respectability.

It’s not difficult to understand why the nazis targeted it as soon as they assumed control of the levers of power. Many of these cabarets were forced to close or moderate their satire and soften their political bite. By the end of the 1930s it was finished off — its performers too frightened to perform, its venues refused licences.

But there was another, much more respectful German cabaret movement. This mainstream cabaret was very different and very popular amongst large swathes of respectable sectors of German society, people who wanted to be taken out of their everyday lives, titillated, amused, moved but certainly not made to think too much about where their society was heading.

It played in large well-known venues and its top performers were known throughout Europe. Cabaret songster Willy Rosen who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944 summed it up as: “Two comedians, one fat, one skinny. Five pounds of sex appeal, a couple of catchy tunes. Some old jokes and lots of new ones. Must look unrehearsed so needs lots of rehearsing — and above all no politics.”

Willy Rosen was just one of the cabaret artistes who found himself on one of the strangest cabaret stages in all of Europe — inside the camp at Westerbork and one of the characters who appears in Ian Buckley’s new play.

Albert Konrad Gemmeker was appointed camp commander in October 1942. Under the jurisdiction of the SS the camp became a transit camp from which every week dozens of cattle cars left the camp for the three-day trip to the death camps of Poland.

Obersturmfuhrer Gemmeker had a cunning and cynical plan. He could avoid panic and try to take prisoners’ minds off those death camp trains, by organising musical concerts, plays and even cabarets within his camp. Gemmeker had always loved cabaret and he knew he had many stars like Willy Rosen, Max Ehrlich, Esther Phillipse and Camilla Spira among his camp inmates.

Under Gemmeker, Westerbork amazingly became a site of world-class cabaret and that is the amazing scenario dealt with in Ian’s new play The Project.

While much of this theatrical activity at Westerborg drew on pre-existing material, the leaders of the camp cabaret, Max Ehrlich, Willy Rosen and Erich Ziegler composed six original revues during their less than two-year stay in the camp. The SS censored the productions: all songs and texts had to be approved.

Being part of this cabaret saved these great performers for a time but in the end they, like 97,000 other Dutch Jews, boarded the transport which would lead them to the killing camps. Only one of these great artists — Erich Ziegler the songwriter — survived to die in 2004.

On April 12 1945, Canadian troops liberated Westerbork camp. There were only 876 prisoners there, and not a trace of the jazz, the high-kicking girls or the raucous jokes that had filled the reception hall months earlier.

Ian Buckley brings the amazing atmosphere of Westerborg alive in his play The Project. Characters loosely based on real cabaret artists Willy Rosen, Max Ehrlich, Esther Phillipse and Camilla Spira and Camp Commandant Obersturmfuhrer Gemmeker take us back nearly 80 years, revealing a fascinating aspect of the horrific story of the Holocaust.

The Project runs from March 5 to 23 at The White Bear, 138 Kennington Park Road, SE11 4DJ. Tickets www.whitebeartheatre.co.uk