Former Yorkshire Cricketer Azeem Rafiq has admitted he had never heard of Auschwitz until he met a Holocaust survivor this week.

Mr Rafiq, who admitted to making antisemitic comments on social media 10 years ago, made the startling admission to survivor Lily Ebert in a meeting organised by Jewish News. 

After hearing her story, he told the 97-year-old it was important to educate others about the Shoah “to remember, in order that events are not repeated.”

Mr Rafiq also met with Holocaust survivor Ruth Barnett MBE, who came to Britain from Berlin on a Kindertransport train in 1939 at the age of four, in a meeting organised by the JC earlier the same day.

She told him: “Humanity seems to need someone to blame and hate. Jews have always been used as the constant scapegoat. Blame the Jews. 

“It’s a convenient way to get rid of your own feelings, to dump them on the Jews. But when you actually meet some, it brings you up short.”

The former cricketer, who said part of the reason he made antisemitic comments was a lack of interaction with Jews, also revealed that he was unaware of Mumbai’s Jewish population until visiting Camden Jewish Museum. 

“It just shows you can know very little but have big opinions,” he added.

Mr Rafiq also took part in an ‘object handling’ session, during which he was able to hold a Nazi-era yellow star.

He has found himself at the centre of a racism scandal after exposing the institutional bigotry he faced at Yorkshire County Cricket Club and subsequently having his own social media posts in which he made antisemitic comments exposed.

A recent survey commissioned by The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany revealed “significant gaps” in the British public’s knowledge of the Holocaust.

Of those surveyed, 52 per cent did not know that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis and 22 per cent thought that as few as two million or less Jews were killed.

A significant 76 per cent of respondents did not know what the Kindertransport was.