How does the past affect present-day behavior? Our colloquial understanding of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany has evolved from the post-war years. Activist groups, elites, and everyday people use the Holocaust and/or Nazi Germany as a simile to compare and contextualize contemporary events and past atrocities (Subotić 2019). In Germany, the United States, and France, the yellow star and Holocaust imagery have been used in discussions of COVID-19 protocols, access to abortion, and migration. I argue that collective memory is a key part of the causal system. Collective memory is a shared understanding of the past maintained in the present. It gives meaning to places, events, and monuments, but it also evolves and changes over time to reflect the circumstances of that period. I argue that to understand the effects of collective memory, we must first examine how people understand the events in question. Recent scholarship has examined the impact of the Holocaust on voting behavior and attitudes in Germany and Poland. I extend this scholarship by examining the impact of the Holocaust on French political behavior during the 1965 and 2002 French presidential elections. I use a novel dataset of deportations of Jews in France to measure local-level exposure to the Holocaust. To assess the sensitivity of these results, I use data from Cage et al (2021) on local-level Vichy collaboration. I find that, on average, communes that had a deportation increased far-right vote share in the 1965 election. To examine how people understand the Holocaust, I use GloVe embeddings trained on Wikipedia. I find that concentration camps are central to our understanding of the Holocaust, while Nazi is a mnemonic shortcut for a variety of wartime experiences. In addition, I find that sites associated with the 'Holocaust by bullets' and Aktion Reinhard are peripheral to our understanding of the Holocaust. Using embedding regressions, I find that the diversity of use of Holocaust related words increases during major political events, but this surge is ultimately short-lived.