My first encounter was Auschwitz-Birkenau. Standing there, I realized how easily words like history and memory fail. The train tracks ran straight into the Nazi extermination camp and then simply stopped. Our guide said there was nowhere else to go. In New York City, trains mean movement: getting home, staying connected, continuing life. At Auschwitz, they carried people into death.

What stayed with me wasn’t just the scale of the violence but how deliberate it all was. About 80% of the people brought there were murdered within days, many immediately. The system was designed not only to kill, but to make killing efficient. That realization didn’t feel distant. It felt uncomfortably human.

As the trip continued, I began noticing how remembrance shows up — and how often it doesn’t. At the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, I learned about a synagogue that had been destroyed during the Holocaust, rebuilt years later and repurposed as a toy store. That decision didn’t sit right with me. Synagogues are not just buildings; they are spaces of identity and connection. It raised a question I couldn’t shake: When historical spaces are restored, who decides how they are remembered — and what responsibility comes with that decision?

Later, in Warsaw, we visited what remains of the Jewish Ghetto and saw a mural honoring six members of the Jewish resistance who died after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Their bravery gave hope to people who had almost none. Yet the mural honoring them wasn’t created until 2022 — nearly eighty years after their deaths. That delay troubled me. Remembrance shouldn’t have to wait decades to feel necessary.

As a Hispanic student who is not Jewish, this trip reshaped how I understand the Holocaust and its relevance today. I learned that antisemitism didn’t suddenly appear in the 1940s — it had deep roots, and difference was used as an excuse to exclude and dehumanize long before genocide followed. That pattern is not just “history.” It’s a warning.

People look different, worship differently, live differently. That diversity should never justify violence. And yet history shows how easily hatred grows when difference is normalized as a threat and memory is treated as optional.

This trip forced me to confront uncomfortable questions: Why did recognition take so long? Why are some stories remembered immediately while others fade? And what happens when remembrance becomes symbolic instead of intentional?

Poland has made important efforts to memorialize the Holocaust, and those efforts matter. But remembrance cannot stop at monuments. It must protect meaning, preserve truth and demand honesty. Otherwise, memory risks becoming something we admire instead of something that changes us.

This experience made me realize that remembrance is not passive. It requires participation — especially from those of us who did not inherit this history personally. If remembering becomes optional, history becomes fragile. But if remembrance is active, it becomes a responsibility.

I carry that responsibility with me now. And if I have the opportunity to share even a small part of what I learned, I will. Because remembrance isn’t just about never forgetting. It’s about never looking away.

Logan Greene, a teacher in Hoover City Schools had his students read, a memoir of a Holocaust survivor. He heard there was an opportunity for the author to come speak to students. But it would require them to raise $1,000 in around two weeks.

“I told the kids there’s no way we can do it,” he said.

But his students reacted enthusiastically. Five of them stood outside of basketball games for two weeks and raised over $2,000.

Greene said that effort by his students showed him the interest in the subject, and the power it has. He started looking for ways to “grow my own practice.”

“That showed me kind of the power of Holocaust education in schools and that led me to start researching how could I grow my own practice,” he said. “How could I get better? And I discovered the Birmingham Holocaust Education Center and started doing workshops and attending the teacher cadres and then it all snowballed from there.”

Alabama, like most states, does not mandate the teaching of the Holocaust. The state’s social studies standards, due to be revised in the next few years, could potentially include a Holocaust component in the future. 

But even without a mandate, there is enormous interest from schools in the subject. The Holocaust Education Center, which recently established a home in Birmingham’s Temple Emanu-El, instructs teachers on how to teach the Holocaust to students in pedagogically sound ways. Gov. Kay Ivey went to the dedication ceremony on May 22.

“I think students want to learn about every hard history, because they like controversies and because I think that they want to make the world a better place,” said Zoe Weil, director of educator engagement at the Holocaust Education Center.

‘Sometimes there’s just not an answer’

Dan Puckett, chair of the Alabama Holocaust Commission, said that learning about the Holocaust is essential for students.

“I think it gives us a much better understanding of who we are,” he said. “Human rights, you know, understanding the value of human rights, the value of civic engagement, I mean, all of that’s necessary for a civil society. Everything that happened in the Holocaust, that we’re looking at, was actually a result of state-sponsored actions and none of it was illegal. It was sponsored by the German government, the Nazi government.”

Ann Mollengarden, an applied researcher at the center, said they do not prescribe a specific curriculum for teachers on the Holocaust, but they do make pedagogical recommendations. Some teachers may only have two or three days to address the subject.

One of the things the center emphasizes is that there are no simple answers when it comes to the Holocaust. 

Mollengarden said teachers need to explain the history and discuss motivations. Every group, she said, had their own reasons for making the decisions they did. 

Teachers should be prepared to be unable to answer the students’ questions, she said.

“A teacher always wants to be able to give an answer to a student and sometimes there’s just not an answer,” she said.

The center also recommends teaching history from different perspectives: perpetrators, victims and bystanders.

“This is not just A-to-B-to-C-to-D history,” she said.

Gretchen Skidmore, director of education initiatives at the United States Holocaust Museum, said that the Holocaust became more of a part of public school education in the 1970s, when more survivors began speaking about their experience. She also cited the influence of “Holocaust,” a 1978 NBC miniseries credited . 

Since then, she said that Holocaust education has evolved from the facts of the Holocaust to looking at the reasons behind it.

“We want people to not only know what happened, but how and why it happened and that is a major change,” she said.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has resources for educators, including a

Greene said that the center is constantly changing their practice, and he’s constantly updating his pedagogy alongside them.

“People sit here and they think history is just history and it’s there,” he said. “But it’s really quite the opposite. We’re always adjusting our practice and we’re always finding new ways to really increase our ability to educate not only students but the public about the Holocaust.”

When asked about lesson plans for what a student might learn, Greene pointed to the organization , where he is interning this summer, as one he would use.

Their sample lesson plan for studying the Holocaust involves connecting themes to the present day and learning about Jewish life before the war. It includes videos of a survivor and a liberator, and a map of where Jewish people lived prior to deportation.

Centering survivors

Greene said that ten years ago, he would have been far more likely to compare the Holocaust to other events in history. Now, he said, he might look at similar themes across history but probably wouldn’t make the comparisons, which he says is not good practice.

“The Holocaust itself is a very unique event in human history,” he said. “So when you try to make direct comparisons, it can be fruitless to try to compare this genocide to other ones. Secondly, when that happens, it is very common for comparisons of pain to happen. And that’s just something we don’t want to do in education. We don’t want to sit here and look at it as was this genocide worse than others.”

Holocaust educators have always stressed the need to have survivors at the center of the lessons. While reading survivors’ accounts is strongly encouraged, Greene said, the use of video or audio accounts are recommended. 

“We always want to let them tell as much of the story as possible,” he said.

Greene’s students have grown up in an online and multimedia age, so video of Holocaust survivors humanizes them to students. Hearing and watching survivors tell their stories, he said, conveys emotions that students may not get from just reading passages or diaries.

“It helps to turn the Holocaust into a grouping of individual stories about the larger event,” he said.

Mollengarden said that simulations – where students are asked to play people who may have experienced the terror of Nazi persecution – are not recommended pedagogy. 

For example, students told to stand together in a small square, as a way of experiencing what it would have been like to be in a box car, lack the feeling of the life before that exact moment. 

“Do those students understand the terror before they were even put into the boxcars?” she said. “Do those students understand the conditions people were living in before they went into those boxcars? Do the students understand how families were torn apart, and some were in one place in one somewhere and another or that they did not know where they were going? I mean, you cannot, you cannot fathom this.”

Legislators over the last two years have introduced legislation to ban the teaching of “divisive concepts” in Alabama public schools. Among other provisions, the bill would ban teachers from instructing students about members of one group being inherently responsible for the suffering of another. The bills have not become law. 

Greene said that the teaching of “divisive concepts” does come up when he’s teaching the Holocaust. Teaching against hate and intolerance should not be divisive, Greene said, but he knows that other teachers have anxiety over the concept. Greene said that he has spoken with other teachers during workshops and had conversations with parents.

Rep. Danny Garrett, R-Trussville, a member of the Holocaust Commission, which provides some funding to the center, cosponsored the divisive concepts bill but said that he did not believe that the legislation would have impacted Holocaust education.

“The Holocaust, in my mind, is not a divisive concept,” he said.

Greene said that it’s important for teachers to be constantly updating and learning more about their practice and new ways to teach in the best way possible. For example, he implements Google maps in his teaching. He can “walk” his students down the street to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.

“Just like doctors, just like lawyers, just like accountants, just like newspaper reporters, we want to make sure that we are doing the absolute best job and most effective research-based methods for educating our students because that’s how we do the best job to prepare our kids for this ever-changing world,” he said.

Mollengarden also said the Center is a resource for teachers, and they can reach out for help or resources that the Center may not have but could provide access to.

“We want to be there for teachers, and I think that’s our primary goal,” she said.

What is lost

The Center houses an archive of letters, pictures and artifacts from the Holocaust. On a recent visit, archivist and librarian Rachel Jones Lopez pulled out two pairs of scissors from one of the boxes. 

One of the pairs of scissors is in good condition. She said the man who donated it said it was his grandmother’s, who came to the United States shortly before the Holocaust began. She was a seamstress, and the scissors were her livelihood.

The other pair of scissors were burned, and had another piece of metal, perhaps an eyeglass frame, melted into them. The donor found the burned scissors at Auschwitz in the 1970s or 80s in a place called “Canada,” where all of the items stolen from the Jewish people taken to Auschwitz were thrown. (The Nazis thought of Canada as a place of wealth, Jones Lopez said.)

The donor took the burned scissors because they were so similar to his grandmother’s.

“This is someone who left before things got bad, and this is someone who didn’t,” she said.

Jones Lopez says she thinks the tactile experience gives people a stronger connection to Alabama history.

She also pulled out postcards collected by a survivor when he was a young boy traveling through Europe. He was disguised as a Catholic orphan after being rescued by a French organization.

Most of the postcards had a place and a date. She also showed a book where he just collected the autographs of people as he traveled through Europe.

“So you can kind of trace where he was, that he just collected these postcards as he went,” she said.

Greene said sharing these stories mean a lot to him. 

“Students want to learn this material,” Greene said. “I really believe that when you sit down with kids, and you can have these hard conversations with them, but they ask incredible questions. And they are incredibly invested in learning this and students are more empathetic than we give them credit for sometimes, and they want to learn how to make the world a better place and they want to learn how to stand up against things like this.”

Greene said that one of the most impactful things he had learned from the Center was the small number of survivors left. Weil said there are 173 documented Holocaust survivors in Alabama who are still alive. Only a few survivors can still speak about their experiences. 

That, Greene said, has brought an urgency to his work. 

“Teachers are going to be really the keepers of this story from now on,” he said.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com. Follow Alabama Reflector on and .

In the face of centuries of anti-Black violence in America, it has become easy to dismiss the Holocaust as Europeans killing other Europeans, as “white-on-white” violence. This notion completely misses the Black history of the Holocaust, the details of which are lost because educators rarely teach it. 

The Holocaust was the systematic murder of 6 million European Jews, and the centrality of Jewish identity to the perpetration of the Holocaust must not be forgotten. But from a diverse array of communities — including persons with disabilities, LGBTQ people and members of other religious minorities — were also targeted by Nazi ideology. This included Black Germans.

While anti-semitic remarks from celebrities draw headlines and outrage, they are ultimately a symptom of a deeper problem: the failure of educators to teach about the Holocaust in ways that relate it to other marginalized communities’ experiences.

I teach courses on political violence at Virginia Commonwealth University, a minority-serving institution in Richmond — the former capital of the Confederacy. The students in my classroom have the same blind spot about Holocaust history as those celebrities. Yet, I’ve connected with my students in profound ways by studying the Holocaust and allowing them to forge their own personal connections to the victims and survivors of Hitler’s attempt to wipe out Jews and other minorities.

Sadly, the anti-semitism that motivated Nazi ideology has been in American culture and political discourse. Still, when tasked with rooting it out, students are readily able to identify anti-semitism. One student highlighted an circulated by a politician running for county office. One drew a connection between South Park’s and . Another supplied far too many quotes from . Young people from diverse backgrounds are able to recognize anti-semitism when they see it, but they struggle to understand where it comes from and why it affects them. 

That’s why I teach the Holocaust through an intersectional lens that reveals the relevance of religious, racial, gender and sexual identities. While the deep roots of Nazi ideology are found in , the forerunners of Nazi policy can be found in the colonization of Africa. Germany’s colonial genocides that began in 1904 in contemporary Namibia were only in 2021. The annihilation of the Herero and Nama peoples by German forces, through tactics such as forced starvation, deportation to concentration camps and medical experimentation, provided a blueprint for the Holocaust. But that isn’t the only connection. 

Nazi racial policy was built around the concept of eugenics, which held that mental illness, poverty and criminality were biological traits passed down from one generation to another. Popular in the United States as well as Western Europe, eugenicists sought to control who could have children as a way of addressing social problems. Virginia enacted eugenic laws in 1924, the same year it banned interracial marriage, and allowed state institutions to sterilize individuals to prevent the conception of so-called genetically inferior children. Virginia’s law became a model for the country after it was upheld by the in in 1927. Twenty-two percent of the sterilized in Virginia alone were African Americans, and two-thirds were women. 

Similarly, Nazi eugenics focused on the elimination of Afro-Germans — Germans of African descent. Hitler wrote about Afro-Germans in Mein Kampf, arguing that they defiled Aryans’ racial purity. Black and mixed-race people in Nazi Germany were subject to similar to that inflicted on Jews. Ye may like Hitler, but if he and his family had lived in Nazi Germany, they would have been socially and economically marginalized and potentially . The history of Nazi-era discrimination against Afro-Germans continues to affect Black people living in Germany today, with many reporting that .

Teaching Black history alongside Jewish and other histories of the Holocaust helps connect it with students’ own experiences with discrimination, violence and hate. It can also help educators better understand their students. As one of my students wrote while reflecting on an image of Germans mocking their Jewish neighbors as they were to a Nazi concentration camp, “I know the fear of deportation, of being taken away from your home and all you know, and just imagining people I’ve known all my life enjoying me losing everything, I can’t even explain how horrible that feels.” The experiences of the Holocaust still have meaning for marginalized students today.  

By forging connections between Black history and Jewish history, between the exploitation and murder of colonized peoples and the Holocaust, between marginalized communities, educators can help students of all backgrounds make important emotional and intellectual connections between the Holocaust and the bigotry and discrimination experienced by marginalized communities. Teaching the Black history of the Holocaust demonstrates to students how events that seemingly affect only one community ultimately affect us all.

State Sen. Jen Day of the Gretna area said she was stunned to learn via recent email that an Omaha area school had tried to teach lessons of the Holocaust but stopped after receiving pushback.

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Such incidents underscore the necessity, they and others testified Tuesday, of Legislative Bill 888 — which would add the Holocaust and other acts of genocide to existing Nebraska statutes that already call for multicultural education to K-12 students in public schools.

Currently, the law requires that multicultural education focus on the culture, history and contributions of African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans and Asian Americans.

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Introduced by Day, the broader language had been pushed previously by a former lawmaker but stalled.

Ten people testified Tuesday in support of the resurrected measure presented to the Education Committee. No one spoke in opposition.

The committee took no action, though Lincoln Sen. Patty Pansing Brooks said she found it “despicable” — and a reflection of “the state of politics today” — that the school Day referred to (but did not identify by name) would receive such pushback about Holocaust education. 

Day cited a recent survey indicating that 66% of millennials were unable to identify Auschwitz (the Nazi concentration and death camp).

That the Holocaust’s systematic murder of six million European Jews occurred relatively recently, during World War II, is further reason to be alarmed, Day said.

“Never Again”

She said she was further concerned that only nine Holocaust survivors remain in Nebraska as a “living, breathing” tool that can equip students with the knowledge to identify and reject discrimination and hate.

“We’re really missing those human to human stories,” said Day. “Ignorance will only increase as (the Holocaust) falls further into history.”

Gary Javitch of B’nai B’rith Omaha said a spike in anti-Semitism is “reason enough” to increase Holocaust education. He said Nebraska should become the 24th state to adopt the legal language.

Said Javitch: “The phrase ‘never again’ needs to be more than just a slogan.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nebraska Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Cate Folsom for questions: info@nebraskaexaminer.com. Follow Nebraska Examiner on and .