A Birthday Reminder
On This Holocaust Remembrance Day
Hi All,
Greetings from Denmark! I’m here for the week on a birthday trip to celebrate my 36th. Those familiar with We Share The Same Sky know that Denmark is a consequential place for my family history and also a home away from home for me. This trip is a bit unique in that I’m here just for the week and just to spend with people I love.
Most years my birthday is full of work. In some strange fated way, my birthday is Holocaust Remembrance Day (yesterday). This fact tends to amuse people; typically when I end up public speaking on my birthday, retelling my grandmother’s story, there is some nod to the irony that I’ve ended up working in the field of Holocaust memory.
I’m heading out to spend the day with people who are the chosen family I’ve inherited as a result of my years retracing my grandmother’s history. Before I go, I want to share a short piece I wrote last week in the lead up to this commemorative day. It’s an encouraging essay of sorts and a reminder that, while it is important to spend time with our own family stories, we must use them as a bridge to learning about others.
May the week ahead be a peaceful one even as the world feels chaotic.
Rachael
My entire adult life has been guided by the archive my grandmother left behind. I’ve studied her words, followed them to different corners of the world, retold them, and lived inside them.
One of the diaries she left behind was from the 1990s where she journals after retelling her story to a group of high school students. She questions what the point was in telling her story to students. Why should they care about the Holocaust? she asked herself. “[It] was an incomprehensible black page in history… What does my life, my experience for that matter, my lost generation mean to them?”
My grandmother, Hana, was one of the lucky ones. She fled Prague when she was 14 years old and spent the first years of the war in Denmark. When that country was no longer safe, she escaped again to Sweden. Her entire family would be murdered in extermination camps. She was on her own.
Her question—”What does my lost generation mean to them?”— guides the work I continue to do with her story. Over the years, I’ve had many answers to that question, and what I gain from studying my family history shifts with the changes in my own life. But in broad strokes, the field of Holocaust education is driven by the hope that the answer to that question is: Never again. The thinking goes: if we study and retell the story, this won’t ever happen again—to anyone, not just Jews.
In 2025, we know that isn’t true. The stories of the Holocaust and other genocides aren’t saving us. And knowing how the new American administration has begun to govern, I worry that they are the only ones who are really learning from history; the warning cries of our educators seem to be the guiding light for our now-in-power politicians. I don’t believe in comparing past and present, as I find it to be a disservice to both, but I deeply believe in making connections. For quite some time in this country and abroad, those connections have been easy to find.
In Holocaust education, studying the rise of Nazism is vital. I find that the years of the Final Solution (1942-1945), when the most number of Jews and other victims were killed, is more straightforward: it’s a period of history when educated white men with evil intentions and advanced technology chose to kill. But it is the years before that hold the answers to the hope of “never again." For example, from 1933 to 1934 we learn how quickly one can consolidate power. In my podcast and book, I break it down like this:
"It had only taken [Hitler] the first six months to consolidate power. He turned a democracy into a one-party dictatorship. He drafted emergency legislation that suspended civil liberties. He got rid of habeas corpus. He deputized the storm troopers. He targeted communists, socialists, state delegates, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witness, the mentally disabled, Germans of African descent and Jews. He over filled the jails and then used schools and gymnasiums for his prisoners. And then, when those were over capacity, he built concentration camps. He murdered his opponents. He burned their books. And he amended the German Constitution and gave himself emergency powers. All in 6 months.”
A couple years after that, we get a lesson about what it looks like when we fail to resist and protect. It was during Hitler’s reign that the 1936 Olympics happened in Berlin. Other countries brought money and support to a Germany that had already begun building concentration camps and had enacted the Nuremberg Race Laws, which made Jews legally different from their non-Jewish neighbors.
That was the start of how my grandmother described the Holocaust. She said, “You are slowly being peeled off like an onion. You are slowly losing first your privacy, your schooling, your income, your possessions. You are being conditioned to worse and worse situations. You are saying, this too shall pass. We can live with this, but you are being conditioned to live a subhuman life. And when you are looked at like subhumans, no one has trouble killing you.”
For years, educators have been saying what I just wrote. This isn’t new or revealing to emphasize lessons from the Holocaust, but we have to admit that retelling in hopes of not repeating isn’t working. So on this Holocaust Remembrance Day, I encourage people to take a different approach: study the stories of today. Ask your neighbors who they are and how they are. What changing laws are affecting them? What do they fear? Study their histories with the same hunger, curiosity and compassion that you have for your own. Take their stories personally. Many will not feel safe or comfortable sharing, and our work is to care about the stories we don’t know as much as the stories we do know. One day we are going to be the ancestors that our grandchildren study, so what story do you want them to tell? Hopefully one where we protected our neighbors and not just ourselves. History is important, but only if we let it be a call to action today.
Three Along The Seam podcasts I recommend this week:
Betty Grebenschikoff z’’l: Betty was a good friend who passed away last year. She was a Holocaust survivor and when she was already in her 90s, she was reunited with her best friend from Germany after more than 80 years of not knowing if the other survived. I was part of the team that reunited them and it was truly a gift of a life experience to share in their joy and friendship.
Naré Mkrtchyan: This episode dives into the history of the Armenian Genocide and includes a conversation with filmmaker Naré Mkrtchyan about the difference of our experiences; she is a granddaughter of the Armenian Genocide which is a history that has long been denied.
Julie Lindahl:
(who also writes here on Substack) is an author and democracy activist; her grandfather was an SS officer and she has spent years retracing and retelling her family history in hopes of creating a better future for all. She is one of the friends I had a chance to see on this trip to Denmark.
Happy Birthday! I’m confused by this statement. “And knowing how the new American administration has begun to govern, I worry that they are the only ones who are really learning from history; the warning cries of our educators seem to be the guiding light for our now-in-power politicians.” Who is “they” is in this sentence?