International Holocaust Remembrance Day invites everyone to pause, to honor the six million Jews and other victims murdered and to recommit ourselves to confronting hatred in all its forms.
This year, the day feels especially urgent.
We are entering a moment when the survivors who have carried the truth of the Holocaust in their own voices are aging, and many voices have already been lost. We are crossing into a new chapter in how those precious memories will be carried forward. The responsibility for sustaining that memory is shifting to descendants, educators, scholars and community leaders. How we rise to that responsibility will shape the future of Holocaust remembrance.
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A year ago, I stood in the commemoration tent at the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau for the 80th anniversary of liberation. The massive tent, erected at the entrance to the former Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, sheltered a gathering unlike anything I had experienced.
Survivors, heads of state, scholars, educators, and global delegations came together at the rail tracks where so many lives were destroyed. I attended not only as a participant, but as part of the leadership team that helped plan and coordinate a delegation of educators, museum directors, and scholars, with historian Michael Berenbaum providing historical framing.
The surroundings carried their own gravity. The imposing gate. The railroad tracks that once delivered human beings into a system designed to erase them. The stillness of the fields. A lone freight car standing as witness.
Survivors sat among us, many in their nineties, carrying memories the world can no longer afford to lose. Their presence made one truth unmistakable: Remembrance must be active. It cannot rely on ceremony alone. It must be grounded in vigilance and in the understanding that hatred does not begin with violence. It begins with indifference and distortion.
Standing there, I thought of my grandmother.
I am the first person in my family not to be born in Poland. My parents, my grandparents and many generations before them all came from Poland, a place that shaped our family’s language, traditions, and sense of belonging — and then became the landscape of its destruction. That rupture is not abstract to me. It is the reason our family story had to begin again somewhere else.
The era of firsthand testimony is ending. The era of inherited responsibility has begun.
My grandmother survived a Europe where antisemitism did not arrive all at once. Jew-hate came in stages — first as rhetoric, then as exclusion, then as danger. Long after the war, she carried those lessons quietly. She packed carefully. She listened closely. She never assumed safety was permanent. She believed in education and democracy, but she also understood how fragile they are when hatred is ignored or minimized.
That inheritance shaped me, and it is why my work in Holocaust education is not only professional. It is personal. It is rooted in a legacy carried through my family and in the understanding that memory requires care and responsibility.
The survivors who spoke during the ceremony offered not only testimony, but warning. Their words were shaped by loss and moral clarity. Antisemitism has resurged across the globe, appearing in rhetoric, conspiracy theories, harassment, vandalism and acts of violence. Hearing survivors speak about moral collapse in the very place where genocide unfolded made their message unmistakable.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is not only about the past. It is about how we choose to shape the present and the future.
Arizona has a unique role in this work. Jewish and non-Jewish Holocaust survivors rebuilt their lives here and shared their stories with generations of students, educators and community members. Their testimonies became part of the moral and cultural fabric of our state.
As executive director of the Hilton Family Holocaust Education Center, set to open in Phoenix in 2027, I see firsthand how urgently young people seek truthful and courageous education. They live in a world where misinformation spreads quickly and historical distortion circulates easily. Holocaust education offers more than history. It provides tools to understand antisemitism, recognize propaganda and see how democratic norms erode. It helps students learn to identify bias, resist dehumanization and choose responsibility over indifference.
This is why the Center is being built. It will house survivor testimonies, immersive galleries and an Upstander Lab that allows learners to practice ethical decision making. It will serve as both a memorial and a civic space, a place where remembrance leads to action.
But institutions cannot carry this work alone. Each of us has a role in protecting truth and advancing understanding. Standing at Birkenau last year, I felt the weight of this transition more clearly than ever: The era of firsthand testimony is ending. The era of inherited responsibility has begun.
As the ceremony concluded and candles flickered in the cold air, I thought again of all four of my grandparents who survived the Holocaust. Their survival was not the end of the story. It was the beginning of an obligation.
As we mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, may we honor all the survivors who rebuilt their lives, the scholars who protect historical truth, the educators who carry these lessons forward and the millions whose lives were cut short. Their memory calls us to pair remembrance with responsibility, and responsibility with action.
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
