When I initially decided to pursue a fellowship through Teach the Shoah, I did so with the intention of learning more about public history. I felt understanding history’s utility outside of academia would benefit me. I did not expect to learn anything new about myself or for the content to connect emotionally with me.

But history was brought to life in a deeply intimate and powerful way, changing how I view my own life.

Meeting Joseph Samuels for the first time, an Iraqi Jew and 95-year-old Holocaust survivor, intimidated me. We were separated by seven decades and immensely different upbringings. However, our interviews quickly dispelled any notion that we truly were very different from one another.

Joe recounted many elements of his childhood that resonated with me and recalled my own memories, from his close yet at times combative relationships with his older brothers to the fear that a monster lived in his toilet. Even a century ago, sibling quarrels and imaginary monsters were among the troubles a young boy confronted while growing up.

The sense of similarity between our upbringings dissipated when Joe detailed his experience during the Farhud to me. Despite being so far removed from Germany, the consequences of Nazism and antisemitism reached Iraq and precipitated a violent massacre in Baghdad, the city where Joe grew up, in 1941. He viscerally detailed his experiences during this time and vividly highlighted a chapter of the Holocaust I was previously unfamiliar with. His story not only informed me about an aspect of history which had slipped through the cracks but also gave me a devastating understanding of what enduring such an experience is like.

However, our discussions also revealed the other parts of Joe’s life that might otherwise have been overshadowed by his experiences during the Farhud. After escaping from Iraq and eventually relocating to America, Joe began a new life. He established a successful real estate career, started a family, travelled the world, and restored his sense of community.

He could have just as easily succumbed to despair and allowed the atrocities he witnessed to determine his life. Instead, he took advantage of his tremendous good fortune and made the most of the opportunities that presented themselves to him.

And this remains true for the other survivors I met – despite the horrors they experienced, they lived incredibly rich and beautiful lives after the Holocaust. So often we forget that the stories of many who survived the Holocaust did not end with liberation: while many never moved on, perpetually grappling with their trauma or choosing to end their lives, many thrived after the horrific events they experienced and lived long, fruitful, and happy lives. However, these portions of survivors’ stories are often diminished or entirely ignored.

The stories of the survivors I met inspired and encouraged me, not only because of their incredible resilience and spirit, but also because they demonstrate the human capacity for rebuilding and restoring, that our worst experiences do not have to define who we are or what we can accomplish.

Even those who experienced the evils of the Holocaust – from the Farhud that Joe’s family narrowly survived to the concentration camps and the mass slaughter that occurred in Europe – were often able to prevail and begin again, unwilling to let the evil of antisemitism define them or limit their story.

Being in my final year of undergraduate study, still navigating the fallout of a medical trauma I had experienced several years prior and anxious about what awaited me after college, the stories of Joseph Samuels, Henry Slucki, and Eva Nathanson felt particularly pertinent to my own situation. They reminded me not only of the consequences of hatred and dehumanization, but also of our capacity to dictate our own lives and make the most of the future, even when our past feels inescapable and hope feels out of reach. We do not choose the circumstances we face or the challenges that confront us, but we do have the ability to decide how we respond.

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In December of 2025, after many months of resisting, my mother quietly passed away as I held her. Gone after 98 resilient and powerful years.

I retired in August 2020, when she was 93, as she needed more care and support. I saw she was fading, and I knew that her Kindertransport story would fade with her. I knew that this story needed to be told, and that I needed to be the one to do it!

I took a course provided by the Kindertransport Association and gave my first PowerPoint presentation in December 2023. Then, in early 2024, I joined Teach the Shoah and discovered the power of storytelling.

I remember the day when, instead of a chronological presentation, I started the third-person story on the morning after Kristallnacht when my 11-year-old mother headed to the town square in Breslau, Germany. The story was now three dimensional and filled with emotion!

I presented the story to my mother and videoed her reaction to hearing it, which was very powerful and validating. I include that video at the end of my slide presentation – after I’ve told her story. It is a way for her to be there, even though she isn’t telling the story.

In 2025, I had a full season of school presentations. I shared with my mother that I had taken her story on the road. She was so proud of me for doing so, even though she never would have done it herself. Her pride fueled me even more!

And then I lost her. As the 2026 school speaking season came around, I was nervous. Could I tell her story without crying? It didn’t feel the same. I was still missing her.

My first telling was in early April to a small history class in a charter school. I told the teacher about the circumstances, so he would be prepared in case I was overcome with emotions. During the telling, I was aware of feeling sad, but it didn’t bubble up, and I was able to tell her story.

The very first question of the Q&A was, “Is your mother still alive?”

I felt the emotions come up to the surface and overflow; my eyes started tearing. With some difficulty, I held it together and told them that she had recently died.

I said that in the Jewish faith, we have an expression: May their memory be for a blessing. By this, we mean that any time the departed person is thought of or spoken about, they are fully present and we are blessed to be once again in their presence.

Before and After: The purpose and drive to do this is still the same. Now my heart is heavier, but my mother is with me, fully present when I tell her story. Like her, I am brave and will continue telling. I have to.

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There is something unexpected about the community that forms in a bomb shelter, about the stories that are told, the stories that are requested, and the conversations that ensue.

Saturday morning

Sirens: war has started. We sit in the shelter. Everyone looks very tense and stressed. We can all hear the explosions from above.

By evening, people’s faces begin to look more familiar, and conversations start.

The person across from me asks a random question that leads to a conversation about Raul Wallenberg and the Righteous Among the Nations. Others listen in. I tell them about Carl Lutz and the Glass House. I tell them the story of Testimony House in Nir Galim: how some of the Glass House survivors and other young Hungarian Jews built the museum so that the memory would be preserved.

One of the women asks if I have heard of Chiune Sugihara. She tells us that her father was rescued by Sugihara! I excitedly tell her about Teach the Shoah, and how we would love for her to learn how to tell her father’s story and to share it with others.

The Following Week

Sirens go off without a pre-warning. (A 3-min warning issued by the homefront that sirens will go off soon.) Without the pre-warning, we have 90 seconds to get to shelter.

As I rush out of my apartment building, a lovely woman who lives in the private house across the street opens her front door and invites me into her shelter. I run to join her.

I have always admired this house. There is a sculpture in the front garden of a stack of books: the top part has open books which remind me of butterflies.

In the shelter, I ask her about the sculpture. She tells me that it was created especially for the house symbolizing the different literary people who lived there.

I knew the house was built by an Israeli author and publisher named of Rabinski. Sitting in the shelter, I learn that right after the war, the house was rented by Yehiel Di Nur, aka Ka-Tsetnik.

Ka-Tsetnik coined the phrase “Auschwitz, the other planet.” I grew up reading his work. And he lived here. He wrote here right in this spot! One of the books I grew up reading might have been written right here!

I think this may have been the first time in a shelter that I didn’t know how long it was before we got the all-clear and I could go home.

Passover in the Shelter

By Passover, there is a regular group in the local shelter. We know each other: a small, strange community that exists underground.

Someone asks me to tell a story of a Jewish hero from the Holocaust. There are so many choices. I tell them about Rozka Korczak, one of the resistance leaders from Vilna. A teenage girl says she never heard of such a thing. She starts googling Rozka and her partner, Vitka Kempner.

Someone asks me to tell them about Albania. Why are they so special in the Shoah? I tell them about the first Albanian to be recognized as Righteous Among the Nations, Refik Veseli. This leads to a conversation about where we find light in humanity.

We come out of the shelter into the fresh air. A few clouds are scattered in the sky, but a ray of sun shines through.

Another cease fire is declared. Another light through the darkness.

The post Thoughts of a Teller: Bomb Shelter version appeared first on Teach the Shoah.

Every story about the Holocaust has a survivor at its heart. That sounds ridiculous on the surface, but it’s true. And it’s why I can tell (and hear) these stories repeatedly despite the emotional reaction each one brings. Allow me to explain.

Many of the stories we tell are stories of survival. Despite the horror of the story itself, knowing the person whose story I am telling lived to tell their own story gives me a sense of pride in Jewish courage and resilience in the face of unimaginable obstacles. It’s as if we stand as a people, united, to say, “We’re stronger than you think, and we will not let you win!”

Some stories, though, end in tragedy – millions of them, in fact. But let’s think for a moment about how we come to learn these stories. After all, the perpetrators of these murders, for all their meticulous bookkeeping, did not write down the stories of their victims’ lives, their hopes and dreams, or their acts of courage, defiance, love, and basic humanity. That knowledge had to come from somewhere else.

Sometimes it comes from a diary or journal found by a relative, friend, or bystander. Sometimes it comes from a relative who survived, shared as part of a larger story. Sometimes the story comes from a friend, a would-be rescuer, or even a stranger. In some cases, the survivor lived because someone else died to save them. Stories come from Jews and non-Jews, from soldiers, diplomats, and witnesses.

Here’s the thing, though – every single one of these people was also a survivor. Everyone who witnessed these stories survived something – if not the Holocaust, then the war. Jews and other victims survived camps, ghettos, and killing pits. Soldiers survived battles; townspeople survived bombings. Some of the witnesses were rescuers or would-be rescuers, putting their own lives and the lives of their families at risk, and surviving to tell the story.

So, no, not everyone who went through the Holocaust survived it. But yes, every Holocaust story we can tell has, at its core, a survivor. Stories that do not include a survivor are lost to us.

When I tell a Holocaust story, or listen to one, it is the courage and resilience of the survivor at its core that gives me the strength to keep telling these stories. That, and the knowledge that, despite efforts to the contrary, this history was not, nor will it ever be, lost to time.

The post The Heart of the Story appeared first on Teach the Shoah.

When I was very young, I learned that if I sat quietly, I could listen undisturbed to my mother and aunts telling stories from their childhoods. As I heard names I recognized and places I had seen, I sat fascinated at the revelations.

People I knew as sweet old ladies had once been rude and wild teenagers. I learned of families formed and broken, children lost to disease, cousins who went to war and never came home. I’ve never been addicted to soap operas, but these stories held me in their spell. Each unraveled tale made the people spoken of come to life for me – their work, their talents, their sense of humor, the kindnesses shown, the secrets taken to their graves.

With this background, I was excited to be part of the storytelling classes when my Teach the Shoah co-founder Deborah Fripp introduced us to storyteller Jennifer Rudick Zunikoff. Through the tools Jennifer laid out for us, we were taught to listen differently to a story – that it was in the listening that the telling grew.

I am more convinced today than when I began of the need for and importance of this method of teaching. Storytelling is powerful because it triggers the release of oxytocin and dopamine, hormones known to enhance our sense of empathy for others and to boost motivation. This is one of our goals as an organization – to motivate people to be not just passive hearers but positive doers.

As Holocaust educators, the stories we share are not easy ones to tell. Often painful to hear, they open a page of history that many tried to bury long ago. Simply speaking the word Holocaust can cause a strong emotional response.

We do not do this simply to unnerve or upset people. We share these stories so we can be the voice of those now silenced by time – so their lives will not be forgotten. We verbally open the door on their world, not just to reveal their suffering but to show their living. As my family stories helped me see relatives as ‘real’ people, so our storytelling advances the knowledge that once there was a people who faced the world they lived in with courage, uncertainty, and perseverance.

Being a Holocaust storyteller is an honor and a privilege.

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Growing up in Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia), I was always mesmerized by a black and white portrait in my maternal grandparents’ bedroom. It showed a gorgeous young woman with her head tilted slightly toward her shoulder, her subtle smile brightening her face. This was my grandmother’s beloved older sister Magdalena. Everyone called her “Dushika” (“little soul”). Even as a little girl, I remember my grandmother crying with her hands covering her face, mourning her beloved sister whom she lost so tragically.

What I knew as a child was limited. Magda was my grandmother’s favorite sister who died in Auschwitz. My beautiful mama was named after her. Only later did I learn the full story. Magdalena was one of 999 young single women on the very first transport to Auschwitz from the Slovak State in March 1942. They were ages 16 to 36 — exactly the age of my own daughters now.

As a Holocaust educator and storyteller in Los Angeles, my family story has often inspired my work. Three years ago, while preparing an exhibit at Holocaust Museum LA, I researched the other women on that first transport — their connections, dreams, and bonds of sisterhood. My sources included original artifacts, testimonies, and interviews I conducted or witnessed.

During this research, I discovered Teach the Shoah. I took their storytelling classes and was hooked. My mentor, Jennifer, offered me a chance to be a featured storyteller in January 2024. Working on and sharing Dushika’s story was transformative. It allowed me to connect more deeply to my family story and learn how to share it meaningfully with others.

The moment I finished, relief and pride flooded my body. “I brought her story alive! I remember her in a way she would feel seen!” Hearing the audience’s appreciation, I understood the power a well-told story can have. We are all storytellers, but our voices need to be discovered and sharpened.

Deep storytelling can shape us into better listeners and make us empathize on levels that statistics never can. It creates community, serves as a bridge without judgment, and conveys messages people might otherwise resist hearing.

When an opportunity arose to join LeSaper: From Survivor Memory to Living Teller, I became a bridge-maker and survivor coordinator. Witnessing students become storytellers and ambassadors of survivors’ stories was tremendously powerful. Their empathy and commitment left a lasting impression on all of us, including the survivors themselves. The survivors know that their stories will be preserved and alive for the next generation.

Today I have not only a photograph of Magda Altmann but also pride in our family’s story of memory and resilience. I honor our memory with joy and community-building on two continents, bridged by family ties, love, and the strong Jewish values my grandmother would be unshakably proud of.

The post Memories and Stories That Continue appeared first on Teach the Shoah.

One of the things I find most rewarding as an educator is when a student finally “gets it” – that moment when the eyes light up with understanding, the face animates, and the person becomes truly engaged in the lesson. This holds true whether I am teaching language arts, social skills, or shapes, but it is especially true when I am teaching about the Holocaust.

Three Teach the Shoah storytellers recently presented stories about resilience and survival to a nearby high school. We tied in a lesson about the variety of cultures within Judaism. This presentation was meant to supplement current learning about the Holocaust. It served that purpose, but it also became much more.

As we told our stories, a room full of eyes focused on us. When we discussed Jewish cultures, students made connections between the cultures we discussed and their own. When we got to the Q&A, eyes lit up, faces became animated, and lessons were learned.

The students had been learning the concept of Upstanders, people who speak up when they see bullying or bigotry, people who do not just stand by and let such behavior continue unchallenged. This was part of our goal for this presentation, and I believe we accomplished that goal.

One student, after hearing a story about a teller’s mother aboard the MS St. Louis, asked if the knowledge of what his mother survived influenced his feelings about immigration in the present. This led to a discussion about how such things could be prevented from happening again. After I told a story about Olympic swimmer Eva Szekely, another student commented that she had always known the Holocaust was “a bad thing,” but it was only when she heard history relayed to her using a first-person perspective that she truly understood the enormity of what had happened. Only now did she truly empathize with those who went through the Shoah. For these and many other students, history became something real, something relatable, and the reasons for learning it were suddenly obvious. This is how being an Upstander starts – with an open mind and heart.

Survivors of the Holocaust have a saying, “The best revenge is grandchildren.” After this presentation, I would like to amend that: “The best revenge is grandchildren and those who call them ‘friend’.” As we honor International Holocaust Remembrance Day and contemplate the place Jews occupy in the modern world, isn’t it nice to know the Righteous of the future are learning and appreciating the lessons of the past?

The post Upstanders 101 appeared first on Teach the Shoah.

On a trip to visit my father and stepmother in 1976, I brought a cassette recorder and half a dozen blank cassettes with the intention of interviewing Dad. The first evening after dinner I brought it down to where Dad was sitting, reading the Yiddish edition of Forverts, the Yiddish newspaper. I showed him the recorder and said, “Dad, there is no one alive who can tell me Mom’s story [she had died seven years earlier], and no one can tell me your family’s story better than you. Can we have a discussion that I will record?” He looked at me over his glasses, and, after a few seconds, he nodded.

Over the next couple evenings, we recorded several hours of tapes, which I took home to New York with me. What happened to the tapes is another story. But what those talks started was life-changing for my father. That’s when he began his career as a Holocaust speaker. Not long after our taping sessions, he said, “I realize that I have been remiss in not talking about my experiences.” He would eventually speak to thousands of people, young and old, Jewish and not Jewish, knowledgeable about the Holocaust and ignorant.

I learned about my mother’s family as well as his and about their lives before and after Hitler came to power. I heard the story of the day my mother’s mother and sister died while she was out on a work detail. I learned that my father chose to fight as a partisan in order to choose his own way of dying; he never expected to survive. I learned of his dream of going to Mandatory Palestine after the war to fight for a Jewish state. I learned how those dreams were thwarted because of the emotional toll the war took on my mother. I heard the story of mother’s cousin who discovered that she was the only one of 72 members of their family to survive and how he brought them to the United States.

Perhaps the most important lesson I learned from my father was the importance of telling my family’s story with the hope that others would learn from it. While there were still survivors living, I would always defer to them. They had lived the Holocaust. My knowledge was second-hand. I knew that sadly my time would come.

Dad gave his last talk in the Spring of 2012, a couple months after his 90th birthday. When I spoke to my stepmother after the talk, she told me excitedly that they had given Dad a standing ovation. I wasn’t surprised.

When Dad died a couple months later, I knew that my time had come. It was my turn to make sure that people would not forget.

The post Talking with my Father; Talking for my Father appeared first on Teach the Shoah.

I remember reading The Diary of Anne Frank as a tween and being drawn to her positivity and hopefulness despite the constant fear of discovery. Later, in college, I read Dr. Victor Frankl’s memoir Man’s Search for Meaning for a psychology class. That book, with its theme of finding purpose and using that purpose to give oneself the strength to keep going in the face of unimaginable odds, was another huge inspiration for me. These two books heavily influenced my development as an advocate for human rights and a proud Jewish woman. They also led me to form a deep interest in preserving and passing on Jewish history, especially Holocaust history. Eventually, this led me to Holocaust storytelling.

My storytelling journey began with these two books, but it did not end there. Teaching our history protects it from being erased. According to the Claims Conference, the organization that manages material claims against Germany for Nazi atrocities, there were only 220,800 Holocaust survivors still alive as of April 2025. As a result, we, as a society, are rapidly running out of time to record our history for future generations while there is still someone alive who experienced that history and remembers it. This is one part of what inspires me to tell stories of the Holocaust.

Additionally, this method of preserving our stories and keeping them alive works. How do I know? Because when I joined Teach the Shoah in 2020 it was a brand new, mostly local, all volunteer organization. Six years later, this tiny community of storytellers has become a worldwide organization, with a large storyteller bureau and frequent classes and workshops. There are presentations at synagogues, churches, libraries, schools, museums, and more. That success is the other part of what inspires me, gives me hope, and restores a little of my faith in humanity.

Ultimately, I take to heart the words of Dr. Frankl, who famously said, “Everything can be taken from a [person] but one thing; the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” I have chosen to use education and storytelling to pass down an important part of Jewish history to the next generation, so that we truly will “never forget.” It is my hope that, in doing so, I inspire others to do the same.

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At the beginning of 2025, we saw a drastic switch in policy and national attitude. As expected with the inauguration of a new president, we were attempting to adjust. As the changes became more intense, I found myself participating where I could. I attended a protest at the capitol building in Little Rock, AR. This event was opposing the increase in deportations and lack of due process that has emerged.

While there were plenty of people there in support of the message we were trying to get across, there were also many people there to show that they do not believe our concern is warranted. I was as gentle as possible, but I would be lying if I said I was not angry.

I saw an opportunity here, not for judgement, but for the goal of education and understanding. I decided to share the story of Henry Weil, a Holocaust survivor I have had the honor of interviewing.

I told Henry’s story of miraculous survival. The incredible coincidences and luck necessary to survive. I briefly told the stories of the other survivors I had met. How not a single one of them is small, even though they start that way.

The circumstances today are not where they were in 1940, yet. It is often forgotten that the descent into corruption is gradual. It is not enacted in a day, and we must learn to identify the signs of danger before they are here.

Many people in the crowd believed we may be victims of confirmation bias. The denial of severity is not new. Henry’s mother refused to leave their home in Austria until the moment the SS knocked on their door.

It is good we stay objective, but I believe the people who have lived the rest of their lives after this horrendous event. When they tell me they feel a familiarity, I am going to honor their experience every time.

I am unsure of the impact of my talk. I would like to believe I brought some tolerance, patience, and understanding to somebody that day.

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