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I have heard many positive things said by participants after a storytelling presentation. Some of the most memorable comments, however, have come from high school students. At a recent program at a public high school near my home in the Dallas area, we not only shared stories of the Holocaust and talked about the history, but we also talked about the assorted cultures of Jews in various places across Europe and how those cultures were impacted by the Holocaust. Many resulting comments and questions from the students were poignant and insightful, but one in particular stood out.

“I always knew [the Holocaust] was bad, but it wasn’t until I heard you tell this girl’s story in her own voice that I understood how bad it really was, how horrible it must have been for the people that lived through it.”  The young lady who said this went on to talk about how eye-opening it was to hear about a girl roughly her own age (16 or 17 years old) coping with such traumatic issues. She compared this to her own life and was genuinely moved by her counterpart’s struggles. This young woman then commented on the similarities in day-to-day life between herself and the girl whose story she had just heard. It was clear she saw more things they had in common than differences between them.

The best part about this girl’s reaction to my story was what she did with it. A few weeks later, I came back to the school as a parent evaluator. This is a role specific to this school where parents of students at the school are invited to view and evaluate projects completed by students in various classes. This girl created an amazing art piece depicting the teenager in my story, showing her thinking about what she would do when the war ended, and she could go back to living her life. The student gave a short presentation about the piece, and how she was inspired by both my story and the story of another girl in similar circumstances. The entire time she spoke, I just stared at her artwork and listened to her, quietly kvelling.

I later learned that her art was entered in a city-wide contest focused on art depicting the Holocaust. The contest was sponsored by the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum and had entries from high schools all over the DFW Metroplex. While this student’s art didn’t win, it was one of very few chosen as a finalist. This is the sort of thing that inspires me. This is why I tell these stories.

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This week I told my father’s story to several classes of tenth graders at a local high school. My father, his parents, and his younger sister left Germany in 1933 to move to Czechoslovakia only to be living under Nazi rule once again in 1939. Through luck, courage, and ingenuity, they then managed to reach Istanbul, Turkey where they lived the remainder of the war.

After my presentation, there was time for slides, questions, and discussion. One slide I showed had two photos – my father (about age 2) holding his father’s hand next to one of my father (age 90) holding his first great-grandchild’s hand. I asked what students thought had helped my father’s family survive the Holocaust, so he was able to live to have great-grandchildren. The first two answers I received were optimism and resiliency. Both answers not only told me that these students had connected with the story but also spoke to what I think we all need during difficult times – optimism (or at least hope that conditions will improve) and resiliency to continue on.

At one point a student asked, “Do you have any questions you wish you could ask your father?” This question touched my heart immediately. I never stop wishing I could ask my father more about his life during the Holocaust. I know that he would not be able to answer some of the questions because his parents never spoke to him about many details (such as how they obtained false documents to travel to Turkey). I know there are questions he couldn’t or wouldn’t answer because it was still too painful for him even towards the end of his life. Despite this, I never stop wishing that I had one more chance to learn more about his experiences. Maybe this reflects my mixed emotions when telling his story — missing him but also feeling he is near me and happy I am keeping his story alive.

Towards the very end of the session, a student commented that hearing me tell my dad’s story made it much more real than just reading about it in a book. What a great appreciation of the wonderful work done by Teach the Shoah and one that reinforces my commitment to keep my father’s story alive.

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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.

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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.

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Zachor – Remember. This word appears almost 200 times in the Torah.

Over and over again, we are commanded to remember. We are commanded to remember that which makes us holy (the Sabbath). We are commanded to remember that which makes us who we are (the Torah). And we are commanded to remember our history.

We remember. We remember our forefathers and our foremothers. We remember our heroes. We remember our temples and our kingdoms.

At this time of year, we remember Egypt. This 3,000-year-old history is one of the most important stories we tell – a story that shapes us as a people. Every year at Seder, we remind ourselves that we must tell our people’s stories “l’Dor v’Dor,” from generation to generation.

At this time of year, we also remember another event that has shaped us as a people – a much more recent history. A week after Passover ends, we will mark Yom Hashoah, the commemoration of the horrors of the Holocaust.

We remember.

The Holocaust demands that we remember in a different way, however – a global way. The Holocaust did not only re-shape the Jewish people; it re-shaped the world. The Holocaust is one of the most significant events in human history, if only for how it changed how we see ourselves and our behavior.

This was not the first time that one group of people attempted to eradicate another, but it was the first time we recognized genocide for what it was. It was, perhaps, the first time humanity truly reflected on our own behavior as a species and blanched at the unimaginable cruelty we found there.

We may never truly understand how such an atrocity was possible, but we all have a responsibility to remember that it was possible.

We at Teach the Shoah have taken the task of helping the world remember as the central part of our mission.

Over the last 18 months, we have brought college students together with Holocaust survivors to keep these survivors’ memories alive. Each student learns a single survivor’s story. They stand in front of the survivors, and the world, and promise to keep this memory. They promise to share the story for as long as they can.

Most of these students are not Jewish. As they bring these survivors’ stories to communities across the country, they show the world that the Holocaust is a story we all must tell and we all must hear.

Our third cohort of students is preparing to start their journey to become keepers of survivor memories. As we approach both Passover and Yom Hashoah, we feel that we are beginning to fulfill our own promise – to remember l’Dor v’Dor, from generation to generation.

The photo collage shows our Lesaper tellers and survivors – from left to right and top to bottom: Emily Hand & Harry Davids; Henry Slucki & Sarah Dilatush; Sonia Chiappe & Ellie Rubin; Cooper Horton, Eva Brettler, & Libby Holden; Lya Frank & Riley Farco; Matthew Taleghani & Eva Nathanson; Torrie Herrington & Gabriella Karin; Avery Epperson & Henry Slucki; Taylor O’Neil & Gabriella Karin; Rowan Fripp with Monika White & Gitta Morris; Maddi Ruiz & Henry Weil; Eva Nathanson & Brenna Metts.

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