Holocaust Remembered 2026

Holocaust Remembered

UNCOVERING THE TRUTH

Separating Fact from Fiction

What is the Holocaust?

(As defined by the 1979 President Jimmy Carter’s Commission on the Holocaust)

“The Holocaust was the systematic bureaucratic annihilation of six million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators as a central act of state, during the second World War. It was a crime unique in the annals of human history, different not only in the quantity of violence—the sheer number killed—but in its manner and purpose as a mass criminal enterprise organized by the state against defenseless civilian populations. The decision to kill every Jew everywhere in Europe: the definition of Jew as target for death transcended all boundaries…

The concept of annihilation of an entire people, as distinguished from their subjugation, was unprecedented; never before in human history had genocide been an all-pervasive government policy unaffected by territorial or economic advantage and unchecked by moral or religious constraints….

The Holocaust was not simply a throwback to medieval torture or archaic barbarism, but a thoroughly modern expression of bureaucratic organization, industrial management, scientific achievement and technological sophistication. The entire apparatus of the German bureaucracy was marshaled in the service of the extermination process.

The Holocaust stands as a tragedy for Europe, for Western Civilization and for all the world. We must remember the facts of the Holocaust and work to understand these facts.”

The Holocaust was an event contemporaneous in large part with World War II–but separate from it. In fact, the Final Solution often took precedence over the war effort–as trains, personnel and materials needed at the front were not allowed to be diverted from death camp assignments. On a very basic level, the Holocaust must be confronted in terms of a specific evil of antisemitism–a virulent hatred of the Jewish people and the Jewish faith. An immediate response to the Holocaust must be a commitment to combat prejudice whenever it might exist. The following articles will demonstrate how the Holocaust educational community is trying to uphold the commitment as outlined above.

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

Next Chapter

It is now for the 13th time that Holocaust Remembered appears in print—first as a supplement to South Carolina newspapers and now as an independent publication. This would not have been possible without the dedication of Dr. Lilly Filler, sole editor for the first 12 issues.

In the inaugural edition of April 2014, Dr. Filler wrote: “It is with great pride and anticipation that the Columbia Holocaust Education Commission presents this edition to the Midlands community.” The supplement counted 24 pages and was planned as an annual publication “to honor our liberators and survivors, to remember the 6 million Jews and millions of others who were murdered, and to educate our South Carolinians.”

Over 13 years, Holocaust Remembered has grown in size and reach. It nearly doubled in pages and is now distributed throughout South Carolina. Available in print and online, it has caught the attention of Holocaust educators across North America.

We remain committed to its original idea. The first issue focused on liberators and survivors celebrating D-Day 1944. In today’s issue, we continue this tradition. Dr. Filler honors her own parents, both Holocaust survivors who met in Munich in 1945. With Eileen Chapenik’s story of “Mickey” Dorsey, we continue honoring South Carolina liberators. Stacy Steele remembers Lon Redman, a witness to the Holocaust, and Joe Wachter reflects on John W. Drummond, the South Carolina

state senator who fought in Europe. While neither a liberator nor a direct witness, Drummond became aware of the mass murder of Jews during his experiences as a prisoner of war, instilling an understanding that would guide his approach to public service.

This edition focuses on the theme “Uncovering the Truth: Separating Facts from Fiction.” Contributors use various angles to share their experiences and approaches to learning and teaching about the Holocaust.

Our thanks and gratitude go to all contributors, the production team and the artist who created the cover art. But we could not have presented Holocaust Remembered 2026 without the previous 12 editions. As a team of four, we can attest to the enormous challenge the first editor faced in 2014 and the years to come. Dr. Filler not only collected the stories and articles but also penned many herself and raised funds for publication.

We are forever grateful to Dr. Filler for establishing a publication that has found its place in Holocaust education and remembrance. To honor her work as an editor and avid advocate for Holocaust education, we present “Lilly’s Column” on page 48—a new tradition we hope to begin today.

William Cox, Ed.D. Adam Pitluk, Ph.D. Johannes Schmidt, Ph.D. Stacy Steele, M.A.

Jadzia Szklarz Stern/Ben Stern

LILLY FILLER, M.D. 10 Teaching the Holocaust Through Community Experiences

JEFF EARGLE, PH.D. 13 Uncovering the Truth

the Past

20 Defending Truth

Dorsey

Lon Redman

STACY STEELE, M.A.

30 Accuracy in Holocaust Education

SCHAEFER 32 Mercy of Looking BY SAWYER JACKSON

K-12 Students

41 Literally “uncovering” the Truth

Student Contest 2026 BY SCOTT AUSPELMYER

Column

Scott Auspelmyer is the executive director of the South Carolina Council on the Holocaust. He is a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum teaching fellow who also has 19 years of experience teaching high school social studies in South Carolina and was previously recognized as the National Council for the Social Studies Secondary Educator of the Year. He has presented at numerous state and national conferences and regularly conducts professional development training in Holocaust education for teachers in South Carolina and beyond.

BY SCOTT AUSPELMYER

Going to the Source to Uncover the Truth

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

— JOHN ADAMS

Currently, we live in an era that some have characterized as a “post-truth” world.

This is one in which the public’s agreement on a shared set of facts has declined due to the spread of misinformation and the blurring of facts and fiction. This has even led to discussions in the area of education and schooling, where debates have raged over which historical and contemporary topics deserve to be taught in the classroom and how they should be taught.

Interestingly, this debate within education has been one that Holocaust educators have been on the front lines of addressing since the 1990s, when the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the impactful film Schindler’s List and the writing of standards for social studies in states across the U.S. combined to

compel the incorporation of the teaching of the Holocaust in classrooms across the country.

From the start, Holocaust educators recognized the need to ground their lessons by giving students access to firsthand accounts and the top scholars and museums of the world that are dedicated to promoting quality Holocaust education to ensure meaningful remembrance of the event. In our state, the South Carolina Council on the Holocaust (SCCH), which was formed in 1989 during the time of the standards movement, has continued to promote this work to assist teachers in helping students uncover the truth of the event by going to the source.

The SCCH’s flagship contribution to preserving Holocaust memory to be utilized by teachers and shared with students and adults alike is the collection of video testimonies we worked to tape

and preserve starting in the 1990s. We have 25 full-length video testimonies of Holocaust survivors who settled in South Carolina in the decades following World War II, along with nine testimonies of U.S. military personnel from South Carolina who participated in liberating some of the concentration camps and two witnesses, one of whom was a boy in the Hitler Youth during the Nazi era.

These testimonies provide an unvarnished examination of the truth of the events of the Holocaust as experienced by those who lived through it and those who witnessed it. They are a powerful and undeniable testament of the human spirit in such difficult and horrific times, while also clearly demonstrating first-person evidence of the event to challenge any who might deny or attempt to diminish the reality of it.

In addition to promoting the use of survivor and witness testimony, the SCCH also has worked tirelessly in recent years to expand opportunities for teachers to bring authentic experiences to their students with the assistance of museums dedicated to Holocaust education. Last year, the council sponsored eight schools in the state to host a tour of the grounds of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. The uniqueness of this is that it is a two-hour live tour of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum conducted by a guide who works

at the museum who walks the grounds of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau while speaking to students via an online platform. Thus, this is all happening in real time and there are opportunities for students to engage directly with the guide to ask questions. Effectively, this experience is the closest that one can have other than being at Auschwitz for the tour itself. The overwhelmingly positive feedback we received from the teachers and students who participated has led the SCCH to continue to sponsor this tour for at least 20 schools for the 2025-2026 school year and hopefully for more years to come.

A different experience that we now offer to bring to classrooms is the Stars Without a Heaven: Children in the Holocaust exhibit. This exhibit is from Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel, which granted the SCCH permission to reprint this exhibit for use in schools and community centers in South Carolina. As stated by Yad Vashem: “The exhibition is dedicated to the unique stories of children during the Holocaust. Despite their appalling situations and living conditions, children still engaged in imaginative play, sketching and writing, expressing their hopes, dreams and fears.”

We offer this exhibit to all schools

for them to have their students see how children victims of the Holocaust attempted to continue to live their lives under the worst conditions imaginable. The impact of this exhibit is felt most through the words of the children who are quoted throughout the exhibit discussing what they did to continue to celebrate momentous events such as bar mitzvahs and birthdays, but also how they dealt with the challenges placed upon them and their families by the perpetrators.

Another unique program that ensures more opportunities for students to learn

the facts rather than fiction about the Holocaust is the SCCH Library Book Donation Initiative. Started in 2024 to celebrate the council’s 35th year, this initiative seeks to provide $500 worth of nonfiction books to select school libraries across the state. Over the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 school years, we had 35 schools receive this funding, and the success of the program had led us to continue it this school year with a goal of involving at least 20 schools as recipients. Overall, this means that by the end of this school year, this program will have collectively provided new nonfiction books that are accessible to over 50,000 students in South Carolina through their school libraries.

The aforementioned offerings are just a few of the opportunities and experiences the SCCH makes available to schools, teachers and communities throughout the state. They display our continued dedication to helping all South Carolinians uncover the truth of the Holocaust as it aligns with our mission to educate all through teaching, outreach and commemoration. Adherence to this mission ensures that we will continue to work to preserve the factual memory of the Holocaust for many years to come.

Dr. Lilly S. Filler, past Chair of the South Carolina Council on the Holocaust and past Editor of the Holocaust Remembered publication, is a retired OB/GYN. She is the daughter of Holocaust survivors Jadzia and Ben Stern and is passionately committed to Holocaust education.

“You Will Survive” —

The Story of Jadzia Szklarz Stern

My mother, Jadzia Szklarz Stern, was born April 17, 1926, in Wtoszczowa, Poland. She was the fourth of eight children born to Laja Gross and Wolf (Zev) Szklarz. When she spoke about her immediate and extended family, her face would shine and her eyes would light up. She described a loving household filled with grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins who gathered for Shabbat meals and Jewish holidays. She remembered a joyful early childhood and many friends in her small Polish village.

According to my mother, my grandmother, Laja, was a homemaker who cooked, baked, sewed and cared for her family of 10. There was always a pot of soup on the stove. When the children brought friends home, another cup of water was added, stretching the soup to include them. My grandfather, Wolf, was a traveling cobbler who repaired and sold shoes throughout the countryside from a wagon. He was often away for days at a time but always returned home in time for the Sabbath. Though the family lived modestly, my mother felt loved and secure.

My mother was friendly with both Jewish and Christian children in her neighborhood and at school. During

Christian holidays, however, the parents of her close friend Malka, who was Catholic, would forbid their daughter from playing with her. This devastated my mother, especially around Easter. When she asked why they could not play, Malka told her it was because Jews killed Jesus. My mother, then 6 years old, insisted no one in her family had killed anyone. “It must have been another family, maybe the other Jewish family down the road,” she reasoned. After a few weeks, the girls were allowed to play together again.

She also remembered schoolboys who stole her homework and chased her down a hill yelling “Jew girl.” The trauma sometimes kept her from returning to school immediately. Despite this, she often said her happy family life outweighed these hardships.

In 1936, the family moved to Bedzin, a larger town divided between Jewish and Christian residents.

BY LILLY FILLER, M.D.

The town featured a central square with shops, a large church and a castle, both of which still stand today. The synagogue no longer exists.

My mother lived in Bedzin at the same time as Rutka Laskier, often referred to as the “Polish Anne Frank,” who kept a diary in 1943 before her deportation

to Auschwitz. I later read Rutka’s diary, hoping to find mention of my mother, but she was not included.

By that time, my mother’s older siblings had left home. One sister, Witka, married, and her brothers Ben and Abraham enlisted in the Polish army. My mother became the oldest child remaining at home. In 1940, the Nazis created the Bedzin ghetto, adjacent to the Sosnowiec ghetto, forcing the family from their home. Living conditions were cramped and food was scarce, but my mother, then 14, still felt safe with her family.

Her father decided to move the family into a loft in a neighbor’s barn, hoping it would offer protection. Jadzia, her parents and four younger siblings-Sabina, Cela, Hillel and Rosalyn-moved into the loft, bringing a large trunk with them. They hid there for a time, but their location was eventually betrayed. One morning, Nazis arrived and demanded the family climb down a makeshift ladder.

Terrified, Laja pulled my mother aside and said, “Jadzia, darling, you must climb into the trunk and stay quiet. We must leave you now, but you will survive.”

A Nazi guard stopped her and demanded to know who she was and where she was going.

My mother cried and begged to go with her parents, but Laja remained firm, repeating, ‘’You will survive,” She believed her oldest daughter of the remaining children had the best chance of living.

When the Nazis demanded to know how many people were hiding, Wolf answered, “Six,” protecting the secret that my mother was hidden in the trunk. Jadzia climbed inside, received a kiss from her mother and the lid was closed. SShe heard her father pleading with the Nazis not to hurt his children, to no avail. Soon a silence fell and the family as my mom knew was gone, never to be seen again.

She eventually fell asleep. When she awoke, it was dark and eerily quiet. She climbed out of the trunk, fixed her long dark hair, descended the ladder and went outside. Fires burned throughout the town as neighbors were corralled into lines. The scene was chaotic and terrifying.

A Nazi guard stopped her and demanded to know who she was and where she was going. She said she was looking for a friend and denied being Jewish. He took her to headquarters, where a town acquaintance urged her to run toward distant lines. She

was soon forced into a transport from the Sosnowiec ghetto to Auschwitz.

My mother was deported Aug. 5, 1943, with 265 men and 248 women. They traveled for two days in a crowded railcar with no food and very little water. There was only standing room. She never spoke further about the journey.

Upon arrival at Auschwitz, she was tattooed with the number 53775 with a triangle under the first 7 on her left forearm, marking her as Jewish. From that moment until liberation, she was known only by her number. Days later, a friend from Bedzin recognized her and

The

trauma haunted her, causing nightly nightmares for the rest of her life.

told her that her younger sister Sabina was in the infirmary.

My mother rushed there and found Sabina badly burned on her lower abdomen and legs, lying on the top bunk of a three-tier bed. My mother climbed up to touch and try to embrace her sister. Sabina told her the rest of the family had been taken to Treblinka, though she did not know their fate.

A guard soon entered and pulled the sisters apart. They clung to each other, refusing to separate, even if it meant

death. The guard easily forced them apart and sent my mother away. My mother later reflected, ‘They would not even let us stay together in death.”

My mother spoke very little about the rest of her experiences. Records from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum show she was sent to multiple camps, including Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbruck (Malchow subcamp) and the Leipzig labor camp. She was liberated from Leipzig in early May 1945 by Soviet forces after 21 months in Nazi captivity. The trauma haunted her, causing nightly nightmares for the rest of her life.

I was born in Munich on Dec. 6, 1947. My parents wanted to raise their daughter in a free country. With assistance from my uncle Gabe Stern, who had lived in South Carolina since 1916, we immigrated to Columbia, South Carolina. My parents remained deeply grateful to him for the rest of their lives.

She met my father, Ben Szterenzys (Stern), through her surviving brother Ben Szklarz in September 1945. They married June 16, 1946, in Munich. A cherished photograph from their wedding day shows them young, with little money and few surviving relatives, but filled with hope. They stopped at a florist along the way to the courthouse and asked to pose briefly with the bouquets. The sales tag remains visible in the photo—a small but meaningful beginning.

We arrived in South Carolina on June 8, 1949, and our family eventually grew to include three more children. My father worked as a lumber salesman, then a carpenter and homebuilder. My mother was a devoted homemaker who learned to drive, sew, cook and arrange flowers. She ensured her children experienced opportunities she never had.

She became active in both the Jewish and civic communities and was among the first Holocaust survivors to speak publicly to schools, churches and organizations. She received the Order of the Palmetto from Gov. David Beasley. My mother died June 28, 2001.

An Amazing Survival Story: The Life of Ben Stern (Benick Szterenzys)

My father, Ben Stern, was born July 21, 1924, in Kielce, Poland. He was the youngest of four children born to Hadassah Felman and Chaim Hillel Szterenzys. He often joked that he was spoiled and frequently went to his oldest sister, Sophie, who was 11 years older, for spending money. She usually indulged him

He described his upbringing as middle class. When asked what his father did for a living, he called him an “entrepreneur,” a man of many skills. His mother was

a homemaker, and life in Kielce was comfortable. When my father was about 8 years old, the family moved to the larger city of Łódź, where his father had greater business opportunities and eventually owned a factory that produced military uniforms for Spain under dictator Francisco Franco.

By 1939, as political conditions worsened, the family believed they would be safer in a smaller town and returned to Kielce. Living together at the time were Sophie and her husband, Berek; sister Faye; brother Joel; and my father’s parents.

All worked in local businesses. In 1941, Kielce was declared a ghetto by the SS. In August 1942, the ghetto was liquidated, and more than 21,000 Jews were deported to Treblinka. Daily life became defined by fear.

My father often recalled the moment that changed his life forever.

He described being awakened one summer morning in 1942 by shouting and pounding at the door. Nazi officers ordered the family to assemble outside with their neighbors. Among them was his sister Sophie, holding her 3-monthold baby, Mietek. My father witnessed the Nazis violently murder baby Mietek during

My father often recalled the moment that changed his life forever.

the roundup—an act of brutality that remained etched in his memory for the rest of his life.

The Nazis separated my father, his two sisters, and his brother Joel from the rest of the family. He was forced into labor, cleaning the ghetto on his hands and knees, picking up trash with his teeth, while the rest of the family was deported to Treblinka. Most were never seen again.

For the next two years, my father remained in the Kielce area, working in the Henryków labor camp. On Aug. 2, 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz with 547 others. He later recalled the suffocating heat of the cattle car, the lack of food, water or sanitation and the overwhelming fear.

Upon arrival, he was subjected to a selection process conducted by an SS officer directing prisoners with hand gestures either to the left or the right.

He later recalled the suffocating heat of the cattle car, the lack of food, water or sanitation and the overwhelming fear.

Dad did not know then that right meant life and left meant death. He was sent to the right.

My father often said he survived because of luck.

Decades later, in a 1988 interview with The State newspaper, he reflected that survival was also “God’s will” and that it gave him a reason to speak out. He said hatred and bigotry had led to unimaginable suffering and that humanity could not survive without rejecting both.

At Auschwitz, he was tattooed with the number B-3348 on his left arm. Later he was transferred to other camps including Oranienburg, Sachsenhausen, and Dachau. He was liberated April 30, 1945, by American forces from Allach, a subcamp of Dachau. He weighed 87 pounds.

After liberation, he remained at Allach, which became a displaced persons camp, to recover. Although grateful to the Americans for saving his life, the surrounding remnants of Nazi cruelty barracks, guard towers

and fellow survivors-remained constant reminders of trauma.

One fellow survivor, also named Ben, stayed close to my father. After several weeks, the two left the camp together and made their way to Munich on foot, by train and hitchhiking.

Europe was devastated, and survivors sought to locate family members. With the help of the American Red Cross, survivors were encouraged to return to their hometowns to register. In September 1945, my father and his companion traveled separately to Poland to search for relatives, navigating chaos without documents or money.

My father found his sister Sophie in Kielce. His companion Ben Szklarz found his sister, Jadzia Szklarz, in Wtoszczowa. Sophie declined to leave, hoping her husband had survived. Jadzia returned to Munich with her brother, Ben Szklarz, and that is when she met my father, Ben Stern. They married June 16, 1946.

I was born in Munich on Dec. 6, 1947.

My parents were determined to leave Europe. Although options included Palestine and Scandinavian countries, my father was resolute about coming to the United States. Immigration required

They embodied resilience, gratitude and civic responsibility.

sponsorship, and quotas were limited. He remembered his uncle Gabe Stern, who had immigrated to South Carolina in 1916.

My father mailed a letter addressed simply to “Gabe Stern, Lexington, S.C. Against all odds, the letter arrived. Uncle Gabe sponsored our family.

We sailed aboard the SS Mccree and arrived at Ellis Island on June 8, 1949. Immigration officials told my father his surname was unacceptable and offered alternatives. He chose “Stern,” matching his uncle’s name.

My parents became U.S. citizens in the early 1950s, and I was naturalized with them. They settled in Columbia, South Carolina, where my father founded Ben Stern Construction Co. He became active in civic and Jewish life, serving as president of Beth Shalom Synagogue and as a lay cantor. He was also a Mason and a Shriner.

My parents loved Columbia and the United States. They embodied resilience, gratitude and civic responsibility.

My father died Dec. 6, 1999, on my birthday.

Full video testimony of Jadzia Szklarz and Ben Stern can be found in the Survivor Testimony in Video Library on the SC Council on the Holocaust website scholocaustcouncil.org. Jadzia and Ben were also interviewed by Shoah Foundation, MUSC Jewish studies program and by ETVISCCH. All photos from Dr. Filler’s private collection.

Dr. Jeff Eargle is a faculty member in the College of Education at the University of South Carolina, where he serves as the Secondary Social Studies Program coordinator. He has been involved in K-12 Holocaust education for 19 years.

Teaching the Holocaust Through Community Experiences

BY JEFF EARGLE, PH.D.

Last summer, while visiting northeastern Poland with my family, I was struck by two Holocaust memorials—one in Gołdap and the other in Suwałki— located approximately 30 miles apart. While both memorials acknowledge the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and are located at sites where synagogues once stood, the memorials convey different, yet accurate, narratives of how the Holocaust was perpetrated in their respective communities. Before 1939, Gołdap was an East Prussian town while Suwałki was a Polish town. Because of this, the Gołdap monument notes that the synagogue was “burnt by the Nazis” during Kristallnacht, while the Suwałki monument notes the murder of the Jewsish residents by the “German invaders.” Because of the national border that separated Gołdap and Suwałki, these two memorials capture how the Holocaust was experienced differently by these communities.

As an educator, I think a lot about community and communities. In my classroom, I strive to build community among my students, and we regularly discuss how community exists within schools. Given that a school is an institution within a broader community, I discuss with my students the importance of working in partnership with members of the community. As a social studies educator, I often speak and teach about the importance of contributing to our local,

state, national and global communities. Of course, social media allows us all to engage in online communities, for better or worse. While communities exists across scale and takes different forms, we often are drawn to our local community.

In the past year, I have been thinking more about community in relation to Holocaust education. To me, this makes sense. A community is a group of people within a geographic area who are bound by shared experiences, beliefs and institutions and who both interact with and are interdependent on each other. While seeking to preserve a community’s uniqueness, members of the community may, unfortunately, strictly define

who does and does not belong in the community. Using this description of a community allows students to understand the Holocaust in new ways while also thinking about their own communities. Recently, I have worked with two colleagues on two projects that focus on community—one focused on the visibility of the Majdanek concentration camp to the Lublin community and the other focused on the Jewish community in Suwałki—as a means of engaging students with complex, fact-driven investigations that challenge misconceptions about the Holocaust. From 1941-1944, Majdanek operated as a prisoner of war camp, a labor camp and a killing center. The camp’s official

name was Konzentrationslager Lublin (KL Lublin) and it was a mere 2.5 miles from Lublin’s city center in the suburb of Majdan Tatarski. Both Majdanek and Lublin are situated on hills, with a decrease in elevation between them. At the time, there were no trees or tall buildings to obscure the view of the camp from the city, and the area surrounding the camp included open meadows and Lublin-area suburbs. Eyewitness accounts and photographic evidence demonstrate that people could see what was occurring in the camp. In other words, Majdanek was built inside of a community, and community members—Catholic Poles— witnessed genocide perpetrated against their Jewish neighbors.

My colleague Bethany Sanders and I developed a lesson to explore what Lubliners witnessed occurring at Majdanek. The lesson, which we taught to both preservice teachers and high school students, required students to create original topographic maps and corroborate their maps with eyewitness accounts and photographs. This approach challenged the misconceptions that killing centers were in isolated, remote places

and that the local populace did not know what was occurring. The lesson prompted students to grapple with the civic and moral questions around our responsibility to act when we witness persecution and atrocities occurring in our community.

In contrast to understanding witnesses, an inquiry into the prewar Jewish community of Suwałki positions students to consider the intricacy of communities. This aligns with best practices in Holocaust education. The scale and scope of the Holocaust is often a challenge for students—and teachers—to grapple with. How do we comprehend 6 million Jews murdered across the European continent? To address this, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s guidelines for teaching the Holocaust rightly recommend translating statistics into people by focusing on individual and personal experiences to humanize the victims. However, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance recommends translating statistics into people using the stories of individuals and the history of communities.

individuals and vanished communities. A single yizkor book offers readers a range of perspectives on complex communities and includes narratives, folk tales, songs, photos and maps. As such, for teachers, yizkor books are a rich, textured, multimedia resource to demonstrate Jewish agency before, during and after the Holocaust.

Using Suwałki as a case study, my colleague Allie Landry and I have developed a series of interdisciplinary strategies using the yizkor book—Yisker Bukh Suvalk (Memorial Book of Suvalk) —written and edited by Suwałki Jews who immigrated to the United States both before and after the Holocaust. In this case, a yizkor-bukh (plural: yizkor-bikher), commonly referred to as a yizkor book, is a book created by largely nonprofessional writers to document the history of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and, in so doing, serve as a memorial to both murdered

In our work with the Suwałki yizkor book, we highlight aspects of the Jewish community that may counter misconceptions of Jews as a monolith. To do this, we use excerpts that address the development of the community from 1790 to 1950. First, we note that Jewish Suwałki was economically and politically diverse. While Jews were farmers, artisans and carpenters, they also owned textile and lumber mills, breweries, photography studios, pharmacies and movie theaters. The Jewish part of Suwałki included a synagogue and prayer houses alongside a hospital and sports leagues. While Jews disagreed over secular acculturation, Zionism and bundism, the Memorial Book of Suvalk demonstrates how Jews were politically engaged in the community and, by the 1930s, held a quarter of the seats on the Suwałki town council.

Additionally, our work positions students to explore prewar JewishChristian relationships in Suwałki. Located in the borderlands, Suwałki was home to people identifying as Polish, Prussian, Russian, Lithuanian, Belarusian, Roma, Tatar, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Russian Old Believer and/or a combination of those. In noting that the city’s diversity allowed them to experience less hostility compared to other Jews in Eastern Europe, contributors to the Memorial Book of Suvalk documented individual Christians who collaborated with, supported and respected their Jewish neighbors. While this was true, the yizkor book also documents how Catholic Poles conducted pogroms against Suwałki Jews in 1914 and 1936. Notably, the 1936 pogrom ended when Jews, armed with pipes and butcher knives, confronted their attackers in the street.

Finally, the Memorial Book of Suvalk offers complex narratives about the Holocaust. The Polish army was able to hold Suwałki for nearly six weeks following the Nazi invasion on September 1, 1939. Between 5,500 and 6,000 Jews lived in the city in September 1939. During and after the invasion, approximately 3,000 fled to Lithuania, where they were ultimately murdered by the Einsatzgruppen. Of those who remained in Suwałki, the elderly and disabled were murdered, while the rest were sent to ghettos in towns south of the city, later entering the camp system. By studying the experience of the Suwałki community, students encounter a narrative that is complicated and splintered, not neat and linear. Additionally, the Holocaust narrative is not about the individual, but how Suwałki Jews helped each other in the camps and remembering actions of those

who died. Thus, students are presented with Holocaust survivor testimony that places the focus on others, a contrast to the typical survivor narratives captured from the 1980s forward that focus on one’s individual experience.

As a number of educators in our current context feel pressure to remove complexity from the local curriculum, my concern is that the Holocaust—like other challenging topics—becomes taught as a litany of facts strung together with little to no meaning or relevance. Schools are institutions in a community, and students are members of their school and broader communities. Using community as a focus of inquiry can position students to develop a stronger understanding of the complexity of the Holocaust, often through a range of disciplines beyond history.

The greater benefit to using community as an anchoring concept is that it helps us better understand our own communities. Teachers and students can engage, as community members, in discussions around how we interact with each other, how we depend on one another, who we include in our community, what our shared vision is for the future of our community, and what responsibilities we have toward our communities and community members. These are important discussions to have in our classroom communities because these are important discussions to have in a democracy. Thus, by teaching the Holocaust through community experiences, teachers can offer evidencebased, textured instruction that supports deeper thinking about both the past and present.

BY HEATHER BROUGHAM-COOK, M.ED.

Unveiling the Truth: Separating Fact From Fiction

As a young witness to injustice and discrimination growing up in apartheid South Africa, I quickly learned these were not abstract concepts but real forces that touch lives, leave scars and, all too often, warp the truth. Some of my earliest memories are shaped by seeing—and sometimes feeling—the sting of words or actions rooted in stereotyping, misinformation or outright prejudice. These formative experiences instilled in me a deep sense of responsibility to confront the fiction that breeds discrimination wherever it appears.

My path as a writer and now as an educator has always been guided by that responsibility: to offer more than lessons from textbooks and instead provide students with the tools to distinguish fact from fiction and memory from myth.

That commitment took on profound new meaning in 2017, when I participated in my first Holocaust education training at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Surrounded by fellow educators and immersed in the gravity of the museum, I was struck by how easily facts can be obscured by decades of distortion and denial. The past there is not static; it is

living, sustained by stewards of memory. It depends on us—the next generation of teachers—to guard it against the everpresent threat of forgetting or fabrication. The training challenged me to continue interrogating historical facts and to teach my students to do the same.

My time at The Olga Lengyel Institute for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights Summer Institute at Queens University in North Carolina intensified that search

for truth. At TOLI, discussions of memory extended beyond historical events to examine how memory is constructed, maintained, manipulated or neglected. I wrestled with new questions: How do we remember? Who decides which stories persist and which fade? How do we recognize when fiction, however subtle, seeps into our collective narratives? It became increasingly clear that the Holocaust, perhaps more than any other

chapter in modern history—demands vigilance. Some continue to revise and distort what happened, turning fact into dangerous fiction and threatening both the dignity of survivors and the memory of victims. Immersed in the institute’s writing and reflection, I made a personal pledge: I would connect my own memories of injustice with collective history and insist on truth, no matter how uncomfortable or complex.

Those early experiences as a Holocaust educator taught me that shared memory is often contested. At a South Carolina Council on the Holocaust seminar in Columbia, a chance encounter with curators of the Anne Frank Traveling Exhibit opened new doors. When I learned it might be possible to bring the exhibit to my students in Bluffton, South Carolina, I recognized an opportunity not

only to introduce Anne’s story, but also to empower students to become educators themselves—committed to carefully separating fact from the fiction that sometimes overtakes her legacy.

What began with 15 students undergoing peer docent training under the guidance of Morgan Bailey of the Anne Frank Center soon grew to more than 45 Cross Schools students serving as trained docents in the Lowcountry. Their work goes far beyond reciting a curated script. Students learn to become custodians of memory, resisting mythologizing and oversimplification that can strip Anne Frank’s story of its power and nuance. Together, we explore her life not as a tragic fairy tale, but as testimony to resilience amid one of history’s darkest chapters. In every tour and conversation, peer docents answer difficult questions

with historical evidence and address common misconceptions to distinguish fact from fiction.

My journey as an educator has never stopped at the boundaries of my classroom or community. Driven by curiosity and a sense of duty to those lost to injustice, I embraced opportunities to deepen my understanding. As an SCCH Teacher Fellow and a JFR Alfred Lerner Fellow, I connected with educators, historians and survivors worldwide. These relationships opened the door to transformative learning experiences, including travel to Holocaust-related sites in and around Berlin with Centropa, led by Lauren Granite and Ed Serotta, and later to Poland through SCCH programs led by Scott Auspelmyer and Jeff Eargle in consultation with the Taube Foundation.

Standing on the steps of a Berlin synagogue, walking beneath the arch bearing the Nazi lie “Arbeit Macht Frei” at Auschwitz-Birkenau, or reflecting on names etched into Stolpersteine in Kraków is to confront both unfathomable heartbreak and immense courage. In those moments, denial collapses under the weight of reality. No photograph, textbook or film can convey the full impact of standing where lives were shattered and, in some cases, hope persisted. Travel to these sites was more than an academic exercise; it was an ethical imperative. Learning in situ multiplies the urgency of memory and crystallizes our shared responsibility to truth. I returned to Bluffton committed to transforming not only what my students learn, but how they learn.

With support from SCCH, my students participated in live, docent-led virtual tours of Auschwitz, encountering preserved history firsthand. While no virtual experience can replace being there, these tours are powerful tools in the fight against denial and minimization. Students confront physical evidence that deniers attempt to erase and come to understand that the truth of the Holocaust is not a matter of opinion, but of documented fact supported by testimony and historical record.

Equally important, I strive to show students that the dangers of fiction, myth and “othering” are not confined to the past. Through visits to Congregation Mickve Israel in Savannah and dialogue with Rabbi Brad Bloom of Beth Yam on Hilton Head Island, students explore difficult questions and practice respectful engagement with differing perspectives. The classroom becomes a space where separating fact from fiction is understood not as a single lesson, but as a lifelong practice.

My experiences are not badges of honor; they are anchors and reminders of my duty to fact. I have seen how history can be rewritten through omission, euphemism or outright lies. The impact of Holocaust denial on survivors, descendants and students—left uncertain about whom or what to believe—fuels rising antisemitism, conspiracy theories and erosion of our collective moral compass.

That is why I center my teaching on evidence-based narratives and engage students directly with survivor testimony, historical documents and primary sources. Through programs such as the Anne Frank Traveling Exhibit, Yad Vashem’s Children

in the Holocaust and the Yiddish Book Center’s Paper Bridges, students learn what it means to carry truth in their own voices. Whether guiding younger students, participating in virtual tours, reading poetry from the Ringelblum Archive or engaging in dialogue with faith leaders, they learn not only to know history, but to safeguard it.

It is not enough to deliver facts to the next generation. Truth must be nurtured, shared and defended. The Holocaust, with all its pain and complexity, resists easy consumption or comforting platitudes. It demands vigilance—and a commitment to preserving facts and the lessons they carry. In a world where conspiracy, revisionism and distortion find fertile ground, separating fact from fiction has never been more urgent.

As I watch students step into leadership as peer docents and see colleagues and community members engage in these conversations, I find hope that truth can prevail over denial, indifference and forgetting. This work is neither simple nor complete, and it does not belong solely to historians or educators. It belongs to all of us.

So, fellow educators, choose to become active participants in memory. To students and readers: Preserve it. Let us pledge to hold fast to truth when fiction tempts, to recognize that collective memory and shared history are both a gift and a responsibility. In doing so, we honor those who came before us and empower future generations to resist injustice with informed hearts and the courage to distinguish fact from fiction.

Digging Up the Past: Two Examples

Sobibor

Even though 80 years have passed since the end of World War II and the Nazi regime’s systematic murder of 6 million Jewish people, efforts to uncover these crimes continue, particularly in the forests of Eastern Europe. Despite meticulous Nazi recordkeeping and testimony from thousands of Holocaust survivors, many atrocities were lost to time, either through deliberate concealment or the gradual reclamation of nature. As the number of survivors dwindles, archaeological excavations—such as those at the Sobibor killing center and across the forests of Ukraine—along with documentary effort, are critical to preserving physical evidence of the Holocaust and countering denial.

While some believe Holocaust denial is a relic of the past due to the abundance of survivor testimony and historical evidence, denial of the scale—and even the existence—of the genocide persists. Over time, Holocaust denial has evolved from fringe propaganda into online misinformation and conspiracy theories that attempt to minimize or distort Nazi crimes. Hate speech, violent rhetoric and outright denial now spread faster

than ever. Some deniers cite the lack of visible physical remains as “proof” that gas chambers or crematoria were misidentified or served other purposes. In an age of artificial intelligence and disinformation, tangible evidence remains essential in confronting Holocaust denial and affirming historical truth.

BY ALLI OTT, M.ED.

Under Operation Reinhard in 1942, the Nazis established Sobibor as one of three killing centers, locating it in a remote forest in eastern Poland. An estimated 150,000 to 250,000 Jews were murdered during the camp’s 14-month operation from April 1942 to October 1943. Unlike concentration camps that relied on forced

labor, killing centers had few survivors, as most victims were murdered immediately upon arrival. Only several hundred prisoners were kept alive at a time to assist camp operations before they, too, were killed.

Following a prisoner uprising on Oct. 14, 1943, Nazi officials closed Sobibor and attempted to erase all evidence of the camp. Bodies were exhumed and cremated, gas chambers dismantled, and guard towers and buildings destroyed. Pine trees were planted over the mass graves, allowing new growth to obscure the site. Unlike Auschwitz and Majdanek, where structures and other evidence survived, the concealment of Sobibor was effective for decades. This absence of visible remains contributed to the camp’s “mythical” reputation and was later cited by Holocaust deniers as supposed evidence that the camp never existed.

In 2007, archaeologists from Israel and Poland began a nearly eight-year excavation to uncover Sobibor’s gas chambers. Led by Yoram Haimi and Wojciech Mazurek, the team used careful, noninvasive methods to minimize

damage. Their work uncovered physical remnants that corroborated survivor accounts and revealed details about the victims’ final moments.

Because of the site’s fragility, excavations were conducted by hand. The effort yielded significant discoveries, including a wedding ring, jewelry marked with the Star of David, cutlery and a

nameplate belonging to a 6-year-old girl. These personal items offer insight into the lives of victims murdered at Sobibor. The team also uncovered remains of fences, barracks, crematoria and the path known as the “Road to Heaven,” which led victims to the gas chambers.

In September 2014, archaeologists uncovered the brick foundations of

Sobibor’s gas chambers. The discovery provided definitive physical evidence of Nazi crimes at a lesser-known but equally lethal camp, strengthening the historical record and undermining Holocaust denial.

Philip Bialowitz, a survivor of the Sobibor uprising, called the discovery “a victory, not only for us survivors, but for humanity.” Though Bialowitz has since died, his words remain resonant.

Holocaust by Bullets

Sobibor is not the only Holocaust site to undergo recent excavation. Father Patrick Desbois, a French Catholic priest and founder of Yahad-In Unum, has led efforts to document what is known as the “Holocaust by Bullets.” Inspired by his grandfather’s captivity during World War II and a desire to improve Jewish-Catholic relations, Desbois began his work in Eastern Europe in 2004.

Before the establishment of killing centers and gas chambers, Nazi forces carried out mass shootings of Jewish communities across Eastern Europe. These executions were conducted by

the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units that murdered Jews in forests, ravines and fields. Desbois has devoted his life to locating execution sites and interviewing remaining witnesses, collecting more than 7,000 eyewitness testimonies.

Traveling through Ukraine, Belarus and other former Soviet territories, Desbois and his team developed a systematic

approach to interviewing witnesses, many of whom were children during the Holocaust. Using standardized questions and a sensitive interviewing style, the team helped witnesses recount events despite lingering guilt or fear. After interviews, Desbois and his team retraced witnesses’ movements, often traveling by foot or vehicle to the execution sites.

While some believe Holocaust denial is a relic of the past due to the abundance of survivor testimony and historical evidence, denial of the scale— and even the existence—of the genocide persists.

At suspected mass graves, the team searched for ballistic evidence and recorded GPS coordinates. Artifacts, including bone fragments and personal belongings, were carefully cataloged. By combining forensic evidence with witness testimony, Desbois created what he calls “maps of memory” across Eastern Europe. Unlike the Sobibor excavations, which aimed to reveal physical structures, Yahad-In Unum reseals sites after documentation. This approach protects remains and restores dignity to victims whose bodies were left unburied. Brief memorials or moments of silence

are often held, transforming sites of denial into places of remembrance and accountability.

Since 2004, Yahad-In Unum has identified more than 3,000 execution sites across eight countries. By preserving testimony and documenting physical evidence, Desbois’ work demonstrates the scale of Nazi atrocities and restores dignity to victims by marking their final resting places. His methodology has also been applied to other genocides, including in Rwanda and Iraq.

Ongoing excavation and preservation efforts throughout Eastern Europe

deepen understanding of the Holocaust and provide concrete evidence against denial and distortion. Despite efforts to erase their crimes, the Nazis failed. Historians and archaeologists continue to demonstrate that genocide leaves evidence that cannot be buried by time or ideology.

Digging up the past is not only about uncovering bones and artifacts. It is about reclaiming truth. By bringing hidden evidence to light, these efforts ensure Holocaust victims are no longer silenced—and that absence can no longer be weaponized as denial.

BY CHAD S.A. GIBBS, PH.D.

Defending Truth: Memory and History Against Distortion and Denial

Holocaust denial and distortion are dangerous and growing problems in these often hateful and troubled times. Denial takes many forms, but the goal is always to cause doubt and undermine the truth in the eyes of the casual observer. Common tactics by deniers include focusing on lessdocumented parts of the Holocaust or attacking any changes and evolution of our understanding of events.

The long-standing denier focus on Sobibor is a prime example. If you had asked in 2010 whether there were any photos of the inside of the Sobibor extermination camp, the answer would have been no. If you had asked just a few years back if any photos of the Nazi gas vans existed, the answer might have been “maybe one.” On a far larger scale, if you had asked just 20 years ago how many concentration camps and ghettos German forces created across Europe, our answer then might have been a few thousand, maybe more. We just didn’t know. History changes. In 2020, a group of German researchers published a book called Photos from Sobibor, bringing new attention to this little-studied place where

the Nazis murdered as many as 250,000 people in gas chambers in 1942-1943. Around 75 years later, a family came forward with a photo album created by a long-dead German guard. After laying hidden in storage for decades, these pictures changed almost everything we thought we knew about that killing center.

As if that wasn’t enough of a bolt from the blue, just five years after the Sobibor photos emerged, another book came out with the first 15 verified photos of a Nazi gas van. As that work notes in its first paragraph, no reputable historian had written about these vans to that point. In the absence of authoritative evidence, however, Holocaust deniers published two books saying that no such vans ever existed.

In 1999, the historian Dr. Geoffrey Megargee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began a project to record all the camps and ghettos of the German state and its allies in 1933-1945. It

was thought this would be a manageable project of one or more volumes. Sadly, Megargee has since passed away while the work goes on in its seventh volume, as yet unfinished. Through the ongoing efforts of this team of researchers, we now

have documentation of over 47,000 camps and ghettos. The enormous scale of Nazi systematic brutality is only now coming into focus more than 80 years after the end of the war.

History evolves. What we know today is different than what we knew yesterday, and it will continue to change as time and discoveries roll on. These truths ought to be simple, agreeable and understandable. When it comes to the Holocaust, however, the way history changes has been used and abused by hateful forces to justify their refusal to accept facts. Deniers call out every change to the record or each poorly understood place as a reason to doubt the whole history of Nazi criminality.

Holocaust deniers fixate on the extermination camps at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka because these sites are not yet as well documented as Auschwitz. Likewise, deniers have tried to claim that gas vans never existed because they too were almost entirely undocumented. Of course, once the photos of each emerged, these voices were suddenly nowhere to be heard. They had already gone off to that next sparsely understood location to restart the cycle.

Memory vs. History

The difference between memory and history is more than a dry academic distinction. Memory is both individual and a function of community. We remember our own lives (with varying degrees of

What we know today is different than what we knew yesterday, and it will continue to change as time and discoveries roll on.

difficulty) while bringing together a set of stories that we like to tell about how we became who we are.

Communities do something similar in ways that create a shared past. This can be the truthful, semi-truthful, or even mythological recollections of how a town got its name or when it was founded, or the much larger issue of national identity.

Memory comes from what we tell, what we choose not to tell, as well as what we can and cannot remember. National memories, just as one example, might leave out lost wars or similar moments of shame and division. The point here is that memory is both frail and not necessarily objective truth. History, when done right, tries to present the reality of what happened as much as possible.

Today’s Germany is as fine an example as any for this difference. At the national level, Germans have mostly come to terms with their history and accepted the national responsibility to retell what their forebears did to Jews and other victims of the Holocaust. National institutions regularly produce volumes of deeply researched work on exactly what Germans did under the Nazi regime while public memorials abound, and educational programming is plentiful. Still, if you enter

certain corners of the present political spectrum, you might not find such a clear representation of the past. Some voices relativize the German past or downplay the significance of the Holocaust for national identity. That is what you might call willful forgetting or selective memory of what it means to be German after 1945, to put it mildly.

Attacking the Witnesses: Deniers Show Their True Colors

Of course, victims of the Holocaust also have their memories and narratives of the past. This goes for both individuals and Jewish communities as a whole. The difference when it comes to the Holocaust is that deniers will not leave the frailties of memory and recollection in peace. Instead, they routinely use these flaws or confusions to drive their attacks on the whole history of Nazi crime.

For as long as there have been memory projects or work to collect Holocaust survivor testimonies, there have been hateful and violent attacks on their statements and on the speakers. Oral histories, or the recorded memories of individuals on video or digital media, have long been a primary target of slander by deniers. These attacks find some success

because of how individual memory is imperfect in ways that should be familiar to us all.

Most human beings can hardly recall what they had for breakfast yesterday with any degree of certainty. Once you add trauma and the passage of time into the attempt to remember, the difficulty is acute. Perfectly honest survivors recorded in oral histories 40 and 50 years after the events of the Holocaust will misremember dates and the names of people involved, or they might even forget the names of the camps they were at. It should be no surprise that it is hard to recall such things years later and through the haze of fear. Still, deniers routinely quibble about the perceived weaknesses they find in the memories of survivors to insist that these narrators are liars or that they are part of

For as long as there have been memory projects or work to collect Holocaust survivor testimonies, there have been hateful and violent attacks on their statements and on the speakers.

some grand conspiracy that has dreamt up the Holocaust. The cruelty of these people should be all that’s necessary to know who they really are. Holocaust deniers are antisemites. They hate Jews without exception or mercy.

Deniers do not care about the differences between memory and history, only about finding the next chance to harm witnesses, mendaciously question history, and cow the survivors into silence. This is always their goal because of the importance that the general public places upon the memories of survivors. Deniers know that they cannot succeed in destroying history without first discrediting the witnesses.

Denier tactics are the same for historical fact or the memories of survivors. In both cases, deniers routinely search for the flaw—historians make

mistakes or don’t yet have the evidence, and survivors forget—then they use what they find to claim the whole subject is a lie. You got the name of the camp you were in wrong; you must have never been in a camp. You wrote that there were only a few thousand camps and ghettos, but now you say there were 47,000; you must be making it all up. They find the real or imagined flaw and pounce in a sickening attempt to claim the whole past is a lie.

What’s worse, this “narrow end of the wedge” strategy obscures the hatred central to denialism, to its benefit. By leading with what they hope will sound like rational questions—and saying things like, “I’m just trying to get to the facts,” or “why can’t we just ask questions?”— deniers cover themselves in a veil of legitimacy. The kinds of nitpicking and narrowly focused mendacious criticisms

practiced by deniers dangerously make their arguments seem more rational than they truly are.

In the end, it comes back to the hatred of Jews and the veneration of fascism, Nazism, antisemitism and racism. Deniers attack the truth of the Holocaust because they know that doing so mocks the victims. Deniers also know that taking this history from Jews and blaming them for such an enormous lie would make it possible to harm Jews all over again. These same forces are never just antisemitic. Those who hate Jews are often also racist, hateful of LGBTQ people, degrading toward women and generally antisocial. These facts make it all the more important that we fight denial, turn back the narrow end of the wedge and preserve both history and memory.

Johannes Schmidt is Professor of German at Clemson University and a member of SCCH since 2021.

Memory and the Holocaust

“It seems to me unnecessary to add that none of the facts are invented.”

— PRIMO LEVI

If it is unnecessary, why does Primo Levi write this line? This contradiction comes from his introduction to Survival in Auschwitz, an account of his experiences in the concentration camp. In the same introduction, he also says his book does not add anything new to what was already known about German death camps. Still, my students find enormous value not only in the individual stories that Levi tells with erudition and clarity, but they also appreciate the philosophical musings about human nature. Every time I open this deeply disturbing text, I learn new facts about the Holocaust. However, Levi insists survivors can never fully convey what they experienced nor can we as readers fully comprehend the horrors of the camps. This disconnect is in part due to the unreliability of our memory. Every time we recall an event, we—unconsciously—add, change, omit, or modify small details. Our brains are not

recording devices that preserve events as they occur.

Ask several witnesses about a fenderbender that just happened on Main Street. After only a few minutes, witnesses may come up with—sometimes vastly —different accounts of the accident. Yet memory research, which revolutionized the field of cognitive psychology in the 1970s, was not accessible to Levi after the war in Italy, when he was writing about his survival in Auschwitz. Rather, his reflections on memory were intuitive and existential. Only decades later in The Memory of the Offence does he fully tackle the problem of memory distortion: “The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even grow, by incorporating extraneous features.” For instance, the ever-growing body of evidence about Nazi atrocities becomes entangled with the experiences of

BY JOHANNES SCHMIDT, PH.D.

survivors. Consider Primo Levi and Jean Améry’s disagreement about meeting each other in Auschwitz.

Jean Améry, born Hans Chaim Maier, was an Austrian essayist who was arrested in 1943, tortured by the Gestapo and later sent to Auschwitz as a political prisoner. In his book At the Mind’s Limits , he claims to have met Levi at Auschwitz III, the Buna-Monowitz labor camp. But Levi responds in The Drowned that he has no recollection of ever meeting Améry. Whose memory is wrong one might ask? Today, it is impossible to reconstruct whether they came across each other and conversed in Auschwitz. But there is more they fundamentally disagreed on: Namely. what Auschwitz or in more general terms the Holocaust did to a survivor. Améry seems to suggest that an intellectual suffered more in Auschwitz, whereas Levi seems to have taken refuge in his intellectual endeavors as an escape from the daily horrors. For example, he retells how he was trying to translate The Canto of Ulysses from Dante’s Inferno. While fetching the daily food ration, a French prisoner asked about the Divine Comedy. But Levi’s French was insufficient and Dante’s poetry too intricate. And what’s more, in the hell of Auschwitz, Levi was no longer capable of remembering

And yet in that moment, a few fragmented lines of beautiful language created a community that helped Levi forget the hardship of the camp, to ignore the hunger and to survive.

even a few verses correctly. And yet in that moment, a few fragmented lines of beautiful language created a community that helped Levi forget the hardship of the camp, to ignore the hunger and to survive. And by engaging intellectually, he made a friend.

Améry never experienced something similar. His world was broken beyond repair; having endured torture and hard labor, he was unable to recover. Today, the acrimonious back and forth between the two writers seems pointless. But it reveals a deeper problem: There is no one Auschwitz experience, just like there is no one Holocaust memory. But does that suggest these memories we are reading today are unreliable? This may lead some to question not only the truth of survivors’ accounts but facts about the suffering of victims in general. Additionally, perpetrators conveniently claim to have forgotten their own involvement in Nazi atrocities. But Améry’s and Levi’s

recollections are not erroneous; they are profoundly different because of their fundamentally different experiences. We also know now that trauma can sharpen and heighten the retention and accuracy of an individual’s memory. Add to this not just one account of a survivor but the multiplicity of voices, thousands of testimonials, the eyewitnesses, the few that did admit their crimes, artifacts and

physical evidence, research that speaks on behalf of those murdered, and the next generations that preserve the memory of their parents and grandparents. As a survivor, Levi anticipated denialism, misinformation and disinformation regarding the Holocaust. Even though it should be unnecessary to say, he was right to stress “... none of the facts are invented.”

Mason “Mickey” Dorsey — Concentration Camp Liberator

Nearly 13 years ago, I had the privilege of interviewing Mason “Mickey” Dorsey for a local newspaper project in Charleston, South Carolina. I visited him at his home on Seabrook Island, where, at age 88, he recounted his experience liberating the Gunskirchen concentration camp during World War II. His recollections were vivid and precise. “The memories,” he said, are “etched in my soul.”

This article is based on our recorded interview in 2013. Dorsey died in 2017 at age 92, but his firsthand account continues to educate beyond what history books can convey. Through his words, readers are invited to witness events as he experienced them.

Dorsey was born in Chester, South Carolina, and graduated from high school in 1942. During his sophomore year at Clemson A&M College, as World War II raged in Europe, he sought to join the Air Force to become a pilot. He was rejected because he was born with only one finger on his left hand. The Navy and Marine Corps also declined to accept him, but the

Army approved him for “limited service,” meaning he was not expected to see combat.

Determined to prove himself, Dorsey excelled during infantry replacement training at Camp Blanding in Florida. He earned perfect scores on physical endurance tests and the highest rifle-training score in his battalion. As a result, the Army reversed its decision and deemed him fit for combat.

He was assigned to the 71st Infantry Division of Gen. George Patton’s 3rd Army, serving in the cavalry reconnaissance troops. Dorsey became commander of an M8 armored car carrying a four-man crew.

On May 4, 1945, Dorsey and his unit attacked a convoy of German trucks on a highway between Lambach and Wels, Austria. After crossing the

BY EILEEN CHEPENIK

road, they followed a dirt path that led to a large fenced enclosure. People stood behind the fence, staring silently at the soldiers.

Dorsey was 18 years old.

The site was the Gunskirchen concentration camp, a subcamp of

Mauthausen. “We were not prepared for what we saw,” Dorsey said. He described a wooded camp dotted with crude wooden huts that offered little shelter or warmth.

“We got out of our jeep,” he recalled. “The people came up to us, hugging us and crying. They were extremely thin and dressed in rags. We didn’t know who they were or why they were there. We thought they might be French, German, Italian or Russian. We didn’t know they were Jews. They were hugging our legs and crying.”

Dorsey understood enough German to realize the prisoners were pleading for food. The soldiers shared their K rations, which included small amounts of food and cigarettes. The prisoners, starving, fought over the rations and consumed everything they could.

“The lieutenant went inside one of the huts and saw bodies,” Dorsey said. “He told me to get on the radio and contact division headquarters. ‘Tell them we’ve liberated a camp. Tell them to send food and doctors.’”

Dorsey later learned that some prisoners died after eating the food provided by the soldiers. “We were told later we shouldn’t have fed them like that,” he said. “But we didn’t know.”

As he walked through the camp, Dorsey saw prisoners lying motionless on the ground and inside the huts. “We thought many were dead,” he said, “but sometimes someone would move a finger or open an eye. There was little we could do.”

The overwhelming conditions left a lasting impression. Dorsey later learned

We were not prepared for what we saw.

that between 12,000 and 14,000 people had been held at the camp. In a letter home to his parents, he wrote that had Allied forces discovered the camps earlier, the war might have unfolded differently.

Dorsey and his unit remained at Gunskirchen for several hours before receiving orders to move on, leaving other units to take over relief efforts.

Fifty years later, Dorsey attended a reunion in Washington, D.C., where he met 14 people he had helped liberate from Gunskirchen. He formed lasting friendships with several of them and remained in contact for years.

Editor’s note: Dorsey donated letters he wrote to his parents, along with other artifacts from his military service, to the Jewish Heritage Collection Holocaust Archives at the College of Charleston. His honors included the Purple Heart, the French Legion of Honor, the Israeli Medal and the California Medal, among others.

Stacy Steele is a high school social studies teacher at Lancaster High School in South Carolina with 20 years of classroom experience. She teaches World History and United States History, with a particular interest in Holocaust education. Steele has participated in multiple international Holocaust study programs throughout Europe and has led district-wide professional development sessions focused on teaching the Holocaust, historical inquiry and civic responsibility.

LBY STACY STEELE, M.A.

Lon Redman: From Oklahoma Farm to Holocaust Witness

on Redman was born April 10, 1920, in Konawa, Oklahoma, a town of about 3,000 people. He grew up on a small family farm until age 12, when economic hardship brought on by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression forced his family to move to Miami in search of work.

Redman was 21 when the United States entered World War II in December 1941. He had been drafted 10 months earlier at age 20 and was among the first draftees in Miami. He was assigned to the 31st Infantry Division, known as the Dixie Division, made up of National Guard units from Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

He initially served as an enlisted soldier before attending Officer Candidate School, where he earned a commission as a lieutenant.

Redman trained in England and participated in the D-Day invasion and subsequent combat operations in Europe. One of the most enduring memories of his service came in April 1945, when his unit encountered Flossenbürg, a Nazi concentration camp in Bavaria, Germany, as Allied forces closed in during the war’s final weeks.

The camp was located in a remote, mountainous area beneath the village of Flossenbürg. One of the largest nearby

towns, Weiden in der Oberpfalz, was about 10 miles southwest.

In oral testimony, Redman described a landscape transformed into a system of destruction. The camp sat in a steep, horseshoe-shaped valley below the village. “You could look out the back and see the activity in the camp,” he said, adding that it was impossible, in his view, for local residents to claim ignorance.

When American forces arrived, Redman said there was no resistance. Guards had fled, leaving prisoners behind. Unlike other camps that had developed underground resistance networks late in the war, Flossenbürg had no organized effort, a fact Redman attributed to brutal conditions and the constant turnover of prisoners.

When his unit entered the camp, Redman said they found “many, many

One of the most enduring memories of his service came in April 1945, when his unit encountered Flossenbürg, a Nazi concentration camp in Bavaria, Germany, as Allied forces closed in during the war’s final weeks.

bodies laying around, a few that were still alive that we naturally tried to help.” Soldiers notified medical units and began securing the grounds.

Civilians from the nearby village were later forced to walk through the camp. Redman said none admitted knowing what had happened there. “All you had to do was look,” he said.

Redman briefly spoke with survivors but said the conditions and overwhelming stench limited interaction. He said most victims appeared to have died from exhaustion, starvation or forced labor rather than shootings.

Like many American soldiers, Redman said he had no prior knowledge of Nazi concentration camps. “None at all,” he said. “As far as I know, the other people I was associated with didn’t either.” The realization, he added, was a “very, very bitter pill.”

Soldiers also discovered detailed camp records documenting prisoners, their possessions and confiscated valuables. Redman said the paperwork reflected the precision of the Nazi bureaucracy and left no doubt about the scale of the crimes committed.

His unit remained at Flossenbürg for about two days before moving south toward Cham and later visiting Dachau. Redman described Dachau as “a bigger version of Flossenbürg,” with railroad cars filled with bodies and corpses stacked across the grounds. “It can make you sick very quickly,” he said.

After the war, Redman served as a post commander in Göppingen, near Stuttgart. His jurisdiction included Ulm, home to one of the region’s largest displaced persons camps. The camp housed about 10,000 people—roughly 5,000 Baltic nationals and 5,000 Jewish displaced persons—and was administered by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.

Jewish survivors and Baltic nationals were housed separately. Many had survived concentration camps or other forms of wartime imprisonment. Residents received food, clothing and medical care while long-term resettlement was arranged.

Redman’s postwar work with displaced persons reflected a continuation of his service, confronting not only the war itself but its aftermath. His experience underscores that for many liberators, the mission did not end with victory but extended into rebuilding lives shattered by the Holocaust.

The Power and Peril of Storytelling: Accuracy in Holocaust Education

BY LAURIE SCHAEFER

In 2008, I found myself answering unexpected questions in the aisles of my local Harris Teeter. Parents and students, fresh from the theater, wanted to know whether I shared their enthusiasm for The Boy in the Striped Pajamas .

At the time, I had not read the book or seen the film. But given concerns raised by colleagues in Holocaust education, I realized it was only a matter of time before the story entered classroom discussions. After viewing the film, my commitment to historical accuracy, survivor testimony and primary sources led me to decide not to use it in my own teaching. Still, those grocery store conversations underscored a reality educators cannot ignore: For many students, their first exposure to the Holocaust comes through novels and films that blur history through artistic license.

Educators have a responsibility not only to acknowledge that exposure but also to redirect it toward historical truth.

Stories such as The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and Refugee can spark empathy and curiosity. At the same time, fictional portrayals risk distorting the past and, in some cases, enabling denial. Teachers can use students’ familiarity with popular fiction as a starting point while helping them distinguish between narrative invention and historical accuracy. Fiction may inspire inquiry, but history must remain the anchor.

Meeting Students Where They Begin

Students often arrive in the classroom with impressions of the Holocaust shaped by what they have read or watched. Teachers can begin by assessing that prior knowledge through short surveys or reflective writing, asking where students encountered the topic and what moments resonated most.

Validating those responses acknowledges curiosity and emotional engagement while preparing students for deeper analysis. Educators can then guide discussions toward the understanding that all stories reflect perspective and purpose. Emphasizing that literature and film interpret history, rather than replicate it, helps students move from emotional reaction to critical engagement with authentic sources and survivor testimony.

The

Boy

in the Striped Pajamas: Guiding Misconceptions Toward Investigation

John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas has become one of the most widely read fictional portrayals of the Holocaust, particularly among middle school students. Its popularity was evident in the many times I was stopped in my local grocery store.

Last year, my 10-year-old niece’s fifth-grade English teacher assigned the book. While well-intentioned, the unit included graphic photographs of camp liberation without adequate context or age-appropriate preparation, leaving my niece with nightmares for days. Rather than criticize the teacher, I arranged for a Holocaust survivor to speak to the fifthgrade classes reading the book, providing

students with a vital primary source and a historically accurate connection.

For my generation, Schindler’s List often served as an entry point to Holocaust history. Despite its inaccuracies and romanticized portrayal of Oskar Schindler, the film was life-changing for me and ultimately set me on the path to chairing the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust. For today’s students, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas often fills that role.

In many schools, it may be the only Holocaust-related text available in sufficient copies, leaving teachers little choice but to teach it. For some students, it is the first Holocaust story they encounter. While the book contains numerous historical inaccuracies and was written as a fable, educators need not simply list its errors. Instead, they can guide students through evidencebased learning, using the novel as a springboard to primary sources.

Materials such as the Auschwitz Album—a collection of 193 photographs taken by a Nazi official documenting the arrival and selection of Hungarian Jews in 1944—help students understand the strict limitations on prisoner movement and agency. Pairing photographs with survivor testimony from the USC Shoah Foundation or the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, excerpts from memoirs and analysis of camp artifacts reinforce the importance of coupling empathy with accuracy.

Refugee: Expanding Context and Continuity

Alan Gratz’s Refugee follows three fictional young people fleeing persecution in different eras: Josef, a Jewish boy escaping Nazi Germany; Isabel, leaving Cuba; and Mahmoud, fleeing war in Syria. The novel ends with a 14-page author’s note that begins with a clear disclaimer: “Josef, Isabel and Mahmoud are all fictional characters, but their tales are based on true stories.”

Gratz details the historical research behind each narrative and explains how

Helping

students

ship, diplomatic correspondence, survivor testimony and the USHMM’s Refugee Ships at Sea video to deepen historical understanding.

At the same time, teachers must emphasize that the Holocaust was a unique, state-sponsored genocide rooted in antisemitism and carried out on an industrial scale. Because only one storyline addresses the Holocaust— and only a small portion of Jewish experience—educators should avoid equating Josef’s story with the other refugee narratives. Without proper context, students may leave with an incomplete or distorted understanding of the Holocaust.

When grounded in historical evidence, Refugee can help students explore both the past and the enduring responsibility to learn from it.

recognize the danger of mistaking fiction for fact is especially critical at a time when Holocaust distortion and denial are on the rise.

Helping students recognize the danger of mistaking fiction for fact is especially critical at a time when Holocaust distortion and denial are on the rise. This approach also builds media literacy and critical thinking skills essential for engaging responsibly with popular culture.

he wove fiction into real events. Aimed at middle school readers, the book’s structure allows students to see patterns of persecution and displacement across time, connecting the Holocaust to the modern global refugee crisis.

Josef’s story incorporates antisemitism, Nazi ideology, Kristallnacht and the voyage of the St. Louis, creating multiple entry points for primary-source analysis. Educators can use photographs of the

Keeping History

the Anchor

The use of historical fiction in Holocaust education remains controversial. With the abundance of survivor memoirs and primary sources available, some educators question whether fiction belongs in the classroom at all.

While my own approach has prioritized firsthand testimony and archival material, fiction can have a limited role if used responsibly—as a doorway, not a destination. Educators who use fiction must ensure that students move beyond it toward a historically grounded understanding of the Holocaust.

When paired with evidence and survivor voices, fiction can inspire empathy and inquiry. But while stories may begin the conversation, only testimony and historical documentation can sustain it with integrity.

The Mercy of Looking: Confronting an Unsettling Truth

Ifirst heard the word “Holocaust” when I was 10 years old, sitting cross-legged on the tile floor of my classroom. An image projected on the board showed emaciated men crowded into wooden bunks, staring directly at the camera. Before shock or horror set in, one question formed in my mind: How?

That question stayed with me. Textbooks offered explanations— antisemitism, nationalism, political extremism—but those answers felt incomplete. I wanted to understand how ordinary people became participants in such cruelty, and how so many others allowed it to happen.

I began to find more meaningful answers years later in a humanities course. The material was heavy, but my professor’s engagement pulled me in. What began as academic curiosity soon felt deeply personal. One evening, my professor described how the 1935 Nuremberg Laws redefined Jewish identity, turning neighbors into legal outsiders. During the discussion, a student seated ahead of me whispered to a friend, “I just don’t understand how Hitler got so many people to adjust to this.”

That question lingered. As we read testimony from survivors and perpetrators, I found myself thinking about the bystanders—teachers, police officers, shopkeepers—whose silence made widespread brutality possible. What haunted me most was not a single moment of violence, but how the descent

BY SAWYER JACKSON

into atrocity unfolded gradually, enabled by countless small acts of compliance and indifference.

I began asking myself uncomfortable questions. If I had lived then, would I have acted differently? The honest answer is that I do not know. That uncertainty is what makes studying the Holocaust

both unsettling and essential. It is not only a lesson about the past, but a reflection of what people are capable of under pressure.

The class changed how I viewed my own behavior. In everyday moments, I questioned my choices: Was exhaustion a good enough reason to take the last seat on a bus? Was ignoring a cruel joke the same as agreeing with it? I noticed how often I compromised my values for convenience. The lessons echoed when I

stayed silent instead of speaking up, chose comfort over honesty, or went along with wrongdoing because it felt easier.

Through those discussions and readings, I came to understand the “how,” not as an excuse, but as an acknowledgment of human vulnerability. The same tendencies that allowed compliance in Nazi Germany still exist today. Recognizing that reality does not make anyone immune, but it does make us responsible for noticing.

I cannot change what occurred, but I can decide how I respond to its legacy.

Years later, I learned that the photograph I saw as a child had been taken shortly before the prisoners were liberated. What I once believed to be an image of death was also evidence of survival. Looking at it now, I notice something I did not at 10 years old: signs of life still present, and the compassion of the person who chose to document what was happening.

I cannot change what occurred, but I can decide how I respond to its legacy. When faced with fear or indifference, I think of that image and the person behind the camera who chose to look and not turn away. That is who I hope to be— someone who keeps looking, even when it is easier not to.

Dr. William R. Cox is the Social Studies Department Chair at Georgetown High School. He teaches AP U.S. History, U.S. History and AP World History. He also serves as an adjunct instructor of history for Horry-Georgetown Technical College. He is a member of the South Carolina Council on the Holocaust and is the higher education representative for the South Carolina Council on Social Studies.

BY WILLIAM COX, ED.D.

“UNCOVERing” the Truth: Teaching Students to Separate Fact from Fiction

In today’s world, truth often feels like a matter of opinion. The 24-hour news cycle floods Americans with politicians, pundits and journalists arguing over “the facts as they see them.” Each side accuses the other of distortion, bias or deceit. The future of democracy depends on the ability to separate fact from fiction.

This confusion has reached classrooms. Many students rely on social media algorithms to curate news, reinforcing what they already believe rather than challenging them to think critically. Few consult multiple sources. Even established programs like 60 Minutes or those on the BBC face scrutiny for selective editing or framing issues to fit certain narratives. For young people in South Carolina and elsewhere, coming of age in this era of algorithmic sensationalism means confronting a world where truth can seem negotiable or unascertainable.

Amid this uncertainty, high school history classrooms can serve as a refuge and training ground for critical thinking. South Carolina public schools follow state standards designed to prepare students

for the modern world. Since 2019, the social studies standards have emphasized not just learning about history but doing history, focusing on skills rather than memorizing facts.

Students are no longer expected to passively absorb lists of dates and events. Instead, they examine primary and

secondary sources, question motives and perspectives and construct evidencebased arguments. In short, they learn to UNCOVER history rather than have it covered for them.

At first, many resist. Teenagers often prefer prepackaged information to deep inquiry. But independent thought develops

only through practice, patience and the willingness to wrestle with ambiguity.

For the past 15 years, I have worked in classrooms from middle school to college to transform students from passive consumers of information into active amateur historians. One effective example came through my work as a Teaching Fellow with the South Carolina Council on the Holocaust. I designed a lesson for my United States History and Constitution course that challenges students to analyze America’s response to the Holocaust using authentic historical sources.

The course is among the state’s most demanding. It includes a state-mandated End of Course Exam, which draws scrutiny from educators and administrators. Yet within this framework lies an opportunity to help students confront one of history’s most morally complex questions.

According to South Carolina’s 2024 Alignment Guide, students must “examine the continuity and changes on the U.S.

home front surrounding World War I and World War II,” including America’s response to the Holocaust and attitudes toward refugees. From this standard, I developed the essential question:

“To what extent was America’s response to the Holocaust sufficient or insufficient?”

To answer, students explore 65 primary and secondary sources, from a 1922 New York Times article describing Hitler as a “new popular idol” to 1938 headlines on Nazi decrees, excerpts from the 1942 Wannsee Conference minutes and public opinion polls showing American ambivalence toward admitting Jewish refugees. They also analyze War Department memos debating the feasibility of bombing extermination camps as late as 1944.

Through these materials, students confront uncomfortable realities about antisemitism, isolationism and the limits of moral action. They decide, based on evidence, whether America’s response

was sufficient. The process includes document analysis, discussion and open dialogue. Most students struggle to find a single “correct” answer—and that is the point.

This uncertainty mirrors the work of historians, who navigate conflicting sources, biases and incomplete information. It also teaches a timeless civic skill: to question what they read, what they hear and, most importantly, the source of information.

Across South Carolina, teachers are embracing inquiry-based learning. Students engage with historical documents through debates, Socratic seminars and collaborative analysis. These practices develop critical thinking, empathy and civic awareness. Students learn not what to think, but how to think. As one student said, “I appreciate that you don’t tell us what we’re supposed to think—you teach us how to make up our own minds with evidence.”

In a world saturated with misinformation, historical thinking is more than an academic exercise—it is an act of civic self-defense. The Holocaust reminds us what happens when propaganda replaces truth, when lies become policy and when silence becomes complicity.

As students grow into voters and leaders, they must be able to distinguish truth from fiction—not only in history but in the world they inherit. By “UNCOVERing” the past, they learn to defend the truth.

BY LINDSAY N. WEIRICH, PH.D.

The Importance of Discovery Using Documents in Social Studies Class

In recent years, it has become increasingly common among social studies experts and educators to argue that students should “do history” just as they “do math.” This perspective has gained traction partly because of the digital age we live in, where access to information is nearly instantaneous. When a simple online search can yield dates, names and factual details in seconds, memorizing such information no longer represents the highest form of historical understanding. Instead, the real value lies in helping students think like historians —to analyze, question and interpret evidence in order to construct meaning from the past. These skills are especially important when teaching students sensitive topics such as the Holocaust. Students should have opportunities to form personal connections with history through discovery-based learning, rather than serving as passive recipients of others’ perspectives.

A discovery-based approach to social studies instruction emphasizes this process of active inquiry. Rather than simply receiving information from textbooks or lectures, students engage directly with primary and secondary sources—documents, letters, photographs, maps, political cartoons and artifacts—to uncover stories, perspectives and truths for themselves. This method transforms

the classroom into a dynamic space for exploration, where students learn that history is not a fixed set of facts, but a series of interpretations shaped by evidence and context.

Encouraging such thoughtful discovery lies at the heart of the mission of social studies supervisors and curriculum leaders across the state and nation. These professionals support teachers at both the elementary and secondary levels, continually promoting the design of engaging, inquiry-based lessons. Their shared goal is to empower students to

dig into history and uncover meaning independently. When students are guided to investigate essential questions—such as “Whose voices are represented in this document?” or “What might this image reveal about the values of its time?”— they not only develop historical thinking skills, but also cultivate empathy and perspective-taking.

Thoughtful empathetic discovery is critical when teaching about the Holocaust. Students engaging with survivor testimonies, personal letters and artifacts, and other official documents

allows them the freedom to confront the human reality of genocide rather than viewing it as an abstract distant event. Through guided inquiry, students can learn more than what happened, they can learn how ordinary people were affected, how ordinary lives were forever changed, and how personal choices shaped the course of history.

Inquiry-based learning is not a new idea, but its application in social studies has become increasingly vital in our modern world. The abundance of easily accessible information has made it necessary to teach students how to evaluate sources critically. By working with authentic historical materials, students learn to identify bias, analyze point of view and assess the reliability of evidence. These are not just academic exercises—they are essential civic skills. A society that values an informed citizenship depends on individuals who can discern credible information from misinformation, and who understand how context influences interpretation. While data and assessments continue to play important roles in education,

ensuring that students are safely and thoughtfully guided through complex and sensitive historical topics remains the highest priority. Teachers act as facilitators in this process, creating structured environments where students can explore difficult issues while feeling supported and respected. Discussions around slavery, the Holocaust, civil rights, war, or political conflict require careful framing, but they also offer powerful opportunities for connection. Through guided inquiry, students learn to engage with challenging histories in a way that builds understanding and compassion rather than division.

The use of authentic documents, images, maps and political cartoons brings history to life in a way that textbooks alone cannot. When students hold a reproduced letter written by a soldier, examine a propaganda poster, or analyze census data from a century ago, the past becomes tangible. These experiences ignite curiosity and foster a deeper emotional connection to the material. Students begin to see themselves as detectives, piecing together clues from

multiple sources to form a clearer picture of the past. This kind of engagement naturally leads to richer discussions, higher-order thinking and a more lasting understanding of historical concepts.

In a discovery-based classroom, the teacher’s role shifts from being the sole provider of knowledge to being a facilitator of learning. Teachers curate appropriate sources, provide context and guide students as they analyze and interpret evidence. This instructional approach encourages collaboration, debate and reflection. As students work together to draw conclusions, they develop communication and reasoning skills that transfer far beyond the history classroom.

Without this kind of inquiry and discourse, students risk becoming passive recipients of information— accepting others’ interpretations without question. By contrast, when students engage directly with historical sources, they learn that history is complex, contested and deeply human. They recognize that every document was created by someone with a purpose and a perspective, and that understanding those perspectives is essential to understanding our collective story.

Ultimately, teaching students to “do history” equips them to be thoughtful participants in our democracy. It empowers them to question, to seek evidence and to make informed decisions about the world around them. Students must practice with primary and secondary sources to develop a more complex comprehension of hard topics such as the Holocaust. When students learn to discover the past through authentic inquiry, they not only gain historical knowledge but also develop the critical thinking skills necessary to shape our shared future.

John W. Drummond — Distinguished State Senator’s

JBY JOE WACHTER

Careful Eye Saw Evidence of the Holocaust

ohn Willie Drummond was born Sept. 29, 1919, in Greenwood, South Carolina, one of seven children of James William and Fannie Smith Drummond. In 1927, the family moved to the town of Ninety Six in Greenwood County, where Drummond lived and worked for the remainder of his life.

After graduating from high school, Drummond joined the South Carolina National Guard in 1939. In 1941, he served with his unit at Fort Moultrie, helping protect Charleston and its harbor. He later became an Army Air Forces cadet, eventually attaining the rank of captain.

Drummond initially trained as a paratrooper before becoming a fighter pilot. He flew P-40 aircraft during training in Florida and Texas and later at an air base in Walterboro, South Carolina, where he joined the 405th Fighter Group. In January 1944, his unit was deployed to England and entered combat against German forces in March.

The group’s missions included attacking rail yards, bridges, rocket sites and military supply lines along the French and Belgian coasts and as far inland as Paris.

In late summer 1944, Drummond’s P-47D

Thunderbolt fighter plane, named “Raid Hot Mama”, was shot down over France behind enemy lines. He was captured and held as a prisoner of war in the Baltics for the remainder of the conflict.

The group’s missions included attacking rail yards, bridges, rocket sites and military supply lines along the French and Belgian coasts and as far inland as Paris.

For his service and bravery during World War II, Drummond received the Distinguished Flying Cross, nine Air Medals, three battle stars, a Presidential Unit Citation and two Purple Hearts.

Postwar Life and Political Career

After the war, Drummond returned to Ninety Six, where he married Holly Self and raised three sons: Brick, Bob and Dick. He began his business career selling doughnuts for Golden Rings before purchasing and operating Drummond Oil, an oil distributorship he ran until 2010.

In 1964, Drummond was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives from Greenwood County. Two years later, he won election to the South Carolina Senate, where he served for more than four decades.

During his Senate tenure, Drummond was a strong advocate for public education, environmental conservation, disability services and veterans’ issues. He also worked to control state government spending. Known for his candor and willingness to work across party lines, he earned the nicknames “Bulldog” and

“The Filibuster King” for his passionate debates.

Though a Democrat, Drummond sometimes supported Republican candidates he believed would be effective leaders. In 1996, he was elected president pro tempore of the Senate, its highest office, serving until 2001. In that role, he played a key part in negotiations that led to the removal of the Confederate flag from the Statehouse dome in Columbia. He retired from the Senate in 2008.

Evidence of the Holocaust

Drummond was also deeply involved in civic life. He served as a deacon at First Baptist Church in Ninety Six, president of the local Lions Club and a 32nd-degree Mason. He sat on the Board of Trustees of the College of Charleston and the Board of Visitors at Clemson University. Though he never attended college, his advocacy for education earned him honorary degrees from nearly every public college and university in South Carolina.

Drummond died Sept. 3, 2016. He was 96.

In April 1945, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe, visited the Ohrdruf concentration camp, a subcamp of Buchenwald in Germany. After witnessing mass death and extreme suffering, Eisenhower ordered that the camps be documented on film and required journalists, troops and German civilians to see the evidence firsthand, anticipating future attempts to deny the Holocaust.

In a South Carolina ETV interview recorded in the 1990s, Drummond described how he came to understand the reality of the Holocaust. Before his capture in 1944, he said, he had no knowledge of it.

Unlike Eisenhower’s later exposure to the camps, Drummond encountered subtler but no less powerful evidence.

While being transported to a POW camp, he and other prisoners were taken to a wooden building for delousing. They were led into a sealed shower room approximately 30 by 40 feet. Soap was scattered across the floor, and a guard instructed them to lather while water was briefly turned on and off.

As the process unfolded, Drummond noticed something unusual: Each shower head had two nozzles—one for water and another for gas. Other prisoners later explained that the gas nozzles were used to kill Jews and others during the Holocaust.

Careful observation and attention to detail can help distinguish fact from fiction and truth from denial.

That realization left a lasting impression. Drummond later said he understood how easily the guard could have turned on gas instead of water—and that moment confirmed for him the reality of the Holocaust.

Recollections and Reflections

In 1967 and 1968, while attending the University of South Carolina, I served as a page in the South Carolina Senate and had the opportunity to meet Drummond. While researching this article, I recalled a special trait: his attention to detail.

On several occasions, Drummond reviewed draft legislation with me, pointing out misspelled words, punctuation errors or imprecise language. He emphasized the importance of noticing small details and being precise and accurate in all work, advice he said would prove valuable throughout life.

Little Things Matter

As the years have passed, I have come to appreciate Drummond’s lesson more deeply. Careful observation and attention to detail can help distinguish fact from fiction and truth from denial. For John Drummond, noticing a small but significant detail in a shower room during World War II confirmed the reality of the Holocaust—and refuted claims that it never occurred. Information for this article was drawn from a South Carolina ETV interview with John Drummond in the 1990s; materials in the John Drummond Papers at the University of South Carolina; and resources from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The article also includes the author’s personal recollections.

IAmy McDonald is the Director of Education at the Alabama Holocaust Education Center. Before joining the center, she was a teacher at Shades Valley High School in Birmingham, Alabama, where she taught U.S. History and Holocaust Studies for 28 years. Amy has authored two books: Determined to Survive, which describes the experiences of Birminghamarea Holocaust survivor Max Steinmetz; and Word Smugglers: A Story of Resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto, which tells the story of the Ringelblum Archive, a secret underground archive in the ghetto.

Literally “Uncovering the Truth”

am drawn to the subject of resistance, particularly cultural and spiritual resistance during the Holocaust.

Holocaust survivor Roman Kent once said, “Resistance does not have to be with a gun and a bullet.” One powerful example is the Ringelblum Archive, also known as the Oyneg Shabes Archive, which was hidden and buried in the Warsaw Ghetto. I first learned about the archive from Holocaust scholar Samuel Kassow, author of Who Will Write Our History? I believed the story would resonate with middle and high school students and began working to adapt it for classroom use.

The story begins with the German invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, followed by the bombing of Warsaw and the creation of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940. At the center of these events was Emanuel Ringelblum, a Jewish historian, teacher, writer, relief worker and community organizer.

As German forces advanced, many residents—including much of the Jewish leadership—fled Warsaw. Ringelblum refused to leave. He urged others to

Resistance does not have to be with a gun and a bullet.

BY AMY MCDONALD

remain and help with relief efforts, organizing soup kitchens and aid for displaced residents and refugees. He began keeping a journal in January 1940. After the ghetto was sealed in November 1940, Ringelblum convened a secret meeting of several dozen friends and colleagues. He proposed forming a clandestine group to document Jewish life and suffering under Nazi occupation. The effort was code-named Oyneg Shabes, meaning “Joy of the Sabbath,”

because members met on Saturdays to avoid suspicion.

The group consisted of about 50 to 60 people and included an executive committee, a team of copiers who reproduced documents by hand, and a small inner circle entrusted with the archive’s location. That final group included teacher Israel Lichtenstein and two former students, teenagers David Graber and Nahum Grzywacz. They concealed the materials in the basement of a former school at 68 Nowolipki St. Of the dozens involved in the archive, only three survived the war.

The archive was a collaborative effort designed to capture a wide range of experiences in the ghetto. “Everyone wrote,” Ringelblum said. Contributors included men and women, young and old, religious leaders, business owners, laborers, journalists, teachers and refugees. To maintain secrecy, contributors did not know who else participated. Only Ringelblum and the executive committee knew everyone’s identity.

One of the archive’s major contributors was writer Rachel Auerbach. At Ringelblum’s request, she opened and managed a soup kitchen at 40 Leszno St. On its first day, it served 50 bowls of soup. Within two years, it provided more than 2,000 meals a day. Auerbach documented the stories of individuals and families who came for food and wrote about the staff who worked there. Her accounts offered a detailed view of daily life and the ghetto’s struggle against starvation.

The archive extended beyond written testimony. It included underground

newspapers, ration cards, postcards, German orders, event invitations, theater posters, jokes, poems, drawings, paintings and photographs.

The Great Deportation from the Warsaw Ghetto began July 22, 1942, and continued through August. More than 5,000 Jews a day were sent to the Treblinka killing center. Afterward, the archive’s focus shifted from daily life to documenting deportations and the fate of Jewish communities across Poland. Information reached the ghetto through underground networks, couriers and contacts outside

The

Great

Deportation from the Warsaw Ghetto began July 22, 1942, and continued through August. More than 5,000 Jews a day were sent to the Treblinka killing center.

its walls, allowing the group to record events beyond Warsaw.

The archive survived the ghetto’s destruction, buried in 10 metal boxes and two metal milk cans. The first cache was buried in August 1942, during the height of the deportations. A second was buried in February 1943, shortly before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

After the war, Auerbach and Hersh Wasser, two of the three surviving Oyneg Shabes members, began searching for the archive with funding from the Jewish Labor Committee in New York. “Just finding a certain house with a certain number was difficult enough,” Auerbach said. “But to find a cellar within a cellar … was almost like an archaeological expedition.”

The first cache, hidden in 10 metal boxes, was recovered in September 1946. It contained notebooks, underground newspapers, drawings, poems and personal items, including the last wills of Lichtenstein, Graber and Grzywacz. The second cache, hidden in two milk cans, was discovered by Polish construction workers in December 1950. It included

deportation notices, essays on the Great Deportation and reports on early resistance efforts. A third cache, buried shortly before the uprising, has never been found.

Ringelblum was captured and murdered by the Nazis on March 10, 1944, along with his wife and son. But his work endured. Kassow later explained that Ringelblum understood the importance of leaving a

record. Without documents, Kassow said, perpetrators would shape how victims were remembered.

Today, one of the milk cans is displayed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The other is exhibited at the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. More than 6,000 original documents from the Oyneg Shabes Archive are preserved there.

Among them is the last will of 19-yearold David Graber, who wrote: “I would love to see the moment in which the great treasure will be dug up and shriek to the world proclaiming the truth. … We fulfilled our mission. May history attest for us.”

BY DAVID WILLIAMS, PH.D.

Voices of History: Podcasting as a Medium for Teaching the Holocaust

In 2024, my writing class at Clemson University worked on a servicelearning project for a professional development program that provides teaching materials about the Holocaust. Our efforts culminated in a 20-minute educational podcast—researched, scripted and recorded by my students—about the Łódź Ghetto in Poland, the second-largest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe.

This project was one of the most challenging experiences I have had in education, a sentiment echoed by my students. While many had previously studied the Holocaust in literature and history courses, they had never been asked to learn about this event while simultaneously developing media production skills. Accomplishing both learning outcomes within a single semester was difficult, but the project was conceived in response to serious concerns facing Holocaust education.

Public knowledge of the Holocaust has been steadily declining for years. Several factors contribute to this trend, most notably our increasing temporal distance from the event and the continuing loss of survivors. At the same time, the Holocaust has become increasingly vulnerable to

distortion and conspiracy theories online as disinformation techniques grow more sophisticated. Social media algorithms prioritize engagement over accuracy and can amplify denialism, while the democratization of media production allows polished, emotionally manipulative material to pass as legitimate historical documentation.

The reality is that current and future generations will continue to spend hours each day in digital spaces, where

Holocaust disinformation often goes unchecked. Historical knowledge is gradually becoming untethered from long-trusted institutions, meaning that teaching through historiography alone is no longer sufficient. Media literacy has become equally essential, particularly for digital natives who encounter Holocaust history online as often as, if not more than, they do in formal educational settings. Educators now face a dual responsibility: transmitting historical knowledge while

equipping students with the critical thinking skills needed to distinguish fact from fiction in an increasingly complex information ecosystem. Teaching Holocaust memory through podcast creation serves two key pedagogical purposes—preserving historical truth and developing the media literacy necessary to combat misinformation.

Through this project, students transformed from passive consumers of history into active participants in the preservation and transmission of collective memory. Traditional lecturebased approaches, though still valuable, often fail to engage students who are accustomed to participatory digital culture and expect to interact with, question and create knowledge rather than merely absorb it. When students produce Holocaust podcasts, they do more than complete an assignment; they become contributors to historical discourse and assume responsibility for accuracy, ethical

representation and the communities whose stories they tell. This sense of digital citizenship—understanding that publishing content online carries obligations to historical truth and future audiences—extends beyond Holocaust education. In an era of deepfakes, AIgenerated content and sophisticated disinformation campaigns, students become both guardians of truth and active agents in the work of remembrance.

Our service-learning project consisted of four group assignments, each building on the previous one. The class was divided into four groups that worked together throughout the semester. The first assignment was an action plan, a written agreement outlining how group members would collaborate and delegate responsibilities. Next came an annotated bibliography, which required students to locate and evaluate relevant sources. Each group was assigned a different aspect of the Łódź Ghetto’s history to ensure

comprehensive coverage. For example, one group examined living conditions while another focused on how residents maintained social order and governance while in captivity.

The groups synthesized their research into podcast scripts, which they recorded and edited using Adobe Audition. Each group contributed roughly five minutes of polished, informative audio to the final product.

As students quickly discovered, producing a high-quality educational podcast requires deep engagement with sources. Students must listen to testimonies, analyze documents, examine photographs and navigate archival materials—the same rigorous research process used by professional historians. In doing so, they learn to distinguish credible sources from unreliable ones, a skill that translates directly to evaluating the constant stream of information encountered online.

Podcasting also requires students to internalize their research more fully than traditional writing. They cannot rely on citations or block quotes to carry their argument; instead, they must explain sources clearly and accurately in their own words for a listening audience. The spoken format forces students to contextualize why sources matter, how they connect to the subject and what they mean for listeners, rather than assuming relevance will be understood. Distilling research into clear, engaging narration demands deeper synthesis and a stronger sense of ownership than writing alone often requires.

As students write and revise their scripts, they confront fundamental questions about narrative construction— questions we also discuss as a class. What details should be included or excluded? How should the story be structured? What tone is appropriate for the subject? Is it possible to tell these stories without sensationalizing suffering? How can survivors’ experiences be honored while remaining accessible to contemporary audiences? These are not merely aesthetic concerns but ethical editorial decisions that shape meaning and interpretation. Addressing them helps students recognize when the media manipulates emotion rather than engaging audiences intellectually and empathetically.

As students quickly discovered, producing a high-quality educational podcast requires deep engagement with sources.

The technical aspects of podcasting further strengthen media literacy. Students learn how sound design—including music, pacing, vocal tone and editing—influences emotional response and perceived credibility. As a result, they become more aware of how production techniques can both clarify and distort meaning. This awareness is essential for identifying Holocaust disinformation, which often relies on sophisticated media production to appear authoritative. Students who have conducted archival research, verified facts and confronted ethical challenges are far better equipped to recognize misleading narratives and emotional manipulation disguised as evidence.

Educators considering podcasting as a teaching tool should anticipate several challenges. Instructors must be familiar with the technology used in the classroom. Audio-editing programs such as Podcastle and Audacity are free, compatible with both Mac and Windows, and user-friendly for podcasters of all experience levels. Tutorial videos available online can effectively supplement in-class instruction.

I also recommend listening to existing Holocaust-focused podcasts to see

how experienced producers approach this sensitive subject. Several trusted institutions offer high-quality audio series. 12 Years That Shook the World, produced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, examines pivotal moments from 1933 to 1945. On Auschwitz, the official podcast of the Auschwitz Memorial in Poland, is available in English and updated regularly. Episodes in both series typically run 30 to 45 minutes, an appropriate length for students, and feature expert commentary that provides valuable models of historical storytelling. Given the limited research on podcasting in Holocaust education, these resources are especially useful for teachers.

Despite its challenges, podcast creation—work that demands rigorous research, ethical reflection, technical skill and public accountability—can effectively bridge historical preservation and media literacy education. This approach is particularly urgent at a time when historical memory is frequently distorted or weaponized. By inviting students not only to learn history but to contribute directly to its preservation, educators can help ensure that Holocaust memory is carried into the future responsibly.

SCCH Student Contest 2025

BY SCOTT AUSPELMYER

Since the 1990s, one of the most meaningful and effective ways students have engaged with Holocaust history is through survivor testimony. To encourage and deepen this engagement, the South Carolina Council on the Holocaust sponsors an annual student contest that invites participants to reflect on a survivor’s experiences and express their understanding through one of four formats: art, film, poetry or prose.

In 2021, the council began partnering with Chapman University in Orange County, California, to encourage student participation in both Chapman University’s national student contest—now in its 25thplus year—and the council’s statewide contest. Each year, Chapman University selects a unique theme that guides students’ examination of a Holocaust survivor’s testimony of their choosing. Many South Carolina students choose testimonies from local survivors, which are available on the council’s website.

The theme for the 2026 contest is “Holding on to Hope.” Chapman University explains the theme as follows:

“Fragile as the seeds of a dandelion, hope became a source of strength for those persecuted during the Holocaust. Hope took many forms, grounded in memories from the past and dreams for the future. In her memoir All But My Life, survivor Gerda Weissmann Klein recalls an act of hope when she and a friend looked toward the future and bet on when the war would end and freedom would come.

Memories of good times became a source of hope as people recalled birthdays and religious holidays celebrated with family and friends and dreamed of such occasions in the future.

Hope also inspired courageous action. Young Tom Blatt knew the odds of escaping the Sobibor killing center were extremely slim, yet he dared to crawl under barbed wire and run through a field filled with land mines. When he was shot by a farmer who had agreed to hide him, he hoped that playing dead would allow him to survive.

The 24-year-old leader of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Mordechai Anielewicz, knew his fighters were vastly outnumbered by German forces. Although they resisted the Nazis for 27 days, military victory was never a realistic possibility. Instead, he hoped their defiance would send a powerful message of resistance and hope into the future.

both to surviving and to preserving one’s humanity.

While in hiding, young Peter Feigl kept a diary in the hope that he might one day share it with his parents. Eva Brettler’s mother, desperately clinging to railings in an elevator shaft, hoped she could hold on long enough to return to her young daughter hidden in a basket atop a wardrobe.

To retain hope under the most inhumane conditions required courage and belief that one’s actions had purpose. Holding on to hope was never easy, but it was essential

The SCCH statewide contest awards prizes in three categories: middle school, high school and senior. Winners in the middle school and high school categories receive a $500 prize and an award certificate. The senior category winner receives a $1,000 scholarship and an award certificate.

Over the past five years, more than 400 students across South Carolina have submitted entries, and the council has awarded more than $8,000 in prizes. Recent winners have come from Charleston County School of the Arts, Cross Schools, Fairfield Central High School, Fox Creek High School, Irmo Middle School, Southwood Academy of the Arts and Summerville High School.

IDr.

Lilly S. Filler, past Chair of the South Carolina Council on the Holocaust and past Editor of the Holocaust Remembered publication, is a retired OB/GYN. She is the daughter of Holocaust survivors Jadzia and Ben Stern and is passionately committed to Holocaust education.

Truth or Consequences?

t is disheartening that we must still define the meaning of fact for the public, A synonym search for “fact” yields words such as reality, certainty, truth and verity, Yet we live in a world that has attempted to move away from facts in favor of so-called alternative facts, or perceptions.

How does one prove facts, events or even the absence of something? That was the challenge faced by Deborah Lipstadt, a historian, diplomat, author and professor at Emory University, On Sept 5, 1996, British author and self-described historian David Irving sued Lipstadt and her publisher for libel in an English court after she characterized aspects of his writing and public statements as Holocaust denial in her book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. British libel law places the burden of proof on the defendant rather than the plaintiff. As a result, Lipstadt and her legal team were required to prove that the Holocaust occurred, For several years, they conducted extensive research but were unable to use survivor testimony, which was deemed prejudicial and not credible by the court. Instead, investigators relied on forensic evidence, including soil samples and water from wells, as well as testimony from individuals who lived near killing sites, Ultimately, Lipstadt prevailed, Justice Charles Gray issued a detailed ruling documenting Irving’s systematic distortion and denial of historical fact.

In the past, we were accustomed to believing what we were taught Sadly, that more trusting era has given way to deception, misrepresentation, and disinformation, I recall visiting my daughter in California when a local newspaper reported on a school district debate over whether the Holocaust occurred, I was deeply shaken to read that eighth-grade students were asked to debate this topic.

How does one debate a fact? The premise itself was fundamentally flawed, drawing a false moral equivalence between historical reality and bigotry. When the premise is incorrect, the resulting discussion becomes meaningless.

In the 21st century, we must verify facts through multiple sources, teach students

BY LILLY FILLER, M.D.

to question the credibility of statements and rely on primary sources whenever possible. Our greatest resources Holocaust survivors and liberators-are becoming fewer with each passing year. As time claims these witnesses, their children and grandchildren have taken on the responsibility of telling their stories, and many in the first and second generations are stepping forward to do so. If this effort does not continue, the erosion of truth will cause lasting harm and widespread misinformation among young people. If educators fail to fact-check what they teach, then the phrase “truth or consequences” will no longer be a lighthearted reference. The consequences, I fear, will be profoundand anything but amusing.

South Carolina Council on the Holocaust

This thirteenth edition of Holocaust Remembered is sponsored by the SC Council on the Holocaust. The Council is appointed by the Governor, President Pro Tempre and Speaker of the House. The Council consists of 12 appointed volunteer members of the SC community dedicated to teaching the Lessons of the Holocaust. Our mission is to “develop commemorative events and to educate teachers to teach the Holocaust to our South Carolina students.”

Present 2026 SC Council members:

Denise Deveaux–Chair–Goose Creek

Marla Palmer–Vice Chair–Simpsonville

Lilly S. Filler, MD-Secretary-Columbia

Stacy Steele-Treasurer–Catawba Eileen Chepenik–Charleston

William Cox, EdD–Pawleys Island

Brian Day–Columbia

Alli Ott-Orangeburg

Adam Pitluk, PhD–Conway

Johannes Schmidt, PhD–Clemson

Kristi Ugland-North Charleston

Joe Wachter–Myrtle Beach

Follow us on our website: https://www.scholocaustcouncil.org Send us your questions or comments to education@scholocaustcouncil.org

ABOUT THE COVER

Taking an abstract approach to the idea of separating facts from fiction, our cover artist, Alex Woz, focused on the idea of separation. The context of the Shoah, the physical items taken from their owners “serve as the most powerful testament to the truth of their history.” With the physical representation, we can see the abstract. The sifting through the rubble of information and finding the truths. The conceptual elements that tell the real stories of the Holocaust, that rise above the fictional misinformation. @WOZ_ART