The Distance Between Then and Now Is Thinner Than We Think, To Remember Is to Resist, 81st anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz. .

In 1993, my dad took me to see Schindler’s List. I was sixteen and hadn’t given the Holocaust much thought before that day. He had me drive us to the theater in Silverdale, and I got to skip school. It felt ordinary at the time—just a weekday afternoon with my dad. He worked most weekends, so his days off landed quietly in the middle of the week. I didn’t know then that this would become one of the most defining moments of my life.

The image of the little girl in the red coat never left me. It burned itself into my memory and stayed. After the movie, I couldn’t get my hands on enough books. I borrowed some from my dad, others from my grandpa. I was hungry to understand—to learn what had happened and how it had been allowed to happen. I wanted to talk about it, to sit with the horror and try to make sense of it alongside the two men who shaped my sense of right and wrong. Those conversations mattered. They still echo in me.

Years later, that history stopped feeling safely distant.

While my family was involved with a school, my son Brock’s teacher stood in a classroom and said the Holocaust wasn’t real. He claimed the world was flat. He told students science couldn’t be trusted. I remember the shock settling into my body—the disbelief that this wasn’t happening online or in some fringe space, but in a school, spoken with authority to children. It was never something I thought I would see taught out loud.

I made my boys watch films. We read children’s books about the Holocaust together. We read The Diary of Anne Frank. I told the teacher plainly that I did not want that nonsense taught to my child, and that if he insisted on spreading conspiracy theories, my son was to be sent to the library instead—to read nonfiction, to learn truth rather than absorb lies. In that moment, I understood something deeply unsettling: there are people in this world who want us to forget. Who want us to believe it wasn’t real. Who are actively working to blur truth until history becomes optional. 

On this day in 1945, Allied forces liberated Auschwitz. Eighty-one years later, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, remembrance does not arrive gently. It presses down with a familiar, suffocating weight. What we are asked to remember is not distant history—it is a warning that never stopped speaking.

More than 11 million people were murdered by the Nazi regime. Six million were Jewish. Others were Roma, disabled people, LGBTQ+ individuals, political dissidents—human beings reduced to categories and then erased. The Holocaust did not begin with camps or gas chambers. It began when some lives were deemed less worthy of protection. When cruelty was excused. When silence felt safer than resistance.

There are survivor testimonies, photographs, preserved barracks, piles of shoes, and recorded voices that describe Auschwitz in ways language can barely contain. They speak of a silence so heavy it feels violent. Of grief that seeps into the ground itself. Even without standing there in person, the truth is unmistakable: this evil was not abstract. It was organized. Intentional. Human-made.

What devastates me now is how much of what happened then feels terrifyingly present today—especially here in the United States. The dehumanizing language. The normalization of cruelty. The way lies are repeated until they sound ordinary. The way fear is weaponized and entire groups of people are framed as threats rather than neighbors. I never imagined I would watch echoes of that history rising again in my lifetime, on my own soil.

You can watch footage from the past and the present, both in black and white, and sometimes struggle to tell the difference. The posture. The rhetoric. The crowds. The cruelty. The fact that there are such openly cruel people alive and influencing the world right now—especially here in this country—is heartbreaking.

Holocaust Memorial Day is often approached through ceremony and reflection. This year, reflection alone feels dangerously insufficient. As survivors pass away and antisemitism resurges openly across public life, remembrance must come with moral clarity. We must be willing to say the uncomfortable truth out loud: this is how it starts.

Today we also hold space for the victims of Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur, and we grieve the ongoing suffering in Ukraine, Sudan, and Gaza. Different places. Different names. The same devastating pattern. The same global hesitation. The same unbearable human cost.

The theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2026 is “Bridging Generations.” That bridge now rests in our hands. The responsibility of remembrance no longer belongs only to those who survived—it belongs to those of us who remain. To witness. To teach. To speak. To refuse indifference, even when it costs comfort or safety.

One day, I hope to stand with my boys and my parents at the places history refuses to release—Auschwitz. Anne Frank’s house. Because we have to see things and feel things from the past so they stay real. With every survivor lost, the distance grows. And distance is where denial thrives.

We do not honor the dead by treating this history as settled or safely contained in the past. The Holocaust was carried out by ordinary people, enabled by bureaucracy, silence, and the slow erosion of empathy. That truth should unsettle us—because it means it can happen anywhere people stop seeing one another as fully human.

Genocide is not only a past event. It is a process. And it always begins with permission.

Maybe, just maybe that is why so many of us that have read the books, seen the movies and been there to stand where it all happened, had stories from family and friends that were there, we are watching and we are wondering the question we have all asked ourselves....Why didn't they stop them? Why didn't they do something.....WE are right there, not being able to stop it, and seeing our mail man, youth pastors at the church, the cashier at the store, our uncle, wearing masks and taking our friends, family and neighbors away. All the while where people are celebrating it  This isn't normal. The awful feeling you have is what you should be feeling. 

We cannot forget what happened—not now, not ever—because forgetting is how the path clears itself to be walked again. 

Let us grieve without looking away.
Let us speak even when our voices shake.
Let us be the light that refuses—absolutely refuses—to go out.