Photos: Ethan Roberts Photography

By Susie Greenberg
Director of Holocaust Education

July 9, 2026

The three opening words in my personal journal on this summer’s European Institute for Holocaust Educators were: Observe, Describe and Reflect.

What seemed like a simple directive to help guide the process of visiting places significant to the Holocaust, and working through the emotions, facts, and unanswered questions they evoke, proved far more challenging. A journey like this compels us to ask profound questions: How does a society judge the value of another person’s life? What has history taught us about antisemitism, about the Jewish communities which thrived and then were destroyed in the Holocaust, and how do our societies understand these histories today?

These are the questions the educators on our trip will carry back to their classrooms. After spending two weeks learning beside them, I believe they will challenge their students to go even further: What is the value of a human life, and what does remembrance require of us?

Through our nearly two-week journey from Lithuania to Poland and then the Netherlands, we stood where millions were murdered, where entire Jewish communities were erased, and where lives were interrupted beyond repair. We saw these places with our own eyes, but we also experienced the difficult work of sitting with what cannot be fully understood. The conversations among our group, the questions that lingered after each site, and the quiet moments of reflection reminded me that learning this history is as much about wrestling with its meaning as it is about understanding its facts.

An idea that echoed throughout our journey was the absence of identity.

We reminded ourselves to avoid plurals and to make it individual. Every voice we encountered, every story we learned, belonged to a person with a name, relationships, dreams, and a future that was stolen. The Nazi regime attempted to silence an entire people by combining state terror, surveillance, propaganda, and control of information. Their attempt to dehumanize the entire Jewish identity was a thread we followed throughout our journey. They attempted not only to murder European Jewry but to erase Jewish identity itself.

Guided by Alexandra Zapruder’s Salvaged Pages, we met young diarists whose words now ask us to become their witnesses. Through their writing, we understood their hunger for life. We felt their anguish through their words. Their diaries became acts of identity formation, preserving pieces of themselves while they traversed their adolescent years as the world around them dissolved.

At Ponar Forest, that lesson became almost unbearable. This tranquil place of terror is where nearly 75,000 Jews were brought not only to lose their lives, but to be stripped from memory. They were carried into that place not simply toward death, but toward disappearance – from the world, from record, from remembrance. The intent was not only to murder them, but to make as though they had never lived.

Even Anne Frank’s sister, Margot, had a diary. But hers was destroyed. What do we know of her hopes, her aspirations, or the person she might have become? What could she have taught us?

At transit Camp Vught, a didactic in Barrack 1B captured this loss of identity:

Every prisoner was given a number or rather; he or she was a number. Every number was required to be present at roll call: in the morning, in the evening or simply at the whim of the camp leaders. Standing in perfectly straight rows for what seems like hours in the freezing cold, the pouring rain or the blistering sun. Numbers were abused arbitrarily; you could always be next. Numbers were assigned in working parties, or put on lists for transport. Numbers who were lucky received letters and parcels; the recipients were then suddenly people, individuals. Loved ones, for whom you could do nothing in return, thought of you and sent you the food they themselves could barely do without. And, if you were unlucky, you would become a number again…

I continue to struggle with that anonymity: the fallen grave markers hidden beneath weeds in the overgrown Jewish cemeteries, the unwritten pages of destroyed diaries, and the futures we will never know. We cannot feel the fear these individuals experienced, nor can we imagine the lives they might have lived. What would Anne Frank have written in 1947? In 1967? In 2000?

We know only fragments of so many lives, yet they remind us of our responsibility to tell history through individual people, not anonymous masses. They call us to recognize the choices, dilemmas, and humanity people were faced with, and in linking the past to the present, what we can learn from the mechanisms behind it. Elie Wiesel said, “To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”

As I continue to make sense of this journey, physically, intellectually, and spiritually, I return to those opening words:

Observe: Be where your feet are. What happened here? What can we no longer see and no longer hear; observe the absence. What is the power of this place?

Describe: What does this place look like? How ordinary does it appear? How could such extraordinary evil happen here?

Reflect: What do I do with this knowledge? How do we honor the past while moving forward with purpose? What is my responsibility as an educator, as a mother, and as a Jew?

These questions belong not only to me but to my fellow travelers. After sharing this raw and intimate experience together, it feels important to end with their names:

Alexandra, Alexis, Angela, Ashley, Bridget, Dave, Ethan, Eugenia, Jane, Jennifer, Kristin, Lindsay, Lynn, Macy, Michael, Mindy, Morgan, Nikki, Ronae, Sara, Sarah, Scott, Tessa, Zach.

Devoting two weeks in the heat of summer to travel with a group of 25 strangers, from 15 different U.S. states, and to immerse oneself in a history marked by cruelty, loss and profound grief, is an act of bravery. Many arrived anxious about encountering this history so closely and then carrying it back into their classrooms. Yet throughout our journey, I watched educators remain open to difficult questions, unafraid of silence, tears, and uncertainty. Their learning was never passive. It was alive, personal, and rooted in the responsibility to bring it back to their students. They allowed what they witnessed to settle deeply enough to hear the whispers beneath the facts, while accepting that some questions will never be answered.

How fortunate their students are to learn from teachers who recognize that Holocaust education is not simply about transmitting knowledge. It is about understanding Jewish life before it was consumed in the Holocaust and knowing about who Jews are today. It is about cultivating memory, empathy, responsibility, and the courage to remain human in the face of what history asks us to witness.

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Power of Place: 2026 European Summer Institute for Holocaust Educators is an experiential professional development for teachers where learning unfolds as they tour historical sites across Europe in order to transform their understanding of the Holocaust, WWII, antisemitism, and Jewish life today. Power of Place is planned and co-led by Humanus Network on behalf of JCRC and generously supported by the Minnesota Vikings, the Tankenoff Families Foundation, Allianz of America Corporation and MINNE (Minnesota Norway Education Israel & Holocaust Fellowship).

This blog post was the featured staff column for the July 2026 Gesher (‘Bridge’ in Hebrew) – JCRC’s monthly email newsletter.
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