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).

by Eugenia Ijames, Johnston County Career and Technical Leadership Academy (Wendell, North Carolina) | July 1, 2026

I participated in the Power of Place, where we followed the footprints of Jewish communities that once existed across Lithuania, Poland, and Amsterdam. To walk through these places is to understand that Holocaust education cannot live only in textbooks, dates, and statistics. It must also live in streets, buildings, forests, cemeteries, photographs, names, and silences. The power of place reminds us that the Holocaust happened in real communities, to real families, in towns where people once prayed, worked, studied, celebrated, raised children, and imagined a future.

Throughout the seminar, we visited memorials and museums honoring victims of the Holocaust. We also reflected on the words of young diarists who wrote about how their lives changed as persecution, violence, and pogroms were carried out by the Germans and their collaborators. Some of these diarists survived, while others did not. Their writings offer more than historical testimony; they remind us that young people were not simply witnesses to history, but children and adolescents trying to make sense of a world that was becoming increasingly dangerous, uncertain, and cruel.

During our trip, we visited towns such as Kaunas, Šeduva, and Łódź, where Jewish families once lived ordinary lives and contributed deeply to the cultural, religious, and economic life of their communities before the Holocaust. Today, very few Jewish residents remain in many of these places, and many descendants may never return to live there or fully reconnect with their ancestral roots. The towns now stand quiet, marked by memorials, plaques, photographs, and traces of history that can easily go unnoticed on sidewalks, in parks, or on the sides of buildings in quiet neighborhoods. These physical reminders ask something of us: to stop, to notice, and to remember that absence itself can speak.

After talking with historians, archivists, educators, and others who have dedicated their lives to preserving history and protecting the heritage of Jewish communities and others murdered during the Holocaust, the question becomes: where do we go from here? When do we begin teaching Holocaust education to young people? How do we teach the truth of what happened without reducing victims to the ways they were murdered? How do we honor both the lives they lived and the violence they endured?

Jonathan Webber noted in his paper, “The Significance of the Physical Traces of the Past for the Education of Modern Society,” that “the problem here is that educating the living about the Holocaust is not necessarily compatible with what is needed for the remembrance” of those who were lost (Preserving the future, International Preservation Conference, June 2004). This tension is important. Education asks us to explain, analyze, and teach. Remembrance asks us to pause, grieve, and honor. Both are necessary, but they are not always the same.

As educators and advocates, we must be willing to hold that tension with care. Holocaust education should not begin only with death, nor should it end there. It should begin with life: with families, communities, culture, faith, language, childhood, work, music, and daily routines. Only then can students begin to understand the depth of what was destroyed. The memorials, museums, diaries, and physical traces of the past do not simply ask us to remember what happened. They challenge us to consider what kind of world we are helping young people build now. If we teach them to notice absence, to question hatred, to recognize human dignity, and to protect memory from indifference, then remembrance becomes more than looking backward. It becomes a responsibility we carry forward.