I have walked through Dachau.
Years ago, I stood in that place where human cruelty was systematized and suffering was industrialized. The air there is different. Heavy. Quiet in a way that is not peaceful but reverent, as if the ground itself remembers.
It does not feel like a museum.
It feels like a wound.
You read numbers in books. You see black-and-white photos. You watch movies. Time and screens create distance. But standing there, the truth presses in:
These were not characters.
They were people.
People with favorite meals. People with arguments. People with dreams that were interrupted mid-sentence. People who laughed at dinner tables and tucked children into bed. People whose names were spoken in love before they were reduced to numbers.
I also visited the house where Anne Frank and her family hid. The narrow rooms, the steep stairs, the silence of that space — it is impossible to stand there and not feel the fragility of safety, the terror of being hunted, the quiet courage of trying to remain human while the world outside turns monstrous.
And all over Europe, there are small brass plaques in the sidewalks outside ordinary homes — Stolpersteine, “stumbling stones.” They list names. Ages. Where the person was taken. These are not grand memorials. They are markers at front doors.
Front doors.
Because genocide does not begin in camps.
It begins in neighborhoods.
It begins when governments decide some people do not belong.
When propaganda replaces truth.
When fear is stoked.
When neighbors look away.
When difference is framed as danger.
The victims were Jews, yes — but also Roma, disabled people, political dissidents, LGBTQ+ individuals, those with mental illness, those who did not fit the regime’s image of “acceptable.” Their only crime was existing outside the preferred mold of power.
What strikes me most now is this:
The Holocaust did not feel historic while it was happening.
It felt like policy.
Like “security.”
Like “national identity.”
Like “necessary measures.”
It was explained. Rationalized. Normalized.
And that is what chills me today.
Because when I look at the world around us now — the rhetoric, the dehumanization, the way groups of people are talked about as problems instead of persons — the distance between “then” and “now” feels smaller than I ever wanted to admit.
Remembering is not about guilt.
It is about vigilance.
It is about honoring those who suffered by refusing to let the warning signs go unnoticed. It is about seeing the full humanity of every person — especially the ones society tells us are “other.” It is about resisting the slow erosion of empathy that makes the unthinkable possible.
Those markers in the sidewalks are not only memorials.
They are mirrors.
They ask us:
Who is being made invisible now?
Who is being spoken about as less than human?
Who is being told they do not belong?
International Holocaust Remembrance is not only about the past. It is a call to protect the present.
To honor the dead, we must defend the living.
May we remember not just with sorrow, but with courage.
May we refuse to look away.
May we choose our humanity — again and again — while we still can.
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