Jan. 27 was International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It’s a day to remember the 6 million Jews who were rounded up into ghettos and murdered in concentration camps and gas chambers around Europe. We also listen to the survivors and learn about those who helped rescue them.
But teaching about the Holocaust continues year-round. WUWM talked to historian and educator Samantha Abramson, executive director of the Holocaust Education Resource Center in Milwaukee, about what we can learn from European society’s descent into systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder.
"The Nazi rise to power and what unfolds across society, it doesn't happen overnight," says Abramson. "It happens over a number of years, and it's small steps along the way."
She says it happened because there was economic, political, and social upheaval in the Weimar Republic [the fledgling German democracy that existed for 14 years before Hitler came to power.] The Nazis used those divisions and weaknesses.
"But again, at its core, it didn't start there. The hatred of Jews, the hatred of others were around for hundreds of years before that," Abramson says.
The Nazis were also pioneers at messaging — at propaganda and using technologies to get their messaging out there, explains Abramson. And this can inform how we teach students today, as people are bombarded with so much information online through social media posts and video clips.
"We know what that can do in this moment in 2026," she notes, saying that it's about teaching the tools to combat hate.
"At the Holocaust Education Resource Center, we teach students this history because we want them to think. We want them to think critically," says Abramson. "We want them to understand media literacy. We want our students to have a toolkit."
She says it's not historians and educators' jobs to teach students what to think, but to give them that toolbox so that they know how to think, how to ask really critical questions, how to look at what the messages they're receiving.
"Again, whether it's in the hallway in their school or on on whatever social media platform is way too hip for me to understand today, whatever it is, we want them to look at that messaging and really interrogate it. What is it saying? Who's saying it? Why are they saying it? And is there another perspective they should go and look for to have a more balanced nuance of where the world is?"
