Joe Engel used to be and stays an icon in Charleston, South Carolina. Born in Zakroczym, Poland, he survived Auschwitz and several other different focus camps and fought with the resistance prior to touchdown on American shores as a refugee in 1949.
After retirement from his dry-cleaning trade, Engel targeted his later years on Holocaust schooling. As a part of those efforts, he took to sitting on downtown park benches dressed in a reputation tag that learn “Joe Engel, Holocaust Survivor: Ask me questions” – turning into town’s first public memorial to the sufferers of Nazi genocide. Realizing he would no longer be right here to impart his message endlessly, Engel and his pal and fellow survivor Pincus Kolender led a power to put in the everlasting memorial that now stands in Charleston’s Marion Sq. park.
In 2021, I moved to town to take in my position as a professor and director of Holocaust research on the Faculty of Charleston. I arrived simply in time to fulfill Engel and to show many native scholars who had met him. He died the next 12 months, at age 95.
For years, historians, educators and Jewish teams had been making an allowance for tips on how to train in regards to the Holocaust after the survivors have handed on. Few of as of late’s school scholars have ever met a Holocaust survivor. Those that have most probably met a kid survivor, with few non-public reminiscences prior to 1945. American veterans of the conflict are nearly totally unknown to our provide scholars; many know not anything of their very own circle of relatives connections to International Struggle II.
Time marches on, distance grows, and what we name “common knowledge” adjustments. One alarming find out about from 2018 published that 45% of American adults may just no longer establish a unmarried one of the crucial over 40,000 Nazi camps and ghettos, whilst 41% of more youthful American citizens imagine that Nazi Germany killed considerably not up to 6 million Jews throughout the Holocaust.
In line with a 2025 find out about through the Claims Convention, there are quite greater than 200,000 survivors nonetheless alive, even though their median age is 87. It’s unfortunately anticipated that 7 in 10 will go away inside the subsequent decade. With their absence close to, how can educators and group participants deliver this historical past house, reducing the perceived distance between the scholars of as of late and the teachings of the Holocaust?
Bringing historical past house
One manner that displays promise helps scholars understand the connections of their very own house and their very own time to a genocide that may appear a ways away – each at the map and within the thoughts.
A letter dated Dec. 27, 1938, despatched from Malie Landsmann to her cousin Minnie Tewel Baum of South Carolina.
Courtesy of the Jewish Heritage Assortment, Addlestone Library, Faculty of Charleston
In categories at the Holocaust, I now use a collection of letters despatched through a circle of relatives of Polish Jews to their family members in Camden, South Carolina. The letters themselves are tough assets demonstrating the expanding desperation of Malie Landsmann, the primary author. In 1938, she reached out to her cousin Minnie Tewel Baum, looking for assist to flee Adolf Hitler’s Germany.
Even supposing the 2 had by no means met, Minnie attempted the entirety to assist her cousin and her circle of relatives. In any case, alternatively, she used to be no longer a hit. American immigration obstacles and murderous Nazi coverage took their toll, with Malie, her husband, Chaim, and their two kids, Ida and Peppi, all killed at Auschwitz.
Those haunting letters display the connections of the conflict to small-town South Carolina. They offer the Holocaust an actual human face and a connection to puts scholars know.
Letter collections like those don’t seem to be uncommon. The Faculty of Charleston holds a 2nd, a ways higher team of letters, the Helen Stern Lipton Papers, which runs to over 170 pages of correspondence between members of the family in South Carolina, German-occupied Europe, Russia or even Central Asia. When I used to be a Ph.D. pupil, I participated in categories the use of the Sara Spira postcards despatched from a sequence of ghettos in Poland to rural Wisconsin. Additional archives exist everywhere the USA. Maximum communities have connections to the Holocaust, whether or not by means of artifacts, other people with direct ties or each.
The essential factor is to show in techniques that may smash down the psychological obstacles created through time and area. It’s certainly the similar explanation why that the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum created a touring show off referred to as “Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away.”
Finding out from descendants
As academics and professors try to bridge those divides, they continuously invite the descendants of Holocaust survivors to their categories to talk. Descendants can retell the tales in their oldsters’ or ancestors’ perseverance and survival, however what’s extra essential is their skill to position a human face on those occasions and display how they continue to be related within the lives of such a lot of.
The Stolpersteine memorial to the Landsmann circle of relatives, put in in Berlin in 2025.
Pablo Castagnola, Anzenberger Company. Courtesy of the Zucker/Goldberg Heart for Holocaust Research
I take those brief visits a step additional in a category the place scholars educate as oral historical past interviewers, then behavior recorded conversations with a descendant of survivors. Those conferences inspire dialogue of circle of relatives Holocaust historical past, however handiest after the scholar asks the descendant about how they discovered about what took place to their dad or mum, grandparent or great-grandparent, and the way this may have weighed on their very own lifestyles years after the conflict.
That is really the purpose right here. Essentially the most impactful portions of those recordings are nearly at all times the discussions of legacies; of ways the households that scholars meet nonetheless are living with the enormity of Holocaust trauma.
When a descendant tells scholars in regards to the previous, this is essential. But if a descendant speaks of what that previous way for them, their circle of relatives and their group, this is so a lot more.
Scholars achieve firsthand wisdom of intergenerational trauma; the difficulties of rebuilding; the superiority of tension, concern and melancholy in survivor properties; and so a lot more. All of this displays scholars in no unsure techniques how the Holocaust nonetheless has bearing at the lives of other people in our communities.
Historical past after reminiscence: A trail ahead
What’s maximum heartening about those strategies and their successes is what they expose about what as of late’s scholars worth. Within the age of AI, Giant Tech and omnipresent social media, I imagine it’s nonetheless – and even perhaps greater than ever – the true human connection.
Chad Gibbs with pupil Leah Davenport, who organized for Stolpersteine to be put in out of doors the Landsmann circle of relatives’s house in Berlin.
Pablo Castagnola, Anzenberger Company. Courtesy of the Zucker/Goldberg Heart for Holocaust Research
Scholars are drawn in through the native connections and speak in confidence the tales of actual other people, dropped at them in individual. Ceaselessly, they release their very own analysis to raised perceive the letters.
One in every of my scholars even helped flip them into lecture room fabrics, now used way past our personal school. Some other did the painstaking paintings to have 4 new Stolpersteine, or Stumbling Stone, memorials put in in Berlin to commemorate the Landsmann circle of relatives.
By no means having witnessed them myself, I will be able to handiest believe the affect of Joe Engel’s conversations on the ones park benches in downtown Charleston.
Not anything will ever really exchange the voices of the survivors, however I imagine academics and communities can lift on his paintings through making historical past really feel native and private. As the entirety round us turns out to turn every day, little may well be extra essential than the teachings of those other people, their assets and the Holocaust.
