--- title: How to Keep the Memories of Holocaust Survivors Alive description: I feature my mother’s testimony in my teaching because it gives my students a direct link, through me, as my mother’s son, to the genocide that was the Holocaust, writes Menachem Z. Rosensaft. canonical: https://time.com/7209598/keeping-holocaust-memories-alive-essay/ author: TIME article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2025-01-27T12:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-10T23:31:11.532Z article:section: Ideas og:title: How to Keep the Memories of Holocaust Survivors Alive og:description: I feature my mother’s testimony in my teaching because it gives my students a direct link, through me, as my mother’s son, to the genocide that was the Holocaust, writes Menachem Z. Rosensaft. og:url: https://time.com/7209598/keeping-holocaust-memories-alive-essay/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt5d27e5c880b23bfb/6998b2b4e1ba006d4c98b567/Auschwitz-Entrance-Holocaust-Remembrance-Day-2025.jpg?branch=production&width=2400&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: 79th Anniversary Of Auschwitz Liberation And International Holocaust Remembrance Day og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: How to Keep the Memories of Holocaust Survivors Alive twitter:description: I feature my mother’s testimony in my teaching because it gives my students a direct link, through me, as my mother’s son, to the genocide that was the Holocaust, writes Menachem Z. Rosensaft. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt5d27e5c880b23bfb/6998b2b4e1ba006d4c98b567/Auschwitz-Entrance-Holocaust-Remembrance-Day-2025.jpg?branch=production&width=2400&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # 80 Years On, We Must Continue to Keep the Memories of Holocaust Survivors Alive ## Video: Holocaust Survivor Recalls Horrors of Auschwitz [Watch (HLS stream): Holocaust Survivor Recalls Horrors of Auschwitz](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/yUX4rSQY.m3u8) (5:24)  _Published 2025-01-27. The 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops is being marked at the site of the former death camp, a ceremony that is widely being treated as the last major observance that any notable number of survivors will be able to attend. Among those who traveled to the site is 86-year-old Tova Friedman, who was 6 when she was among the 7,000 people liberated on Jan. 27, 1945._ by [Menachem Z. Rosensaft](/author/menachem-z-rosensaft/) ## Menachem Z. Rosensaft Jan 27, 2025 12:00 PM CUT  Visitors pass by the entrance gate with “Arbeit Macht Frei” inscription at the former Nazi German Auschwitz I concentration camp in Oswiecim, Poland. Visitors pass by the entrance gate with “Arbeit Macht Frei” inscription at the former Nazi German Auschwitz I concentration camp in Oswiecim, Poland.Beata Zawrzel—NurPhoto/Getty Images by [Menachem Z. Rosensaft](/author/menachem-z-rosensaft/) ## Menachem Z. Rosensaft Jan 27, 2025 12:00 PM CUT “How many of you have known, or met, or listened to a Holocaust survivor?” I recently asked the Cornell University undergraduates in my class on antisemitism in the courts and in jurisprudence. All 16 hands went up. “You are the last generation,” I then told them, “to have had that privilege.” Over the course of the past 80 years, ever since the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in what had been German occupied Poland, the women, men and children who had been persecuted, oppressed, tortured, and marked for destruction as part of Nazi Germany’s “Final Solution of the Jewish question” assumed the mission of telling the world how their families, their friends, and their neighbors had been murdered. With the survivors dwindling all too rapidly from the scene, we are at a pivotal moment in determining how their memories can be passed on to those who have never had—and will never have—the opportunity to listen to the tales of all those who bore and are still bearing witness. Both my parents survived Auschwitz and the Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in Germany where they were liberated. In September 1945, my mother, then Dr. Ada Bimko, a Jewish dentist from the Polish city of Sosnowiec, was the principal witness for the prosecution at the first trial of Nazi war criminals. In the dock before a British military tribunal in the German city of Lüneburg were the SS officers and guards who had run Bergen-Belsen, many of whom had previously served at Auschwitz-Birkenau. My mother, who had been imprisoned for 15 months in Birkenau followed by five months in Bergen-Belsen, [told](http://www.bergenbelsen.co.uk/pages/TrialTranscript/Trial%5FDay%5F005.html "undefined") the tribunal that upon her arrival at Birkenau on the night of August 3, until August 4, 1943, she was separated from her parents, her first husband, and her child who were sent directly to be killed in a gas chamber. She was subsequently assigned to work as a doctor in the camp’s infirmary. In what was one of the earliest, public accounts of the dispassionate cruelties at Auschwitz, she [recalled](http://www.bergenbelsen.co.uk/pages/TrialTranscript/Trial%5FDay%5F005.html "undefined") how “the sick Jews” in the infirmary “were ordered to parade quite naked” in front of an SS doctor. “The seemingly weak people were put aside at once,” she said, “but other times the doctor looked also at the hands or at the arms and any small sort of thing which caught his attention was sufficient for him...Sometimes they pointed with a finger to one or the other, pointing out that those may join those people who were condemned to death.” I feature my mother’s testimony in my courses at Cornell and Columbia—I also teach about the law of genocide at the law schools of both universities—primarily because of its intrinsic importance, but also because it serves to give my students a direct link, through me, as my mother’s son, to the genocide that was the Holocaust. **Read more:** [_Why I’ll Never Stop Sharing My Holocaust Story_](https://time.com/7174919/gidon-lev-holocaust-story-essay/ "undefined") The late historian Lucy Dawidowicz once [described](https://www.amazon.com/Jewish-presence-Essays-identity-history/dp/0030166764/ref=sr%5F1%5F5?crid=3EOM7RZRN2236&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.JaLKJONWnorVdjMk-ytg952-uxf6HfznDfYPiw0SkNUMiA9sAZy6PI7MRBACWQRdZOidTumqva0DpERXtOh07Kyi2%5FnTKC6l043SMJQKfp%5FuocDm-gRn1Vj-YHpnyB3AjC7L1CfJ9Hwz%5Fb-%5FkQWxXAAKAhESWQsA%5FLdBpRaiz5STJ34I3AwrkF%5FrR2zoseFdl-BTO7JNMgQKNJF7BHPL-pqiG9mGwJg2qhzBmfAnhsQ.tYqbG2mds%5FnkMU0DlC5BW97ZDBK0j2GfJtemy73Qeqo&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=lucy+dawidowicz&qid=1734706435&sprefix=lucy+dawidowicz%2Caps%2C133&sr=8-5 "undefined") my father, the fiery leader of the survivors in the British Zone of Germany after the end of World War II, as “our Ancient Mariner, who passes, ‘like night, from land to land,’ with ‘strange power of speech’ to tell his tale to whomsoever will listen.” Remembrance is only meaningful if it has a purpose. And that purpose must be rooted in an understanding of precisely what we enjoin ourselves to remember and why. In formally [designating](https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/n05/487/96/pdf/n0548796.pdf "undefined") January 27, the date that Auschwitz was liberated in 1945, as an annual international day of commemoration, the United Nations General Assembly reaffirmed that the Holocaust must “forever be a warning to all people of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice.” One other central, if not overriding, purpose of Holocaust remembrance, however, must be to think of the millions who were annihilated not as impersonal statistics but as individuals with names, faces, identities, dreams, and emotions. The survivors told us about their parents and grandparents, their spouses, their siblings, their children, their friends, their neighbors who died of starvation in ghetto streets or of typhus in a concentration camp barrack, or whose corpses rose toward heaven from a crematorium. We cannot allow these dead to fade into the ether of oblivion. Each of us, in turn, must now commit to transmit into the future at least one name and one face. For me, that name and face belong to Benjamin, my mother’s five-and-a-half-year-old son. Since my mother’s death in 1997, Benjamin has existed inside of me. I see his face in my mind, try to imagine his voice, his fear as the gas chamber doors slammed shut, his final tears. If I were to forget him, he would disappear. And I must make sure that he will not disappear with me. We, the survivors’ children and grandchildren, who grew up with them, knowing them, feeling their pain and experiencing their joys, have absorbed their memories into ours. In a very real sense, we have become their attesters. Our task and the task of all of us who have known, or met, or listened to a Holocaust survivor must be to ingrain these memories—the survivors’ legacy to the world—into the permanent consciousness of humankind. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/7209598/keeping-holocaust-memories-alive-essay/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/7209598/keeping-holocaust-memories-alive-essay/"},"headline":"80 Years On, We Must Continue to Keep the Memories of Holocaust Survivors Alive","datePublished":"2025-01-27T12:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-10T23:31:11.532Z","description":"I feature my mother’s testimony in my teaching because it gives my students a direct link, through me, as my mother’s son, to the genocide that was the Holocaust, writes Menachem Z. 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