This spring break, my friends and I travelled through Germany, Poland and Lithuania, visiting Holocaust sites and learning about its legacy. Despite being a Judaic studies concentrator and being currently enrolled in JUDS 0902: “History of the Holocaust,” this trip was eye-opening in a way few other trips are. It has shown me the limits of learning about history from a classroom and the importance of bearing witness. Brown is a university committed to “(serving) the community, the nation and the world by discovering, communicating and preserving knowledge.” But to fulfill this mission, it must provide students opportunities to learn about history firsthand. During our current moment of increasing antisemitism and rising nationalism, the University can start by expanding Holocaust education opportunities.
The Holocaust was one of the most important and tragic events of the 20th century. It was the systematic mass murder of 6 million Jewish men, women and children in death camps, mass shootings, concentration camps, labor camps and ghettos. Speaking about the Holocaust in 1941, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill stated that “we are in the presence of a crime without a name.” That name, of course, would become genocide as put forward by the Polish-Jewish attorney Raphael Lemkin and defined in the 1951 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.
The Holocaust occurred at an unbelievable scale, in an industrialized manner that exceeded the boundaries of atrocities that came before it, and even after it. For much of the late 20th century, Americans could hear about the experiences firsthand from the 140,000 Jewish refugees who came to America between 1946 and 1953. The events of the Second World War were also still within recent memory. However, 81 years after the war’s conclusion, as the era of Holocaust survivor witness testimony comes to a close, Americans are forgetting. Yet the Holocaust remains as important right now as it was then.
Today, Americans know shockingly little about the Holocaust. According to a 2018 survey by the Claims Conference, 31% of Americans, including 41% of millennials, believe that fewer than two million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. The same survey found that 66% of millennials could not say what Auschwitz — the concentration and extermination camp where at least 1.1 million people were murdered — was. And less than half of Americans know Hitler came to power through the democratic process. Today, Jews face attacks and harassment globally, nationally and even here on campus. Jews comprise 2.4% of the U.S. population but are the victims of about 60% of religiously motivated hate crimes. And antisemitic streamers are more popular than ever — just look at Nick Fuentes, who believes “Hitler was awesome,” Candace Owens, who minimizes the Holocaust, claiming historical accounts of Nazi medical experiments on Jewish prisoners were “bizarre propaganda” and Tucker Carlson, who speculates that Chabad, a Hassidic sect, was responsible for the Iran war and has hosted a Holocaust revisionist on his show unchallenged.
Even up the road in Cambridge, the Harvard College Debating Union unanimously proposed, and later rescinded, a debate on a resolution stating that “This House regrets the Enlightenment-era movement by European nation-states to grant greater civil rights to Jewish people in exchange for their political and legal assimilation (often termed ‘Jewish Emancipation’).” Judging them favorably, I hope they were only ignorant about the history of antisemitism leading up to the Holocaust, when it too was socially acceptable to debate whether Jews should continue to have rights.
This is all to say that the state of Holocaust awareness in the United States is in dire shape. Understanding how a society can become mobilized to destroy its democracy and systematically murder its neighbors is important for every American, and indeed should be reemphasized in schools today. But these lessons are particularly important for Brunonians since many will go on to have influential careers in industry, medicine, journalism, government and defense — fields that shared complicity in the Holocaust. To help prevent the past from repeating itself, the University must do more to teach its students about this dark period of history.
While Brown famously does not have a core curriculum, there is more that it can do to promote education about the Holocaust and historical events like it. The Program in Judaic Studies could fundraise for an endowed lectureship each Yom HaShoah, the Jewish Holocaust remembrance day, to teach Brown students and community members about the Holocaust. The University could hire additional faculty specializing in the topic to expand its course offerings. A class on the Holocaust or comparative genocide studies should be a requirement for the undergraduate history and international and public affairs concentrations, which are among the college’s largest areas of study. This is because it is impossible to understand modern history and the post-war world order without having a robust understanding of the Holocaust — for these concentrators, to graduate without such an understanding would amount to academic malpractice.
But visiting Holocaust sites is one of the most powerful ways to understand what happened. When you walk into the gas chamber at Auschwitz or the crematorium at Majdanek, you understand the absurdity of the Nazis’ hatred. When you see a room full of shoes, suitcases or human hair, you begin to understand that 6 million people are not just a statistic, but 6 million precious lives that were stolen.
Brown should ensure that there are opportunities to witness these sights over the course of a break. Much like the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences has an annual spring break trip, so too could the Program in Judaic Studies or the history department. Furthermore, the Warren Alpert Medical School and the Graduate School could establish a partnership with the Fellowship at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics to bring medical and graduate students to Poland to see firsthand how doctors and other professionals participated in Nazi crimes. Taking a week to visit sites could also be more practical than taking a semester-long class on the Holocaust for the majority of students who are not history, IAPA or Judaic studies concentrators.
The Holocaust and its victims will always be a crucial part of history. Brown should do more to ensure that Brunonians continue to understand the importance and scale of the crimes so that they can never materialize again.
Tasawwar Rahman ’26 can be reached at tasawwar_rahman@brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald.com and other op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
Tas Rahman is an Opinion Editor and a member of the Editorial Page Board. He hails from Detroit, Michigan and is concentrating in Computational Biology and Judaic Studies. In his free time, you can find Tas hiking and reading the Atlantic (alongside the Herald).
