In 2019, I was working as a curator at a Holocaust museum in Rockland County, NY. While inventorying the museum’s archives and artifact collections for a move to a new facility, I discovered a small plexiglass box identified simply by the words “Ashes from Chelmno?” on a faded yellow sticky note. I immediately realized that this was far more than a simple artifact but rather a box that represented the epitome of evil.
Chelmno, located in German-occupied Western Poland, was the first Nazi extermination camp to conduct the large-scale execution of Jews using gas. Between 1941 and 1944, more than 172,000 Jews were murdered in Chelmno, with their remains scattered throughout the camp.
While Holocaust museums typically have policies not to accept human remains into their collections, this container of ashes and bone fragments had somehow found its way into the collection and was then forgotten on a storage room shelf.
Jewish law requires human remains to be buried, and these ashes had waited more than 70 years for a proper burial. What followed was months of navigating legal, religious, and financial challenges to ensure these victims would receive the dignity they had been denied in death. Finally, on September 28, 2019, more than 500 people gathered at the local Jewish cemetery to witness the burial.
A towering tombstone with inscriptions in English, Hebrew, and Yiddish was erected to tell the story of the remains buried there. I chose a quote from Lamentations, “Over these do I weep,” to be prominently displayed at the top to signify the deep sadness and sorrow felt for the murdered individuals and families.
Following Jewish tradition, the inscription closed with the words “May their memory be a blessing.” But to those familiar words we added another message: “May their memory be not just a blessing but also a warning for future generations.”
Just a few months after we buried the ashes, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and museums closed their doors. Then something curious happened – in lieu of a visit to a Holocaust museum, individuals and groups began requesting tours of the memorial.
What began as one small school field trip to an outdoor space where students could practice social distancing while learning about the Holocaust evolved into a full-fledged educational program that thousands of people from the United States, Canada, and Europe have now attended.
As one of the only places in America where the ashes of Holocaust victims are buried, my tour grew to include the graves of many Holocaust survivors buried near the Chelmno memorial, testifying to their resilience and the rebirth of a community literally built from the ashes of the Holocaust.
The question I was asked most often was about the inscription. People wondered what we meant by “a warning to future generations.” Often feeling like the lone canary in the coal mine, I would use these questions as a launching pad to talk about the steady rise in antisemitism worldwide and the dangers of leaving hate unchecked.
But nobody has asked me that question in the last 15 months. Since October 7, the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, not a single student or adult on a tour has questioned the necessity of those words.
Waves of antisemitic fervor
As waves of antisemitic fervor have reached new crescendos in the United States and around the world, nobody has asked what warning bells we were trying to sound. Tragically, it has become glaringly obvious that violence against Jews can be easily excused and ignored, even in the democratic liberal society we pride ourselves on today.
Our generation has missed the warning that Holocaust historians and educators have been sounding for decades: Antisemitism is the longest, most continuous prejudice, and leaving this hate unchecked leads to violence against Jews, democracy, and the rule of law.
Jews have begun to suffer the consequences of this inattentiveness – consequences with historical patterns seen many times before: being afraid to appear identifiably Jewish in public spaces out of fear that they will quickly be targeted, Jewish professors and students no longer feeling safe on college campuses, and a new generation of youth raised to believe in the age-old biases, tropes, and conspiracies against the Jewish people.
We may have missed the warning that sounded 80 years ago, and today less than a thousand Auschwitz survivors remain alive to share their testimonies. But as we reach this week’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, let’s not miss the alarm bells ringing loudly today.
The writer is the curator at the Holocaust Museum & Center for Tolerance and Education in Suffern, New York, and director of fellowships at Touro University’s Lander College for Women.