On Monday, April 13th, in observance of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, I attended a lecture by Deborah Levine given to a classroom of Covenant College History students, and I was moved to write this article. A quote from one of her books states “99% of Germans were not Nazis, but were complicit” {need book and quote, source}. After hearing many questions asked by the students at the conclusion of her lecture and researching antisemitism as it exists and spreads today, I have come to believe that Holocaust education in young generations of students is more important than ever.

Deb described her idyllic childhood in Bermuda, her mother’s love of storytelling and how it influenced her forward-thinking work with special education populations in the 1940s, and the culture shock of moving from Bermuda to Long Island, NY when she was just 7 years old.

Leaving behind the slow, sun-soaked island life – where her family was the only Jewish family -for the comparative rough-and-tumble streets of New York, which many Jewish families called home was a world away from everything she had known. Much of this shift was difficult. Deb longed to return to the island, to the slower pace and the life she had known, but her future held experiences and education that she could have never imagined.

Before Deb was born, her father had served as a Ritchie Boy – one of a remarkable group of mostly Jewish refugees who had fled Europe and returned as U.S. military intelligence officers, using their native German and French to interrogate prisoners and gather intelligence. Her Father helped liberate the Nazi concentration camp of Nordhausen. He received a Bronze medal but was humble and rarely spoke about it or his experiences from the war. He came home largely silent and Deb would come to understand that the trauma absorbed by both survivors and liberators did not stay with them alone – it was passed down, quietly and invisibly, through one or two generations.

She was shaped by a history she never lived, carried by a man who never fully spoke it. At the lecture, Deb read excerpts from her father’s letters – written to her mother during the war, describing the horrors he witnessed. Words that were private for decades, now read aloud in a college classroom. It is an act of courage to let strangers into that kind of grief.

When Deb opened the floor to questions, the first came from a student who asked, “Were you alive during the war?” It made me quietly chuckle – Deb would have to be well over 90 for that to be true. But the question, innocent as it was, speaks volumes. For younger generations, the Holocaust is not a living memory. It is history in the same category as any other – distant, textbook, untouchable. It is exactly why lectures like this one matter.

Deb also spoke about her work with Tulsa’s Jewish Federation and her collaboration with the FBI following the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995 – one of the deadliest domestic terrorist attacks in American history, carried out by individuals with ties to white nationalist ideology. A student asked her to elaborate, and she did. 

Her job was to prepare Holocaust Survivors to speak to the media. She dealt with international Holocaust denier, David Irving who came to speak at a Tulsa library. And she served on Oklahoma’s Say NO to Hate Council, helping the FBI train her colleagues. But she didn’t stop there. Deb shared that she had reached out to the FBI again, more recently, after being targeted online by Neo-Nazi inspired individuals and groups who were intent on scaring her into silence.

Another student asked frankly, “How should I respond when I encounter Holocaust deniers – like at my old school?” It was this question that stopped me. Not just because of the implied casualness of it – that Holocaust denial is something this student had already encountered in her own peer group – but because of what it suggested about the world these young people are navigating. After the lecture, I found myself researching antisemitism in younger generations, the common push to deny or minimize what happened, and how rapidly it spreads online. What I found was sobering.

Antisemitism is not a relic of the past – it is rampant, and just below the surface lurks a darkness that seeks to explain away and deny a history we have documented in first-hand accounts, photographs, and film. The organized effort to rewrite or erase that history is not fringe anymore. It lives in comment sections, on college campuses, in the hallways of high schools – exactly where that student had already encountered it. The current political environment adds fuel to this fire, with rhetoric that blames Jewish people broadly for the complex situation in Israel and the Middle East – a dangerous oversimplification that echoes patterns we should by now recognize.  This is precisely why Deb’s father’s letters matter. Why Deb keeps walking into classrooms. That student’s question needs an answer.

At the close of the lecture, a student asked the question that perhaps mattered most: “What can we do to help?” Deb’s answer was simple and profound. “Each of you are history,” she said. “Write it down and tell your story.” It was a direct echo of her own mother – a pioneer in special education who understood decades before most that storytelling was not a luxury but a lifeline, that the stories we carry and pass forward are the only true defense against the darkness that seeks to erase them. Deb has spent her life honoring that belief. In a classroom in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on an April evening, she passed it forward again.

I drove her home afterward, and I came home and started writing.

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Note: Response of a student at the  Covenant College presentation:
       “I just wanted to say thank you so much for coming to speak yesterday, I have had multiple people say how much that impacted them. Your presentation was amazing! Thank you for being willing to come back and making my Senior year (the last time doing this at college) work out. I’m beyond grateful, you are amazing! Please know that you have left a great impact on us up here at the college.”

Photo by Zoshua Colah on Unsplash