© 2026 Bryan R. Hinton
Learning about this legacy is one way of honoring those who came before us: those whose lives were taken, the families torn from them, and those who survived the camps, including the medical experiments carried out there, and went on to live quietly in our neighborhoods in the decades that followed. We owe them every measure of respect.
The ideologies behind these crimes do not disappear on their own. Each generation has to carry that knowledge, and act on it.
This is a shared history, and it cannot be told without Poland. For nearly a thousand years, from the Statute of Kalisz in 1264 through the academies of Kraków and Lublin, the printing houses of Warsaw, and the streets of Wilno, Polish Jews built one of the great civilizations of Europe. They were Poles. They wrote in Polish, in Yiddish, and in Hebrew. They fought in Polish uprisings. They are buried in Polish soil.
Three million Polish Jews were murdered. Much of the killing was carried out on that same soil: at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec, Majdanek, and Chełmno — Nazi German camps and killing centers built in occupied Poland. Whole towns where no one came home. A civilization of a thousand years, destroyed in five.
The fields look ordinary now. The forests have grown back. The track is still there.
What remains is the duty to remember precisely. The names. The places. The dates. The silence in those places now is not empty. It is the shape of what was taken.
To study this history through the objects, documents, and testimonies that carry it forward, I recommend:
POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
Warsaw
The Shared History Project
Managed by the Leo Baeck Institute
— In Remembrance and Honor —
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