Memory Is Not Enough

I am writing this from France, the country where I was born. This morning, I came across a sentence by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, written nearly two centuries ago, that stopped me: "As the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity."

I have spent much of the past decade thinking about that past.

I have sat across from Holocaust survivors in their homes, held their hands, listened as they returned to places and moments most of us can barely imagine, and recorded stories they knew they would not be here to tell forever.

For years, I thought the urgency was recording them before it was too late. I no longer believe that is enough.

We have amassed archives, testimonies, museums, and memorials. We have commemorated anniversaries and preserved millions of pages, photographs, and hours of testimony. Yet antisemitism, historical distortion, conspiracy theories, and misinformation are flourishing.

Perhaps the question is no longer whether we have preserved enough history.

It is whether we have learned how to make history teach.

A 2020 nationwide survey by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany found that 63% of American Millennials and Gen Z did not know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Nearly half could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto, and 56% could not identify Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Five years later, the Claims Conference's 2025 Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Index found that 48% of Americans still could not name a single Nazi concentration camp or ghetto. At the same time, 76% believed something like the Holocaust could happen again today.

That paradox should trouble us. We have more access to history than any generation before us, yet access is not understanding.

We may have confused preservation with transmission.

A testimony sitting safely in an archive is memory preserved.

A testimony that reaches a 15-year-old and helps that student understand how neighbors became enemies, how propaganda became accepted truth, how discrimination became law, and how ordinary people became accustomed to the exclusion of other human beings. That is memory transmitted. And today, transmission is the emergency.

I understood this most clearly through David Schaecter.

David survived Auschwitz and other Nazi camps. He lost much of his family. He later devoted decades of his life to Holocaust remembrance and education.

One day, as we sat together, David took my hands in his. He looked at me with an intensity I will never forget and insisted that I had to become his "mouthpiece."

I understood what he meant. He was not asking me simply to preserve his story. He was asking me to carry it. There is a profound difference.

Survivors did not endure the pain of returning to their darkest memories simply so their interviews could exist on a server somewhere. Again and again, I have heard the same urgency beneath their stories: "Tell them. Teach them. Make them understand what happened."

Soon, they will no longer be able to walk into our classrooms. We must build a way for their voices to enter those classrooms without them.

That realization changed the way I think about Holocaust testimony. Recording a survivor should never be the end of the work. The real challenge is what we do with those voices next: how we place them in the hands of teachers, bring them into classrooms, connect individual stories to the places where history unfolded, and make them meaningful to a generation born decades after the Holocaust.

Because not every young person will walk through a concentration camp. Not every student will visit a Holocaust museum or memorial. If we cannot bring every student to the places where history happened, we must find ways to bring that history to them. And we have to meet young people where they are.

They are growing up in an information environment in which a historical fact, a conspiracy theory, an AI-generated image, an influencer's opinion, and a piece of propaganda can arrive on the same screen within seconds of one another.

In that world, firsthand testimony has a particular power. No algorithmic interpretation. No anonymous account rewriting history. A human being saying, "I was there. This happened to me."

But even testimony cannot simply be placed in front of a child and expected to do the work for us. It needs context. Teachers need tools. Students need opportunities to ask questions, connect individual lives to historical events, and understand not only how the Holocaust ended, but how it began.

"Never Again" cannot simply mean teaching young people what happened at Auschwitz.

By Auschwitz, it was already too late.

They need to understand what came before: the words, the propaganda, the normalization of hatred, the gradual exclusion of people from society, and the indifference that allowed each boundary to be crossed.

That is where Holocaust education becomes more than an obligation to the dead. It becomes an education for the living. The generation of witnesses is disappearing.

Nothing we do can stop that. But we can decide what disappears with them. If Tocqueville was right that the past must illuminate the future, then our responsibility is not simply to preserve the light. It is to make sure the next generation can see by it.

For decades, we asked: How do we make sure the world remembers? Today, we must ask the harder question: What are we asking the world to learn? Memory preserves the past. Transmission gives it a future.

About the Author

Leslie Gelrubin Benitah is a French-American journalist, documentary filmmaker, author, and founder of The Last Ones Foundation, a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to Holocaust education through survivor testimony. The granddaughter of four Holocaust survivors, she creates films, books, and educational resources that connect younger generations with firsthand accounts. Her book, Bubbeh Meisse, explores her family's Holocaust history.