Today is Yom HaShoah—Holocaust Remembrance Day.

I don’t normally post stuff like this but for whatever reason it seemed appropriate.

One of the most impactful visits of my life was a family trip to Auschwitz in 2014.

Everyone who goes will have a different experience and I’m sure part of that will be colored by their own history.

My grandfather was imprisoned at Auschwitz. He survived the Holocaust. Many members of his family—including his four then-alive children and wife—did not.

Being the grandson of two Holocaust survivors, I of course heard a lot about the Holocaust growing up.

But something about visiting the physical location of an extermination camp was really different.

A few observations about it that are surely not unique and certainly not comprehensive:

(1) The sheer scale of the place. The amount of planning and deliberate thought that went into constructing it. The resources. The every day bureaucratic decisions that had to be made to make sure a place like that runs. It’s astonishing. Go there. Look around. It goes far.

(2)This is obvious but I had never thought of it before: Auschwitz—and every extermination camp—is a place. It has grass. It has trees. It has smells.

Beyond that—and this I had thought of—there are surrounding towns and people who lived there, all the while.

(3) You visit the bathrooms, the places they slept. Speaking of smells—the bathroom still does. It’s been 75 years.

For me, visiting where the imprisoned lived was more impactful than visiting the crematoria. Maybe thinking of those final moments is too hard. I don’t know.

Most of all, you go to a place and you think of the people who were there before you. That very much could have been me. It could have been you (you know what I mean). The utter horror of it is all is unspeakable, but we must try to speak of it. That’s the point of this day.

It is hard to conceive of the immense evil that occurred at Auschwitz and so many other places during the Holocaust. People can clearly do horrific things. We have proof.

We are now alive. We have an obligation to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

We also, in my view have an obligation to live our lives in a good way. Why did people survive? What for? I have no idea.

But the least I can do—personally—is make my life meaningful, impactful, hopefully good.

Today, all I can do is tell people: this happened. It is unspeakable but must be spoken.

I ask that you remember. Not just so it doesn’t happen again, but because it DID HAPPEN.

Those were real people, with internal lives, put in impossible positions. Most of them did not survive. Some did.

I am here because some did. So I can say to you today: I hope you might spend part of your day remembering. /end