Thursday, October 1, 2026
Like many Jews of my generation, I grew up learning about the Holocaust. I attended religious school, read the books, watched the documentaries, and listened to survivors tell their stories. I understood the facts, the timelines and the staggering death toll. Yet nothing prepared me for what it felt like to stand in the places where that history unfolded.
My wife and I recently took a Jewish Heritage Tour through Poland, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary and the Czech Republic. While the trip included beautiful cities, remarkable architecture, and centuries of European history, what stays with me are the places where absence speaks louder than anything still standing.
Before the tour began, we traveled to Radom, Poland, where my wife’s father lived before World War II. She located the building where her father’s family once lived, which was still there.
As we walked along the cobblestone street, people were going about their daily lives. It was an ordinary neighborhood. Yet not far away, in the city’s historical museum, photos and records documented the destruction of the once thriving Jewish community there.
Before the war, Jews made up roughly one-third of the city’s population. My wife’s grandfather and aunt were murdered by the Nazis. Her father and uncle escaped and survived. I found myself thinking less about history and more about what was missing. The buildings and streets remained, but the people who had filled those streets with life were gone.
That feeling followed me for much of the trip.
In Warsaw, we walked through the former Warsaw Ghetto. In Prague and Budapest we visited Jewish quarters, synagogues and cemeteries that testified to communities that had flourished for centuries before being devastated. We repeatedly encountered reminders of vibrant Jewish life alongside reminders of how much had been lost.
Nothing, however, compared to Auschwitz and Birkenau.
I had seen photos of the camps throughout my life. But photos cannot convey what it feels like to stand there. Walking through the barracks where prisoners were housed, seeing the conditions in which they lived and the gas chambers and crematoria forces you to confront the reality that the statistics represent human beings.
The Holocaust is often discussed in terms of numbers because the scale of the crime was so immense. Six million Jews were murdered. Yet in Auschwitz, those numbers begin to disappear. Instead, you think about parents separated from their children, young people whose futures were stolen, and families that vanished.
One stop that particularly affected me was Terezín, in the Czech Republic. The camp was used by Nazi propagandists to create the illusion that Jews were being treated humanely. Today, drawings and writings by children imprisoned there remain on display. I was struck by the innocence reflected in their artwork and words. Most of those children didn’t survive the war.
As powerful as these experiences were, they felt especially relevant because of what we are living through today. Antisemitism is rising in the United States and across the globe. Jewish institutions increasingly require security measures that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Jewish students report harassment and intimidation on college campuses. Hate crimes directed at Jews continue to occur at alarming rates.
The lesson I took away from Eastern Europe is how easily hatred can become normalized when people stop challenging it. The destruction of Europe’s Jewish communities didn’t begin with concentration camps. It began with prejudice, scapegoating and the gradual acceptance of discrimination.
I returned from the trip with a renewed conviction that combating antisemitism cannot be left solely to the Jewish community. Every community has a stake in confronting hatred wherever it appears. History shows that intolerance rarely confines itself to a single target.
The places we visited serve as powerful reminders of what can happen when prejudice goes unchallenged. They also remind us that preserving memory, while essential, isn’t enough. The responsibility that history places on each generation is to apply its lessons in its own time.
Holocaust victims can’t tell their stories. The responsibility to remember them — and to ensure that the hatred that consumed so much of Europe never gains such a foothold again — belongs to all of us.
Arnold Drucker represents Nassau County’s 16th Legislative District and is the Legislature’s deputy minority leader.
