Last week, I returned from co-leading the Power of Place 2025 European Institute for Holocaust Educators. While mere words can’t capture what this experience meant to those of us who lived it, I’ll try.
We began in a quiet park in Linz, Austria — tired, uncertain, a little guarded. We each shared where we came from, who our students are, and — most importantly — why we were here.
I offered the formative questions that I intended to personally explore as we would travel through these sites of remembrance: Whose stories are we telling? And what are we asking these stories to do for us? While I was pretty sure my base knowledge afforded me a good grip on these queries, I found myself eager and poised to learn alongside this group that was already proving themselves remarkable.
Over 11 days, our group of 25 educators and facilitators — from 12 U.S. states and Vancouver, BC — became more than colleagues. We were career educators and first-year teachers, museum staff and classroom leaders, urban and rural, middle school to high school, general ed and special ed. For many, it was their first time overseas. This trip, intended to create an immersive and emotionally resonant experience for dedicated educators, brought us together to deepen our understanding of the Holocaust — not just what happened, but how, and why, and what it demands of us now.
In Austria, we studied with internationally renowned Holocaust education scholars Paul Salmons and Wolfgang Schmutz, engaging in hands on pedagogical methodology. They challenged us to look beyond a simple victim-perpetrator narrative and ask: How does a civil society descend into genocide?
At Hartheim Castle, a site where over 30,000 people with disabilities were murdered under the Nazi euthanasia program, we confronted the dehumanizing logic that begins with medicalized language and ends in mass murder. At Mauthausen, we didn’t just visit — we taught. In small groups, we led one another through participant-centered learning at different locations in the camp, using guiding questions to spark layered conversation and different vantage points. To model pedagogy on ground made sacred by suffering was, for many of us, a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
From Austria, we traveled to Poland: Bielsko-Biała, Bedzin, and Oswiecim. In Bielsko-Biała, we walked the streets where Holocaust survivor and author Gerda Weissmann Klein — whose testimony many teachers use in class — spent her youth. In Bedzin, we met the voice of Rudka Laskier, a teenage diarist whose story mirrors that of Anne Frank, but in a lesser-known ghetto. And in Oswiecim — once home to 20 synagogues and a Jewish majority (60% of the 14,000 people living here pre-WWII were Jewish) — we faced what remains of that world.
Today, the city has 36,000 residents. Only one is Jewish.
One mile from where we slept lies Auschwitz-Birkenau. We spent a full day there, moving between barracks and crematoria, lighting yahrzeit candles at the ruins of the gas chambers, holding one another in collective grief.
The more places we visited and jointly learned at, the more questions we went away with. The guiding questions that Paul and Wolfgang challenged us as the trip originated; “What do we choose to remember and what do we choose to forget?” and “How could so many be murdered in the midst of a civil society?” were queries we continued to grapple with. Throughout the journey, we also studied how patterns of antisemitism — lies about Jews — can take root in law, culture, and public imagination. The lessons were never abstract. They echoed in the rise of hate we see around us today.
Then: Rome. Some asked, “Why Rome on a Holocaust education trip?” Here, we examined the role of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust, guided by Dr. Suzanne Brown-Fleming of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Vatican Archives Initiative. At the Vatican and Castel Gandolfo — the papal summer residence — we wrestled with the question of neutrality: How did Pope Pius XII respond as Jews were deported, and what moral responsibility does the Church bear?
Outside the city, at the Fosse Ardeatine caves, we stood where Nazi forces executed 335 people — Jewish prisoners and Roman civilians — before sealing the cave to conceal the massacre. There, we again gathered as a group and held a memorial service of our own, blending Jewish rituals of mourning with participant-led reflections from other traditions: poetry, prayer, and silence.
And then came the moment no itinerary could have planned.
In Rome’s Jewish Quarter, we met Sara Pavoncello, an Italian-Israeli and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. After 10 days of learning about and visiting places where Jewish people and others were deported from, dehumanized, and murdered, Sara began her narrative in a similar fashion; she showed us the stolpersteine (stumbling stones) embedded in the street with her family’s names, the apartment where they had lived, the site where they were taken. As we walked, passersby familiarly met her with warm greetings and embraces, and Sara would introduce them all to us. Then, as we went into the Great Synagogue of Rome, everything became clear.
The people we had met on the street were all Sara’s family — gathered for her aunt and uncle’s 50th wedding anniversary. Over a hundred descendants of her grandmother and the relatives that survived. As the rabbi and cantor sang and blessed the couple, family members encircled them in song, love and celebration. The joy was palpable, and the depth of understanding of resilience, endurance, importance of Jewish communal life and spirituality was in full bloom before our eyes. We were witnessing a Jewish world not only surviving, but flourishing.
Back in that Linz park, I had asked: What are we asking these stories to do for us? Now I know: we are asking them to make us remember. To hold us accountable. To call us to teach — not just the facts of history, but the patterns, the questions, the choices.
This group — once strangers — became family. We cried together. We taught one another. We asked hard questions. We created a brave space where honesty was welcome and complexity wasn’t dismissed.
Power of Place implies that it is about the sites. But really, it is about the Power of People — and what happens when educators, given time and trust, become witnesses together.
Susie Greenberg is the Director of Holocaust Education at the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas.
Power of Place: 2025 European Summer Institute for Holocaust Educators is an experiential professional development for teachers where learning unfolds as they tour historical sites across Europe in order to transform their understanding of the Holocaust, WWII, antisemitism, and Jewish life today. Power of Place is planned and co-led by Humanus Network on behalf of JCRC and generously supported by the Minnesota Vikings, the Tankenoff Families Foundation, and Allianz of America Corporation.