When they were teens, we took our children to Washington, DC. It was part of what we considered a pilgrimage for them as they transitioned from youth to adulthood. We wanted them to see the place of the federal government of their country. We wanted them to experience the incredible wealth of information and memory of the National Mall museums. We wanted them to see the memorials first-hand. Our visit was incomplete. We only had so much time and so much energy. Our budget was limited. But we did see a lot. We rode to the top of the Washington Memorial Obelisk. We walked alongside the reflecting pool to the Lincoln Memorial. We wandered through the Smithsonian Castle and the Air and Space Museum. We viewed the outside of the Capitol and the White House. We visited the National Zoo and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. We wanted our children to know our country's history and culture and have a sense of its place in the world.

It was a trip that reflected two visits to Washington, DC, that I had taken with my parents and siblings when I was growing up, one when I was six and the other when I was sixteen. On those trips, we had a bit of an insider’s view, as my mother’s sister lived nearby in Maryland and worked as a congressional aide for decades. She was an excellent tour guide when we came to the city.

The Holocaust Museum was a new site for me. It was founded after my childhood visits. It opened in 1993, so it was still a relatively new institution when we visited. It had already become an internationally recognized institution with over 2 million visits yearly. Our visit was slightly abbreviated due to a problem with the fire alarm system in the building, but in retrospect, we had taken in about as much as is possible in a single visit. The impact of the museum is so dramatic, and the emotions it invokes are so powerful that it may be best for people to experience it in reasonable doses, returning multiple times.

Visiting the museum was high on my list of priorities for our visit. Like many people my age, I began to realize the enormity of the Holocaust by reading The Diary of Anne Frank. That book raised some emotions because of Anne’s age and my age when I read it. It invited me to consider what it would be like to be in the circumstances of European Jews in the time of Hitler. The realities of the Holocaust are so horrible that they almost defy imagination. As I began to learn more about the murder of six million, one of my guides was the survivor novelist Elie Wiesel. Wiesel wrote more than just fiction; he became known for his novels and plays because of their emotional power and honest reporting of the impact of the Holocaust. As he said in the introduction to The Gates of the Forest, “Sometimes to tell the truth, you have to tell a story.”

My personal Holocaust education was enhanced by a visit to Dachau, one of the first concentration camps built by Nazi Germany. It was also the longest-running camp, built initially to intern Hitler’s political opponents. Communists, social democrats, and dissidents were sentenced to the camp on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory in Bavaria. Its purpose was forced labor. The distinction of a concentration camp as opposed to a prison is that those interred there were not charged or convicted of a crime. They were denied due process. When the Nazi Party labeled all Jews, Romani, and others as criminals without evidence or trial, they became part of the population of the camp, living in squalid conditions in constant fear of brutal treatment including standing cells, floggings, pole hanging, and execution. During our visit, we peered into the crematorium and tried to understand the meaning of the death factory.

Elie Wiesel continued to write, and I continued to read. One of his novels that I have mulled over and over since I first read it is “The Forgotten,” published in 1992. It is the story of a father and son, Elhanan and Malkiel Rosenbaum. Elhanan has an incurable disease that causes him to lose his memory slowly. He struggles to tell his son his story before it is forgotten. Malkiel learns the truth about his father and is left struggling to deal with his past. The story presents the dilemma of every survivor generation. Those who have witnessed great evil resolve never to forget and never allow the world to forget the evil they have witnessed. But victims do not live forever. And as they face the reality of their mortality, they wonder if what has happened will be remembered.

We now find ourselves at a point in history where the last survivors of the Nazi concentration camps are coming to the end of their lives, and their deaths raise the question of whether or not the world will be able to remember.

While the current US president frequently declares support for the modern state of Israel, he seems to have forgotten the circumstances that led to the Holocaust. He has ordered mass deportations that have resulted in mass incarceration of people in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center without due process. He speaks of incarcerating his enemies and labels entire groups of people as enemies. For students of history, it is a frightening display of authoritarianism that has distinct parallels with the conditions that led up to the Holocaust.

Meanwhile, Israel continues a ground offensive to occupy Gaza indefinitely, without concern for the 2.1 million people who live there and who are dying in attacks. In addition, the infrastructure of the region has been destroyed, with hospitals and relief workers targeted. Survivors of the attacks die of starvation without access to food.

It is frightening when a US President seems to have forgotten what led to the Holocaust. It is alarming when the leadership of Israel appears willing to engage in perpetuating military action against a class of people distinguished in part by their religion. It feels as if the novel is coming to life as world leaders fail to wrestle with the horrors of the past.

The price of forgetting is new generations of trauma and suffering. May we renew our commitment never to forget before it is too late.