Why Children Must Learn the Realities of the Holocaust While the Survivors Still Speak
GRAND RAPIDS, MI, January 27, 2026 /24-7PressRelease/ -- In the span of the next decade, nearly every living Holocaust survivor will be gone. Their voices — the ones who witnessed the barracks, the cattle cars, the selections, the tattoos, the ash — are fading one funeral at a time. What remains is a moral question with global consequences: How do we preserve memory for a generation growing up in a world of misinformation, radicalization, and denial?
Eva Mozes Kor believed she knew the answer.
Kor, who survived Auschwitz at ten years old, spent the final years of her life insisting that Holocaust education begins too late. In most American schools, if it's taught at all, it's introduced around age twelve or older. By then, she argued, children have already begun to form worldviews — including prejudice.
"You have to reach the kids before their prejudices are formed," she often said. She was right.
Kor knew something our culture is still struggling to accept: elementary and middle school students are already encountering conspiracy theories, extremist propaganda, antisemitic memes, and Holocaust distortion online. Shielding children from history does not protect them. Teaching them early might.
Her memoir for young readers, I Will Protect You: A True Story of Twins Who Survived Auschwitz, written with author Danica Davidson and released in 2022, answers that call. The book has since become a bestseller in three categories and is now being read in schools, libraries, and living rooms across the country. It captures what many adults still struggle to grasp: how two children — Eva and her twin sister Miriam — survived Mengele's medical experiments, the starvation, and the terror of Auschwitz, and yet still grew up to advocate for education, healing, and even forgiveness.
Davidson first met Kor at Western Michigan University, where the survivor delivered one of her signature lectures on remembrance and resilience. After the event, Kor made her intentions clear: she didn't just want to preserve history — she wanted to reach young people. She wanted a children's book. And she wanted it fast.
From there, Davidson began interviewing Kor repeatedly, weaving personal narrative with essential historical context to make the story accessible for upper elementary and middle school readers. The goal was not to simplify history, but to make it legible — to show children that these events did not happen in a vacuum, that antisemitism did not begin with Auschwitz nor end with it. The resulting manuscript sold quickly. Fifteen days later, while traveling to Poland to continue her educational work, Eva Kor unexpectedly passed away.
Her book remained.
Memory is Not Guaranteed
Holocaust Remembrance Day is not just an annual moment of silence — it's a warning. In the last five years alone, antisemitic incidents in the U.S. and abroad have surged. Online radicalization has lowered the barrier to hate. Polls show a troubling percentage of young Americans cannot name a single Nazi camp; some believe the Holocaust is exaggerated or fabricated.
This is not because young people are incapable of empathy — it's because no one taught them how to recognize dehumanization when they see it.
Books like I Will Protect You offer an entry point. They meet children at an age where imagination is still intact and moral formation is still in motion. They teach history not as an abstraction, but as the lived reality of children just like them — children who played, argued, dreamed, worried, and loved before the trains came.
Davidson hasn't stopped with I Will Protect You. She also wrote a graphic novel with another survivor and education advocate, Eva Schloss, titled What Lies Hidden, which is ready for publishers. Like Kor, Schloss traveled the world to tell young people what she had been through. After publishing three books about her past, she became intrigued by the idea of a graphic novel to highlight the incredible paintings her beloved brother Heinz made in hiding. And with the passing of Schloss this month, the story becomes even more important. While the world may know Schloss best as the posthumous stepsister of Anne Frank, What Lies Hidden shows her as her own person, strong, unique and resilient, and details her dedication to the memory of her brilliant and artistic brother, who died before liberation. In her Holocaust Remembrance Day op-ed "Working with survivors to tell their stories, before it's too late" at the Jewish News Syndicate, Davidson writes about working with Kor and Eva Schloss, and how both knew the importance of education:
"Both women took these book projects very seriously, understanding how they fit into the broader framework of Holocaust education."
Working with Kor and Schloss
The framework matters. History does not repeat itself word for word, but it rhymes — and children who learn how to recognize the pattern are far harder to recruit into hate.
Eva Kor and Eva Schloss understood this. Kor spent decades returning to Auschwitz not to relive trauma but to confront it, to teach from it, and to ensure no child would ever again inherit the world she once did.
On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, her message is both clear and unfinished:
Memory must be taught. Empathy must be practiced. Education must begin earlier.
Because the last generation who can say "I was there" is disappearing — and once they are gone, the world will only remember what we teach it.
As Davidson said in her Holocaust Remembrance Day article "Holocaust Education Should Start in Elementary School" at Aish:
"The abundant documentation of the Holocaust can also open kids' eyes to so many different things, including the importance of critical thinking, the way humans repeat certain behaviors, how history shapes the present, the power we have as individuals, the harm of us-versus-them mentality, and why we ought to treat others the way we'd like to be treated. All of these are important lessons to prepare children for the real world."
Get your copy of "I Will Protect You" and read it to your children and encourage your friends to do the same - you can get the book here - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B093ZQ3LBX/
Danica Davidson is the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of 20 books for young readers, with more than a quarter of a million copies sold. Her work ranges from serious nonfiction to official Minecraft books to manga drawing guides and more. I Will Protect You, the middle grade Holocaust book she wrote with Auschwitz survivor Eva Kor just before her passing, is a Notable Social Studies Title from the National Council for Social Studies, and a Teacher Favorites and Children's Favorites award winner from the Children's Book Counsel. Please see her website at www.danicadavidson.com.
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