These photographs reveal identification tattoos on prisoners who survived Auschwitz. (Image: Kathryn Reed)

Jan. 27 was declared International Holocaust Remembrance Day by the U.N. in 2005. I’ve never paid attention to it until this year.

The date marks the liberation of the German Nazi death camp Auschwitz. Sadly, until now I never knew what the date commemorated.

Earlier this month I had the sobering experience of visiting the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. It’s powerful, disturbing and thought-provoking.

Walking in a worker stresses this is both a museum and memorial, to treat it and those I encounter with respect.

On the first page of the museum’s website it says, “This January—80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz—the rapid spread of antisemitism, including Holocaust lies and conspiracy theories threatens Holocaust history. On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, it’s even more important than ever to defend the truth of the Holocaust by sharing victims’ and survivors’ powerful stories.”

If you think you know everything you need or want to know about the Holocaust, think again. If you have the opportunity, go to this memorial. You are bound to learn, be moved, wonder how this ever happened. Even if you can’t go, there is no reason not to learn more about the Holocaust—before, during and after.

On the museum guide it says: “This museum is not an answer. It is a question. And the question always is: What is your responsibility now that you’ve seen, now that  you know?”

Today, more so than ever we need to prevent history from repeating itself. Parallels between Hitler’s words and actions can be drawn to Trump. How people  dismiss this is beyond me.

Soviet troops in July 1944 discovered a mound of shoes at the Majdanek camp in Lublin, Poland. (Image: Kathryn Reed)

One panel reads: “In the spring of 1933, party officials and members of the Nazi students’ organization raided libraries and bookstores in 30 cities and towns across Germany. They removed truckloads of books and cast them onto bonfires. On May 10, more than 25,000 books were burned in Berlin alone. The book burnings were not spontaneous: they were a calculated, coordinated effort to ‘purify’ German culture. The students worked from prepared blacklists of books deemed ‘un-German.’ Some of these books were by Jewish authors; most were not.”

The recent spate of book bans in the U.S. have set a foreboding precedent.

Another installment said: “The Nazis used propaganda, along with terror, to manipulate the German population. In the hands of Hitler’s Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda was simplistic, emotional, repetitive, and uncompromising.”

Sound like anyone you know now living in a white house?

“Nazi propaganda drew its power from the government’s absolute control over the flow of information.” In Trump’s first days in office the Constitution was removed from websites and he banned departments from having external communications.

“Hitler transformed Nazi racism from a political philosophy into a concrete public policy.” Listen and read what Trump says about immigrants and non-white people.

“Under the Reich Citizenship Law, only persons of ‘German or kindred blood’ could claim the new status of Reich citizenship. German Jews remained merely ‘subjects of the state.’” Trump in his first week tried to ban birth-right citizenship; a judge said not so fast, it’s a constitutional right.

“Adolf Hitler was determined to increase the territory of Germany, by any means available.” Think about Trump’s threat to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal, and to make Canada a state. He’s already changed the names of the Gulf of Mexico and Denali.

Hitler had a cadre of supporters help him carry out his heinous crimes. Trump also has people willing to do his dirty work. One of whom has already used the stiff-armed Nazi salute.

I was surprised to learn the 572,455 Jewish people living in Germany in 1933 represented only 0.88 percent of the population. In Europe, Poland had the most Jewish people at 3,028,837 and the largest percentage per capita at 9.49 percent.

Between 1933 and 1945 Nazis killed 6 million people—mostly those of Jewish descent, but also people with disabilities, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, and political dissidents.

         First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.

         Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.

         Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.

         Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.

—Martin Niemoller, Lutheran minister and early Nazi supporter who was later imprisoned for opposing Hitler’s regime

Will you speak out for others? Will you speak out before it’s too late?

As the museum says, “The history of the Holocaust teaches one of the greatest lessons about individual responsibility—the choice that we each have to act or not to act and the consequences of that decision. In other words, what you do matters.”