The Holocaust I didn’t mean to watch

This year, as Holocaust Remembrance Day came around, I felt the pull I always do to connect, to remember, to reflect. Usually, I’ll watch a film or documentary about the Shoah — something that helps me sit with the weight of it, to honor the memory of those lost, and to keep the reality of that horror from ever becoming abstract. That’s the point of remembering, right? So it doesn’t fade into history, so it doesn’t repeat.

But this year, I couldn’t bring myself to watch a film about 1940s Europe. Not because I didn’t want to remember, but because something heavier, eerier, was sitting on my chest. I found myself instead watching documentaries and footage from October 7th. I didn’t plan it. I just…ended up there.

And it hit me with a kind of sorrow I don’t know how to describe. I wanted to look back 80 years — to mourn, to remind myself how far we’ve come. But instead, I was watching now. Watching Jews hunted, terrorized, dragged from their homes, children murdered in their beds, entire communities shattered overnight. I didn’t need to reach into the past to see the face of hatred. It was looking right at me, in the present tense.

It felt like a new Holocaust was speaking to me. And that’s not a word I use lightly.

Of course, it’s different. No historical comparison is ever perfect. But the spirit of it — the systematic dehumanization, the targeting of Jews simply for existing—was horrifyingly familiar. There was that same sick feeling in my gut. That same disbelief that turned into grim recognition. The same images of mothers shielding babies, of homes turned to ashes, of bodies piled, nameless.

Eighty years. Eighty years later and we are still burying Jews massacred for being Jews.

That realization left me hollow. There’s something especially chilling about feeling like history didn’t stay in its place. Like somehow the thread of our trauma is still unspooling, generation after generation. I’m not watching black-and-white footage narrated by survivors anymore — I’m watching raw clips from people with iPhones. It’s not history class. It’s real time.

So yeah, I wanted to remember the Holocaust this year. But I didn’t have to look that far back. This year, remembrance came looking for me.

And it asked a painful question: How long will we be telling our children to “never forget” while we continue adding new names to the list of those lost?