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Queen’s Hillel re the over six million Jewish people who died during the Holocaust.
As part of the International Holocaust Education Week, Hillel and Students for Holocaust Awareness, Remembrance, and Education (SHARE) are co-hosting a week of events from Jan. 20 to 27, with the hopes of raising awareness, educating students on the Holocaust, and keeping in memory the stories of survivors.
While Hillel is hosting a week of commemorative events, official Holocaust Remembrance Day is on Jan. 27, which marks the liberation of Auschwitz—the largest and deadliest concentration camp where over one million Jewish people perished. Auschwitz is recognized globally as a symbol of the genocide carried out by Nazi , particularly the annihilation of Jewish people.
Audrey Feld, ArtSci ’26 and chair of SHARE said one of the main focuses of the week’s programming is to keep the stories of survivors who are no longer with us and the survivors who chose not to speak about their experiences alive.
“By recovering these hidden pieces of history and elevating the voices of those who can no longer speak for themselves, we not only honour their memory but also ensure that their experiences and cultural legacies continue to bear witness to the atrocities they endured and the resilience of the Jewish people,” Feld said in an interview with The Journal.
The week’s events began with a presentation by of Hillel at AMS Assembly where they spoke on the prejudice and violence Jewish people all around the world face to this day. Assembly’s theme was “ing the Holocaust” ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27.
“It’s a scary time to be a Jewish student, even just a Jew. We shouldn’t live in the same fear as our ancestors, and yet we do,” Feld said.
Another Holocaust Education Week event hosted speaker Karen Lasky for the talk “Holocaust Testimony: A Descendant Bares Witness” on Jan 21.
She spoke about being a child of Holocaust survivors who were put in multiple concentration camps and the “unspoken past” she feels from her parents.
“They [her parents] were very broken. They were in the worst death camps imaginable and couldn’t speak of their past,” Lasky said in an interview with The Journal. “I grew up rather protected about that […] but even though it wasn’t articulated, I felt it and grew up with it.”
Lasky shared how years later, her mother opened up about her trauma after a trip to Lasky’s son’s history class where she spoke about her experience in the Holocaust. After that, Lasky began to dig into her parent’s past and started to share their experiences.
She shared about how her mother had to jump from a train going to a concentration camp where the rest of her family was taken.
While her mother never saw her family again, she was eventually liberated from interned-persons camp turned Concentration Camp Bergen-Belsen at the end of the war.
“[My parents] couldn’t speak for who they lost, so I have to,” Lasky said.
Lasky stated children of survivors must share their families’ stories
“We can’t stop. We have to keep doing [speaking about the Holocaust] and keep hoping that it won’t happen again, and we have to keep ing those six million people that were lost, including both of my parents’ entire families,” Lasky said.
Hillel was happy to bring Lasky to campus to speak to students about her life as a descendant of Holocaust survivors, Phoebe Starnino, CompSci ’27, and Hillel’s Vice-President (External Relations) said in a statement to The Journal.
“The trauma of the Holocaust is ed down from generation to generation and the legacy is on the younger generations to carry forward,” Starnino said.
Hillel also held two tabling sessions at the ARC, where they showcased books about the Holocaust and art depicting the experiences of women in the Holocaust.
In the coming days, Hillel will host a Havdalah ceremony—the lighting of a candle at the end of Shabbat, marking the beginning of a new week—and hold an additional candle lighting on Jan. 27 to mark 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz.
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International Holocaust Education Week
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