I regularly speak at high schools, universities, and community events, sharing my eyewitness account with newer generations of Americans who have no concept of the horrors governments can inflict. I feel a duty to keep alive the memories of millions of Jews who were murdered by Adolf Hitler's Germany and who cannot speak for themselves.

In our increasingly cynical age, it is vitally important to present myself as living proof of that horror to audiences, whose entire knowledge of it comes from musty history books and grainy YouTube videos, if at all.

George Santayana presciently wrote, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." It is my personal mission to make sure the outrages of the past I witnessed are not tragically repeated by future generations. The Holocaust was a unique atrocity. One of the greatest challenges in educating people about the Holocaust is seeing it trivialized, or used, for political and ideological reasons.