Lakeland Regional High School is honoring International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which falls on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The ERASE Club, which stands for End Racism and Sexism Everywhere, arranged a moment of silence in the morning and asked each classroom to light an digital candle in remembrance of the 6 million lives lost.

Patty Kebrdle, history teacher and ERASE adviser, told The Ledger that the club wanted to involve the Lakeland community in the world wide event. “So, all across the world today, people are lighting candles for the Holocaust remembrance day… We (the ERASE club) just thought it was a good way to honor and recognize different cultures around the world.”

In an article with NPR News, Auschwitz survivor  Alina Dabrowska, who is 96 years old, recounts her experiences and why it’s so important to remember the Holocuast. “Those children [young people of today] will grow up one day and they will be the ones deciding about how to rule the world,” she says. “It is important [to talk about it] in order to develop the conviction that war is not a good thing, in order to seek peace and try to talk about it, in order to think that it is us who are responsible for this Earth and for passing it on, undamaged, to the next generations.”

Another powerful quote from the article on in the important of remembering the Holocaust is from an Auschwitz museum tour guide, Pawel Sawicki. “Sometimes I think that when they leave a candle or a stone or they put the flower or they say a prayer and they leave the memorial, and they go back to their lives… But I think there should be a next step. People should look at this place and think about our moral responsibility. This is not an anthropological discovery of ‘Oh, people 75 years ago were able to do something like this,’ and we are surprised. They [still] are able to do it. They did it before. And people still hate each other.”

The LRHS community and society as whole should not only reflect on what happened all those years ago, but take and apply the lessons learned from it into our own lives daily. Thank you to the ERASE Club for helping us remember and spark thoughtful conversation, insight, and, hopefully, change.