By Erin Levi

Portrait from early 1900s of my grandfather Berthold as a child, seated with his sister Johanna and their parents, Sigmund and Marie. Sigmund, in his German army uniform, fought in WWI and earned an Iron Cross—one reason he was later released from Dachau and allowed to emigrate to the U.S.
Credit: Bruce Levi/Levi Family Archive

As snow fell on Auschwitz that December morning in 2005, the stark beauty of the winter landscape stood in sharp contrast to the horror of what happened there. I walked those grounds with my college friend Chris, a Polish Catholic – our friendship itself a testament to how far we’ve come since the dark days when such a relationship would have been unthinkable.
That personal memory takes on new meaning as New York City marks the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation this week, with City Hall and other municipal buildings illuminated in yellow as part of the World Jewish Congress’ #WeRemember campaign. The commemoration comes at a particularly poignant moment, as the city grapples with a surge in antisemitic incidents, including the recent defacement of an Israeli restaurant in Brooklyn – an act that reminded our editor Rafael Nektalov of «USSR» or even “Russia in 1912” and stirred memories of Nazi Germany for those of us whose families fled the Holocaust.
Mayor Eric Adams, leading the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel, announced a powerful exhibition in City Hall’s Rotunda featuring Holocaust survivors’ artwork from the Yad Vashem collection, called «The Anguish of Liberation as Reflected in Art.” «We stand at a profound moment in history, where remembrance is not just about the past, but about securing our future,» Adams said during the announcement.
The anniversary has particular resonance in Queens, where Congresswoman Grace Meng is spearheading a bipartisan resolution in the House of Representatives commemorating the liberation. The resolution, co-sponsored with Representatives Lois Frankel, Mike Lawler, and Don Bacon, comes as FBI data shows anti-Jewish hate crimes have increased by 63 percent since 2023, with more than 10,000 antisemitic incidents reported nationwide since October 7.

Erin Levi (age 8), visiting her ancestral cemetery in Mühringen, Germany in 1991 with her father Bruce and sister Julia.


«We must give the words ‘Never Again’ strength and power by continuing to teach future generations about the horrors that more than six million innocent people experienced during the Holocaust,» said Meng, noting that Jews were the target of a majority of hate crimes in New York in 2024.
The anniversary coincides with renewed cultural attention to Holocaust remembrance through films like Jesse Eisenberg’s «A Real Pain,» which explores what scholars call «dark tourism» – visits to Holocaust sites by later generations seeking to understand their heritage. The film, along with other recent works, grapples with questions familiar to many children and grandchildren of survivors: How do we honor the past while living in the present? How do we maintain hope while remaining vigilant?
These questions resonate deeply with my own family history. As a German Jew who reclaimed citizenship in 2021 through my grandfather – a «Ritchie Boy» who fled Germany in 1937 before returning to fight Nazis as part of a U.S. military intelligence mission that was the precursor to the CIA – I carry both the weight of history and hope for the future. My Aunt Johanna escaped after Kristallnacht in 1939, while my great-grandparents remained until 1942. My great-grandfather Sigmund, an Iron Cross recipient from WWI, survived imprisonment in Dachau and was able to emigrate to Connecticut only through the intervention of a sympathetic local baron.
With only about 220,000 Holocaust survivors still alive worldwide, the responsibility of remembrance increasingly falls to subsequent generations. The yellow lights illuminating New York’s civic buildings serve as both memorial and warning – a reminder that the past is never as distant as we might think.
As Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, noted at the City Hall exhibition opening, these commemorations compel us «not only to reaffirm our shared responsibility and preserve these stories but to act, to remain vigilant against the erosion of basic human values.» In a city as diverse as Queens, where the shadows of history meet the challenges of the present, that vigilance has never been more essential.