On January 27, 1945, Soviet forces entered Auschwitz and uncovered what the world had refused to see: an industrial system of death. Piles of shoes, suitcases, human hair — the remnants of lives systematically erased.

By then, six million Jews had already been murdered.

But the Holocaust did not begin in Auschwitz. It began years earlier — in speeches, in newspapers, in classrooms, and in laws that slowly stripped Jews of their rights, their identity, and ultimately their humanity.

In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws formalized the exclusion of Jews from German civic life.

In November 1938, Kristallnacht turned antisemitic hatred into open violence, with synagogues burned and Jewish businesses destroyed across Germany and Austria. Throughout Europe, Jews were ghettoized, isolated, and marked — first socially, then legally,........

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