“How many of you have known, or met, or listened to a Holocaust survivor?” I recently asked the Cornell University undergraduates in my class on antisemitism in the courts and in jurisprudence. All 16 hands went up. “You are the last generation,” I then told them, “to have had that privilege.”

Over the course of the past 80 years, ever since the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in what had been German occupied Poland, the women, men and children who had been persecuted, oppressed, tortured, and marked for destruction as part of Nazi Germany’s “Final Solution of the Jewish question” assumed the mission of telling the world how their families, their friends, and their neighbors had been murdered.

With the survivors dwindling all too rapidly from the scene, we are at a pivotal moment in determining how their memories can be passed on to those who have never had—and will never have—the opportunity to listen to the tales of all those who bore and are still bearing witness.

Both my parents survived Auschwitz and the Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in Germany where they were liberated. In September 1945, my mother, then Dr. Ada Bimko, a Jewish dentist from the Polish city of Sosnowiec, was the principal witness for the prosecution at the first trial of........

© Time