Dear community,

Last week, I had the great honour of witnessing one of our Holocaust survivor speakers address special guests, councillors and Mayor Ken Sim at an International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration hosted at Vancouver city hall. It was a moving account of a family’s escape from Nazi persecution during the Second World War, and it reflected the family’s resilience during the war and in the years since.

IHRD came into being in 2005 when the United Nations passed a resolution designating January 27 as an annual international day of commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust. The day was chosen to mark the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, 60 years ago. The resolution urged member states to develop education programs to inculcate future generations with the lessons of the Holocaust to help prevent future acts of genocide.

Hannah Marazzi, Holocaust survivors and Vancouver city council at the reading of the city’s 2026 proclamation for IHRD.

The VHEC is continually developing innovative ways to integrate survivor testimony into our educational programming. In addition to the survivor speakers who gift us their time, we rely on our collection of recorded audiovisual testimony, using digital platforms and innovative delivery tools to get students to connect with the experiences of survivors.

To this end, our latest offering is Fragments in Focus: A History of the Holocaust, a bilingual online teaching resource developed for teaching about the Holocaust in BC classrooms. It features 160 Holocaust-related artefacts, primary sources, historical texts and recordings of local Holocaust survivors. The website is freely accessible worldwide, and the VHEC education team has been delivering training workshops all over the province to help teachers use the resource to suit the needs of their classrooms.

We developed Fragments in Focus to align with BC’s new mandatory Holocaust education curriculum, something that the VHEC has been advocating for over the past decade. The new curriculum means that every student who graduates from high school in BC will have learned about the Holocaust.

Every single day at the VHEC, we dedicate ourselves to the spirit of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

We remember those who perished and honour those who survived. We dedicate ourselves to ensuring that the world never forgets this vital piece of history. To that end, our education team has spent the last month with hundreds of students, teachers, parents and adult learners in our museum and in their classrooms and auditoriums unpacking the lessons and legacies of the Holocaust.

I want to end this note with a word of thanks to our extraordinary survivors who continue to do the incredibly hard work of teaching us and sharing their stories. I want to reaffirm and uphold the work of Holocaust educators around the globe. May the Shoah continue to remind us of what can happen when we forget our responsibility to belong to one another. May “never again” be an invitation to each of us to stand up and remember.

About the Author:

Hannah Marazzi is Executive Director of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. She joined the VHEC in 2023 after serving as Special Advisor to Canada’s first Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism and co-authoring Canada’s national report to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.