Eighty-one years after the liberation of Auschwitz, it is tempting to believe that we understand what happened there – that the facts are settled, the lessons learned, the warnings absorbed. But Auschwitz was not only a site of murder. It was a system, carefully constructed and socially enabled, that shows us what happens when civil society slowly abandons its moral guardrails.

I know this not as an abstraction, but as an inheritance.

My father was 16 when he and his twin sister Miriam arrived at Auschwitz. There he met a boy named Kalman, fourteen, also a twin. They were selected for Josef Mengele’s experiments and placed in what was known as the hospital camp. For six and a half months during the height of the Hungarian deportations in the summer of 1944, Kalman and Leopold were forced to work inside Mengele’s hospital camp guard shack, less than one hundred meters from Crematorium IV and the open burning pit.

From that position, they........

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