Arlene Hanauer needs someone to take her books.

The retired teacher has a lot of them. Her collection includes about two dozen well-worn books related to the Holocaust, the oldest of which dates back nearly 50 years. The Jewish Furlong resident has period photographs and documents, too.

She’s shopped her collection around to the Center for Jewish History in New York, as well as the Holocaust Awareness Museum and Education Center here in Elkins Park, among six or seven other places around the country. There has been some interest, but Hanauer still has her books.

Hanauer, however, is more than just a teacher and more than just a history buff. She was a fellow at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the daughter-in-law of a man who fled Germany and the Nazis in the 1930s by way of Belgium. As a history and French teacher in Cheltenham and Bucks County, she brought in survivors of the French Resistance to speak to her classes.

To Arlene Hanauer, the Holocaust is history worth preserving.

“Early on in my studies, the more I read [about the Holocaust], I said to myself, ‘What’s this about? How come I never heard of this before?’” she said. “I have been collecting these books, and people have given them to me. It’s hard to say, over my lifetime, where I collected them all.”

For Hanauer, preserving her collection means helping preserve Holocaust education at a time when that education is woefully inadequate. In 2020, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany reported that 63% of respondents to a survey of American Millennials and Gen Zers were unaware that 6 million Jews were murdered during the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany.

“If the adage is ‘history repeats itself,’ then we clearly have to know history and to learn its lessons. If people are asked today to talk about the Holocaust, or to name a concentration camp, or to explain the roots of the evil of that period, many of their answers would be lacking,” she said. “What are students taught about that period of time? Who was affected?

Do they know the warning signs of the problems? Only by studying the past can we attempt to learn from it.”

Hanauer said that this isn’t just an American problem, either. She recalled a time when a French exchange student in one of her classes was left shocked by her lessons on Nazi activity in France and the French Resistance to Hitler’s rule.

“She said to me, ‘Madam, we never studied this in class. All this is new material for me,’” Hanauer said. “And I was shocked, but I also wasn’t shocked.”

Hanauer said that students need to have these horrific acts framed in a certain way for them to really hit home.

“Personalizing and having students engage in their learning are essential factors,” she said. “A book, film or photo is not enough. A reaction paper or poster with a summary about the book, film or photo is important. Engaging in activities will help students learn lessons in tolerance and diversity.”

One of the highlights of her teaching career was the aforementioned fellowship with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which saw Hanauer join 24 other teachers “who shared my passion for teaching about the Holocaust,” she said.

That fellowship led to a moment she will always remember, and one that reveals the depth of her knowledge on this dark period of Jewish history.

On a tour of the museum’s archives, a museum employee opened a drawer and took out a weathered letter that a child wrote to his mother while he was stuck in a juvenile home during the war. It was just one piece of the museum’s massive collection of artifacts, but Hanauer knew exactly who wrote it and what it said.

“I had just taken a look at that letter and the children who were at that house when I was doing my research, and here was that exact same letter sitting in front of me. I just said to the group, ‘You won’t believe this, but I know this letter.’”

Hanauer is aging and wants to make sure that her collection outlives her. It’s too important to her, and the rest of us, to let it fall into disrepair. It’s time for someone to care for these books, photos and documents, and Hanauer hopes that whoever that is values them as much as she has for the past several decades.

“I hope that by donating my collected resources, many others will have the resources available to read, visualize and in general be more aware of the dangers of the Holocaust. Education is most important. Learning from the past is a never-ending goal,” she said.

aguckes@midatlanticmedia.com