Child of Holocaust survivors speaks to Provo about the importance of truth, history

On March 24, the Provo City Library ballroom filled with students, community members and friends who gathered to hear Faye Lincoln, daughter of two Holocaust survivors, speak.

Lincoln is a fellow at the Osher Institute at the University of Utah and an author whose work covers values, biblical history and geopolitical shifts.

The event was organized by Noah Horlacher, a political science and history double major at Brigham Young University, who first met Lincoln through a KSL interview.

After tracking down her email through the Osher Institute, he invited her to speak at what would become a community-supported evening, with sponsorships from Dexter Law, Cane's and Krispy Kreme.

"I kind of view it as my personal responsibility to continue to tell the stories that they no longer will be able to tell after they pass on," Horlacher said. It's a way of honoring our humanity, remembering these events and honoring those who will come after us."

He shared why he put together this event.

"What really sparked my interest in the Holocaust is my interactions with people who had been affected by it," Horlacher said.

He added that research into Arab-Israeli tensions during a Washington, D.C. internship further deepened his interest.

Lincoln opened with her parents' history, a story she said was rarely spoken aloud while she was growing up.

Her mother came from Tomaszw Mazowiecki, just outside of d, Poland, from a wealthy family that owned large textile factories in the region.

Her father came from Warsaw. Both of her maternal grandparents lost their lives and their property during the Nazi occupation.

Her parents lived in the d ghetto for at least three years before being transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp, during the final year of the war. They lost a two-year-old son during that period, shot by Nazi soldiers.

Lincoln shared several moments of survival that bordered on the inexplicable: her mother talked back to a Nazi soldier who ordered her to throw bodies into a grave, and walked away alive.

She was selected from a lineup by a female guard, then avoided being chosen for unknown tests, later learning that the selected women were sent to serve at Hitler's country house.

Her father, transferred to a different part of the camp, survived partly because both her parents were skilled tailors and seamstresses, sewing uniforms for Nazi soldiers rather than doing physical labor.

"My mother and father lived because of timing, luck, skills and a lot of fortune," Lincoln said.

After liberation in 1945, her parents were separated. Her father went to England, her mother to France, and they were reunited through a mutual friend who carried word between them.

They made their way to a refugee camp near Vienna before obtaining visas to the United States, arriving in New York and settling in Michigan, where relatives helped sponsor them.

Steven Spielberg sought out her mother during the making of "Schindler's List" to record her testimony.

I rarely heard stories of what my parents went through in the camp. My father never did share his experience, Lincoln said. Stephen Spielberg was filming a documentary about holocaust survivors. He wanted my mother to tell him her story, but she refused.

Despite repeated questions from Lincoln as she grew up, her parents almost never spoke of what they had endured.

It was only in Lincoln's late 40s, after her late husband encouraged her mother to open up, that the full weight of the family's history began to emerge.

"I think my parents never wanted to talk about it while I was growing up because they just wanted to protect me," Lincoln said.

Last year, Lincoln traveled through Eastern Europe and visited multiple concentration camps. Her most striking experience was at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex.

Auschwitz was the largest Nazi camp where Jews were murdered. More than 1.1 million Jews died there, along with approximately 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Romani, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war and tens of thousands of others.

Lincoln arrived expecting an emotionally devastating tour centered on the Jewish experience. Instead, she said, she was disturbed by what was missing.

"Our museum tour guide minimized the experience of the Jews by replacing much of the camp's Jewish history with a focus on what happened to the non-Jewish Polish people," she said.

Lincoln acknowledged that the suffering of Polish prisoners was real and documented. At the time of the Nazi invasion in 1939, 3.5 million Jews lived in Poland, the largest concentration in any country.

2 million non-Jewish Poles also died at Nazi hands. Both communities suffered profound losses, and both deserve acknowledgment.

Lincoln's concern was about proportion and omission. Gas chambers at Birkenau killed as many as 2,000 Jewish people each day, using the pesticide Zyklon B.

More than half of all prisoners at the Auschwitz complex were Jews, and the majority of Jews who arrived were never processed into the camp at all, because they were sent directly from the train platform to the gas chambers and crematoria.

That reality was barely mentioned, she said. "I could not help feeling that our guide's narrative sounded objective and sterile ... but for the visitor, the experience is piercing, and to me, the missing context is critical."

Lincoln contrasted this with a visit to the Majdanek concentration camp, closer to Lublin, where a Polish guide spent equal time on both Polish and Jewish victims, and told the tour group at the end that it was her personal mission to tell the whole story so that nothing like it would ever happen again.

She told us at the end of the tour, I find that it is my mission to make sure that something like this never happens. And so it's my mission to tell the whole picture of what happened,' Lincoln said.

Lincoln also visited the Oskar Schindler factory in Krakw, expecting an account of how Schindler saved Jewish lives.

Instead, she encountered a visually driven, self-guided tour focused on Polish history under Nazi occupation, with little to no mention of Schindler's rescue of Jewish workers.

When asked why Auschwitz's narrative had shifted, Lincoln offered a historical explanation rooted in Polish politics.

"After the war, many Jewish survivors returned to reclaim property only to find it had been taken by neighbors or nationalized by the Soviets," she said. "Antisemitism was in some cases worse after the war than before."

She noted that a period of democratic revival followed, allowing Jewish history to be reintegrated into Polish public memory, reflected in institutions like the POLIN Museum in Warsaw, which she praised as a meaningful tribute to Jewish life in Poland.

But that progress, Lincoln argued, began to reverse in 2015 when a conservative nationalist party came to power.

In 2018, she explained, the Polish parliament passed what became known as the Holocaust Law, restricting how Polish involvement in Nazi-era crimes could be discussed, researched or taught.

In 2021, a property restitution law imposed a 30-year statute of limitations, one that by the time it took effect had allowed most Polish claimants to already obtain restitution, while most Jewish claimants had not, Lincoln said.

She said its important that people remember this history.

Freedom means that we must honor human life through compassion and understanding, Lincoln said. "Imprisoning or killing people for the sake of nationalist ideologies or political and economic needs is a way of destroying the path to a compassionate and just society.

Lincoln spoke at length about how social media platforms accelerate antisemitism and Holocaust distortion.

She said studies have shown that people spend more time engaging with negative or fear-based content than positive content and that advertising revenue models incentivize platforms to maximize engagement, regardless of the content's nature.

Section 230 of the Federal Communications Act, passed in 1996 to foster innovation in digital platforms, gives technology companies broad immunity from liability whether they remove harmful content or leave it up.

The result, Lincoln argued, is that content regarding antisemitism gets pushed into the mainstream by algorithmic amplification.

"Social media has really made antisemitism go viral," she said. "It makes it spread much faster than we can verify."

Her advice for individuals confronted with antisemitic comments online was to avoid circular arguments, which rarely resolve anything, and respond only when you have something rational and constructive to add.

Silence, in many cases, allows harmful content to fade rather than escalating it, Lincoln said.

Lincoln offered three areas of response:

Abdullah Alsboul, a BYU student, attended the event to better understand the Holocaust.

I came because I grew up in the Middle East, and I never really heard about the Holocaust, the significance of it, or the atrocities that occurred. I was just really curious, and I loved it, Alsboul said.

Alsboul asked whether she believed university divestment protests, calling on schools to withdraw investments from Israel, constituted antisemitism. Lincoln emphasized the importance of keeping demonstrations peaceful.

The exchange illustrated how events like this create a safe space for the difficult, honest conversations that Lincoln herself called for.

Pauline Bown, another BYU student, emphasized the importance of firsthand accounts.

"It's easy to get caught up in new fads and how people are viewing the world, but it's really good to just hear real-life experiences. I think it's important to remember these events ... to remember people's humanity," Bown said.

A childhood friend of Lincoln's in attendance, Linda Stulberg, also the daughter of a Holocaust survivor whose family lost 65 members in the camps in Hungary.

I just want to commend Fay. I'm so proud of her, and it takes so much courage to get up and to share her family's story. It is wrenching, Stulberg said.

She also noted that the psychological study of PTSD itself originated with psychiatrists working with Holocaust survivors. She praised Horlacher for organizing the event.

"I congratulate him for organizing this event because the generation of Holocaust survivors are almost all dead," Stulberg said. "And those of their children, we are approaching our senior years as well. So (Horlacher), carrying forward the education that would otherwise be lost is so impactful."

Lincoln closed her remarks where Holocaust memory always returns to the phrase 'never again,' and to the question of what it actually demands from those who say it.

Distortion and denial are not just historical offenses. They are steps on a path toward the dehumanization of people and the erosion of the rule of law, she argued.

When the suffering of one group is minimized to elevate the narrative of another, something essential is lost, not only for the group whose memory is erased, but for the society that allows it, Lincoln added,

The evening in Provo was a small act of resistance against that erosion. A daughter sharing her parents' story, students listening and asking questions and a community trying to understand what honoring history actually requires.