Pillar Three
We will not forget
This family's story is a door into a larger one. The Foundation's educational work is not commemoration for its own sake. Ordinary people built the twentieth century's worst machinery, and ordinary people stopped it. Both halves have to be taught. A third world war is prevented by populations who can recognize the early shape of tyranny, not by populations who are merely moved once a year.
One family from Louisiana is a door. It is not the room.
Four children of Thompson and Bethie Hanes served their country, and their father served before them. That is a story worth keeping on its own terms. But the reason this Foundation treats education as a founding purpose rather than an activity is that the family record runs directly into the largest thing that happened in the twentieth century.
The family holds that Aubrey Lee was among those who documented Auschwitz, as an Army intelligence officer. If the service file bears that out, then a man from Shreveport stood inside the clearest evidence ever produced of what an ordinary state can be persuaded to do, and his assignment that day was to write down what was there so that it could not later be denied.
That is a family story and a world story at the same time, and the Foundation intends to teach it as both.
What this work is for
Prevention, not sentiment.
Remembrance that stops at feeling moved has no protective value. A population can be sincerely moved once a year and still fail to recognize, in its own time and in its own language, the early moves of the thing it is remembering.
The Foundation’s educational work therefore holds to four commitments:
- Teach the mechanism, not only the atrocity. How a lawful state was converted into an instrument of mass murder — by ordinary administrators, through ordinary paperwork, in visible steps.
- Teach both halves. Ordinary people built it. Ordinary people stopped it. A history that teaches only the first half produces despair; one that teaches only the second produces complacency.
- Teach from evidence. The documentation gathered at liberation exists precisely because men like Aubrey Lee were sent to make it. Denial is answered with records, and that is why records matter.
- Teach without partisanship. Tyranny is not the property of one political tradition and does not always arrive in the same colors. The Foundation teaches the pattern, and does not use it as a cudgel in current politics.
In development
Program work is being built
The Foundation is organizing its educational program now: classroom material for Louisiana schools, an interpretive component to accompany the exhibited collection, and published research as service records arrive.
This page will carry that material as it is produced. It is listed here as intent, clearly marked, rather than described as though it already exists.