Jeremy Brown wants to bring history alive for his students — one personal account at a time.

In Brown’s social studies classroom at Oakman High School, he is sharing his passion for Holocaust studies with his students and creating scholars of the genocide.

Instead of teaching students only a brief history of the Holocaust found in their textbooks, he’s relaying information he has learned through a fellowship program with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., along with the knowledge he has gained through his in-depth study of the Holocaust since 2008.

According to the museum’s website, “The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. … The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were ‘racially superior’ and that the Jews, deemed ‘inferior,’ were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.”

When asked why he has a fascination with studying the Holocaust, Brown said it all began when he retired from the Marines and pursued a career in education. One day, he observed a teacher in Hoover presenting a lesson to her students on the Holocaust. He realized he wasn’t taught a lot about the Holocaust in school, and he immediately wanted to learn more.

He would eventually go to Washington, D.C., to attend the Arthur and Rochelle Belfer National Conference for Teachers at the museum in 2008. It’s the same conference that he now plans to facilitate in the summer of 2019.

He said his first trip to the Holocaust museum forever changed his teaching path.

“When you walk through the museum for the first time, you start seeing things that you’ve never seen before, and they’re real foreign to you. It’s the story of the people that really grabs me,” Brown said. “When I put a name and a face with it, that’s a different story, because each one of those people had a different story. While we’ll never know everybody’s story because they were murdered, the people that we do know their story, I think we need to tell it.”

Jeremy Brown, right, with Holocaust survivor Irving Roth in New York City. Roth is a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp. (contributed)

For the past decade, Brown has attended conferences and even traveled to Israel, Poland and Germany to deepen his education of the Holocaust. He has most recently worked with two other teachers from Nebraska and Wisconsin, as part of the Holocaust museum’s fellows program, to create a Holocaust lesson that the museum is featuring in the Some Were Neighbors exhibit on its website.

Through Brown’s research, he has interviewed survivors and even had some of them speak to his students, and in March he facilitated teacher training in North Carolina for the Holocaust museum, in order to share knowledge and resources about the Holocaust.

This summer, he will travel to Rwanda to study the Rwandan Genocide.

“We learn about the Holocaust, and there are other genocides that have taken place. One of those is the Rwandan genocide of 1994,” Brown said. “We’re going to meet and talk to some people. I’m hoping to bring that back to my students.”

At right, Oakman High teacher Jeremy Brown explores The David and Fela Shapell Family Collections, Conservation and Research Center at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with Hashim Davis. (contributed)

Brown said roughly only two pages of his students’ current textbook discusses the Holocaust, so he supplements his lessons with other books, ID cards of Holocaust victims, slide shows and other teaching methods.

His goal is to teach another Holocaust and genocide class at Oakman, and he wants students to hear about the Holocaust through personal testimony, rather than a generic description of the horrid time in history.

“I would like them to get more firsthand accounts of historical things from the people that lived it,” he said.

Brown said he will continue learning as much as he can about the Holocaust while also fulfilling his duties as a coach for Oakman’s football, girls basketball and varsity softball teams. He helps to coach the All-Out 04 softball team that his daughter plays for, and he is the pastor of Pumpkin Center Baptist Church. He’s also been on a weight-loss journey and is down roughly 100 pounds.

He said he’s thankful to his wife, Monica Brown, for her support of his endeavors.

Sometimes, Brown said he wonders if he’s taken on too much, but his passion in every role and his continued personal and educational accomplishments reaffirm his journey.

His dreams moving forward are to teach an adult class about the Holocaust and eventually to take a group of students on a trip to Europe to experience history firsthand, as he has.

Even though his students can’t attend conferences or travel with him at the moment, Brown said he wants to continue bringing his knowledge back to Oakman and Walker County.

“You just keep going, going, going, and bring it to the students,” he said. “I want our kids to see that there’s a lot more out there than what they see around them. I want them to be good citizens, and I want them to be productive members of society and see for the greater good.”

In addition to the conferences and travel experiences mentioned previously, Brown has attended the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous Summer Institute for Teachers at Columbia University in New York; the Jewish Labor Committee’s Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teachers Program, in which he studied and traveled abroad for three weeks in 2011; and the Olga Lengyel Institute for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights Summer Seminar in New York.

All conferences and trips were made possible through grants and scholarships Brown received. His partnership with the Holocaust museum is ongoing, and he hopes to continue educating other teachers across the country about the Holocaust through the museum’s fellows program.

This story originally appeared in the Daily Mountain Eagle.