
In 2019, Amy Burgon-Hill, a sixth-grade teacher at Eisenhower Junior High School in Taylorsville, Utah, was attending a training session on teaching the Holocaust to students. She recalls sitting behind a woman (whose name she can’t recall) who had a beautiful wedding ring on and complimenting her on it, unaware that what would happen next would impact her career.
“The woman said, ‘Thank you! It belonged to my grandma. She snuck it out with family and got rid of it right before she was captured and put into a concentration camp,'” Burgon-Hill says. “I just looked at her. It was this moment where the reality of everything hit, and that was my first experience talking about the Holocaust.”
Burgon-Hill began chatting with the woman and discovered that she spoke to groups about her family’s experience. Since she was used to addressing groups of about 20 people, however, she wasn’t comfortable speaking to an auditorium filled with students—but she knew someone who was.
Lecturer Professor Amos Guiora, who is the son of Holocaust survivors and a Distinguished Fellow at The Consortium for the Research and Study of Holocaust and the Law, received a text from Burgon-Hill and was excited to speak with her students. They set up a time for him to visit the school and talk to a group in both seventh and ninth grade.
“One of the wonderful aspects of engaging with young people is their willingness, perhaps reflecting eager innocence or young courage, to explore beyond conventional boundaries. That powerful and compelling confluence between innocence and exploration made the 90 minutes electric,” Guiora recalled in a 2020 opinion piece in The Salt Lake Tribune.
Guiora has returned to Eisenhower Junior High School several times, most recently on Jan. 14. He recalls that this last visit felt different than other presentations.
“I think one of the reasons Tuesday so powerfully resonated with me is that I could sense a level of engagement I hadn’t experienced before, something really positive happening while I was speaking,” he says. “For me, the opportunity to talk to kids about my parents’ Holocaust experience is always a combination of challenging and important. As a second-generation Holocaust survivor, one of my greatest fears is that the Holocaust will be put in the dustbin of history.”
At the Jan. 14 visit, however, the students were very interested in what Guiora was saying and immediately followed up with insightful questions.
“A sixth-grade kid asked if I was empathetic to my parents’ travails, which really grabbed me. Another student asked if I could have survived the Holocaust had I been alive. Their questions were intelligent and powerful,” Guiora says. “At that age, kids are unfiltered. They don’t think before they ask—but the questions they asked were the best I have ever gotten.”
Burgon-Hill says that while it is age-appropriate behavior for junior high students to rarely see beyond themselves, learning about the Holocaust helps them look at the world from a different perspective.
“When Professor Guiora speaks, he is able to help my students see that there are people beyond them and that my students are not the only ones who struggle. He does not share his parents’ story in a way that suggests students have it so easy. It is an acknowledgement of this horrible and hard thing that happened, but that people survived and they thrived,” Burgon-Hill says. “He’s able to present it in a way that is not condescending or preachy, and it engages my students and they listen. Professor Guiora is so vulnerable and honest about his parents’ story, which I imagine is very difficult on some days, but it opens the students up as well.”
The students also get excited about Professor Guiora’s visits because he treats them with respect, Burgon-Hill explains.
“They’re not used to being recognized for their intelligence and their maturity. This is my 27th year at this school, and Professor Guiora is the first person who has stood in front of them and complimented them on their thoughtfulness and their sincerity,” she says. “I have never seen a guest speaker do that with my students. He gives that respect to them.”
Guiora notes that the event was humbling for him, even after visiting the school multiple times, and is thankful that Burgon-Hill and her colleagues teach about the Holocaust and continue to have him come to speak.

“I am lucky to have the opportunity to engage with different audiences in the community—and of particular importance, to engage with young people about the Holocaust. That day was a perfect confluence of my work teaching others about the crimes of complicity. It perfectly meshes with the Bystander Initiative mission as well. ” he says. “I genuinely enjoy meeting with people and find the experience invaluable. I would do it again in a heartbeat.”
When he had finished speaking, several of the students showed him how to do different handshakes, including “the dab,” which he was unfamiliar with, and tried to get him to shoot hoops with them. Others lined up to say hello—not because they wanted to get out of class, Burgon-Hill clarifies, but because he had shared an intense and personal story with them.
“Professor Guiora told them they could be part of the change that doesn’t allow bullying to continue and progress to something like that. And here’s a man who could do it without speaking of violence, without dropping the n-word, without doing what they see on social media or hear in their music or see in their video games. Here’s a man who could do that with respect. He made a difference,” she says. “In English class, we gave them the opportunity to write thank-you notes, and they were all positive: ‘What I am going to do is stand up against bullies.’ ‘I am going to help people.’ ‘You let me know that I need to stand up for people.’ ‘This can’t happen again.’ ‘I need to you know that I will be a protector.'”
As Professor Guiora spoke to a local radio station the next day about the conflict in Israel, he mentioned his Eisenhower Junior High presentation as well. Burgon-Hill says that they played the portion mentioning the school during overhead announcements and that the students were thrilled to be recognized.
“Some of the kids at my school fight dragons. They are 11 and 12 years old and fighting battles I don’t understand,” she says. “Then Professor Guiora went on the radio and said something good about them. I wish I would have recorded their reaction to hearing it, because it was amazing. They were screaming, cheering, and pounding on desks. It was chaos.”
Learn more about the Bystander Initiative and Guiora’s research.