With the recent shooting in Pittsburgh that left 11 dead and the White Nationalist march in Charlottesville last year, a local Holocaust educator believes now is the right time for everyone to learn from history.

“The people in Charlottesville were chanting ‘Blood and Soil,’ (a World War II Nazi rallying cry) and the man in Pittsburgh was saying ‘Kill all Jews’, these are the same things they said back then — it’s not over and done with,” said Charles Moman of Seymour who recently spoke to students at Medora Community Schools.

Moman, who also is a photographer and composer, said many people do not know the full story of the Holocaust, while others may have some of the basics but very little more.

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His audience at Medora included students in Justin Coffey and Kristen Koerner’s classes.

Moman presented statistics during his presentation, but said that the numbers “mattered more to adults often then students.”

More than 6.25 million Jews were recorded as being killed in the Holocaust, through both death and concentration camps.

That number is often difficult to comprehend, Moman said.

“Everyone wants to believe that (Nazis) were insane, crazy, but they weren’t,” he said. “They were a group of very sane people who were dedicated to the horrible idea of the eradication of the Jewish people, who they considered subhuman.”

Moman said many of the people who fueled the mass killings were very educated, very intelligent people.

He said the massacres of a large portion of the populations of “undesirables’ began at gunpoint, but that this was mentally scaring to the people carrying out these executions.

“They came up with different names, at Auschwitz, they labeled all their poison gas pellets as for ‘relocation’ of the Jewish population,” Moman said.

And they almost succeeded according to Moman’s research.

Nearly 75 percent of the European Jewish population was killed, with one-third of the world’s population of the Jewish bloodline wiped out.

Moman said he was not a Holocaust survivor and there is no any Jewish heritage in his family.

“I’m not a Holocaust expert, or even a death camps expert. I am an expert of my own experiences and I talk about those,” he said,

Four years ago he admits he knew nothing about the Holocaust and the death camps, but that all changed after he met Holocaust survivor Eva Mozes Kor, who lives in Terre Haute.

The Romanian lost both her parents and two older sisters to the Holocaust. She and her twin sister, Miriam, were subject to human experimentation under Josef Mengele at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the war. She founded Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors aka CANDLES in 1984

Moman said his interest in the subject began after he was nearly killed in an automobile accident.

While recovering, he started watching documentaries on Netflix, ultimately binge watching ones about the horrors of the Holocaust.

Moman then connected with Kor and the CANDLES Museum in Terre Haute.

This lead to Moman signing up for a trip to Auschwitz, one of three major death camps. More than 1.3 million people lost their lives there.

“I didn’t know anything about it, truthfully. I thought I was going to Germany, but Auschwitz, like all death camps, wasn’t located in Germany but Poland,” he said.

Mengeles conducted inhumane tests on twins, torturing and killing more than 2,800 pairs of twins. Only a little less than 200 twins survived the encounter with the Nazi doctor.

To the students, Moman spent most of his time talking about the experiences of standing in the camps and meeting with Eva Kor.

“She told me one time, “Imagine me at 9-years old watching people throw themselves upon these (electrified) fences to commit suicide rather than experience what lay ahead,”” said Moman, talking about an experience walking through the entrance to the camps with Kor.

Kor has spent much of her time about her experiences including writing a book entitled “Forgiving Doctor Mengele.”

Kor has received some criticism for her statements about forgiveness and the Nazis, and that’s something Moman said he feels is unjust.

“She advocates that she, personally, can’t continue to hang on to the hate she had, it was making her a darker person,” he said. ‘She says that she needs to forgive, but never forget, what was done to her. Some people I think, believe she is saying just ignore that it happened, and she’s not. She never wants us to forget what they did, but she just can’t keep hating.”

Moman showed the students a view of the outside of a preserved medical building, where Jewish people received no real medical treatment. The only thing visible was barbed wire and the living quarters and crematories to dispose of bodies.

“Imagine being a small child and looking out these windows and thinking “Is this what the world is like now? Does the entire world hate us this much?”” Moman said to the class.

In 2015, Moman began speaking at the Seymour Public Library to between 80 and 100 people about his travels to the death camps, the museums and his experiences meeting Holocost survivors and officials seeking to record the past.

“I started there, then went to Columbus and it just kept growing,” said Moman.

Moman said he often encounters people with who have never heard of the atrocities, or all of the atrocities, and has even came across “deniers” who claim that the Holocaust is a hoax.

“I can’t understand how they can believe that. The Holocaust is probably one of the most documented events in human history and the fact that people can convince themselves that it never happened is just …” said Moman never finishing the sentence.

Koerner’s class was studying the Holocaust as a part of their S.T.E.M. studies through a connection to Anne Frank’s Diary.

“We studied how Anne Frank had to be very quiet in the attic, and related that to the study of how sound travels, and then we are making sound proof boxes to try to connect that to the science involved in, basically, being quiet,” said Koerner.

Starting next week Koerner’s class will use what they learned about sound traveling to create sound proof shoe-boxes.

Moman said he is more than happy to talk at any educational locations and that he can be contacted at [email protected]