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Daniel Shaer ’26 Wins Arbeiter Holocaust Essay Contest

BUA junior Daniel Shaer '26, along with five others, won this year's Israel Arbeiter Holocaust Essay Contest, part of Boston's annual commemoration of Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust Day of Remembrance. Daniel's essay was inspired by a 2023 trip to Erfurt, Germany, to see an exhibit based on his great-grandmother Miriam's diary, which recounts her 1938 exodus from Nazi Germany to British Palestine.

Daniel says, "That trip to Germany in the summer of 2023 to see the exhibit about my great-grandmother's life had such a profound impact on me and I wanted to share what I'd learned in my submission. When I found out that I'd won, I felt so proud to be related to my great-grandmother and incredibly honored that I was able to share her inspiring story." 

Daniel, along with the five other essay contest winners, will travel to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. In anticipation of this educational experience, Daniel notes: "I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity to visit the USHMM, and I welcome the chance to reflect more deeply on the story of the Jewish people and my place within it...I believe it's essential to remember the pain and resilience of those who came before us — not just to honor their memory, but to better understand how to face the challenges ahead."

You can read Daniel's winning essay in its entirety below.

Miriam’s Diary: Remembering the Holocaust, Rebuilding the Future

The train slows with a sharp jolt, and I’m lurched from deep in thought. I lean against the window and watch the German countryside speed by. A polite announcement in German signals our arrival at Erfurt Hauptbahnhof, the city where my great-grandmother Miriam grew up. I’m holding a copy of her diary tightly in hand. Her first entry dates to 1935 when she was fourteen—the same age I am now.

We glide into the station and step out onto the chilly platform. I look around at the bustle of morning commuters and imagine Miriam—then called Marion—standing here in 1938, suitcase in hand, knowing she might never return. It jars me that this ordinary place is where my great-grandmother was torn from her home and sent to British Palestine to escape the Nazis.

Just beyond the station walls, I’m stunned to see a large poster: Miriam’s

Tagebuch—Miriam’s Diary—above a photo of her as an adult working in the fields of Kibbutz Degania. Any trace of Marion Feiner, the German girl from the diary, is gone. I reflect on all that was lost in her transformation from Marion to Miriam—and all that rose in its place.

With the Nazi party’s rise in 1933, Marion’s life slowly unraveled. Her father was fired, and she was expelled from her ice-skating rink by the Hitler Youth. Her family knew she couldn’t stay. In 1938 at 17, she left with her Zionist youth group to British Palestine and never saw her parents again. Their last message arrived in March 1941, from Lwow, Poland—just before the Nazi occupation and murder of 120,000 Jews. In her diary’s final entry, she described sitting on the kibbutz water tower contemplating the finality of her parents’ farewell.

I arrive at the museum, surrounded by the quiet hum of local visitors. The exhibit tells

Miriam’s story—from her first diary entry in Erfurt to the family she raised and her life in the new nation of Israel, the country she helped build. At the center of the room, encased in bulletproof glass, is her original diary, donated by my family.

The exhibit is housed in the former headquarters of Topf & Söhne, the engineering firm that designed the crematoria for Auschwitz. Unlike others forced into compliance, Topf & Söhne’s engineers chose to help. They saw themselves as innovators—problem-solvers pushing the boundaries of technology. But their expertise didn’t preserve life; it destroyed it. Their pursuit of “efficiency” made genocide more efficient than ever.

Here I realize the Holocaust wasn’t just enabled by soldiers but by workers—how ordinary people, by failing to consider the impact of their work, became instruments of atrocity.

It’s no coincidence that Miriam’s exhibit is here. The same building that once helped erase the Jewish people now preserves the story of one who survived. But that survival came at a price; Miriam’s life in Israel rose from the loss of the girl she once was. Marion—the German child with a diary, with ice skates, with loving parents—was gone. That tension between what was lost and what came to be lives at the heart of how we must remember the Holocaust today. It reminds us that even with the rise of something new, resilience cannot return things to the way they were.

And so, we must remember: the Holocaust wasn’t just perpetrated with gas chambers or guns. It was perpetrated with silence. With blueprints. With workers who didn’t ask what they worked for. With scientists and engineers who didn’t stop to consider the harm their creations could do.

Today, we are again surrounded by hate. Antisemitism is surging in all corners of the world. Jewish students face harassment, and synagogues are attacked. All the while, technology advances faster than we can understand it. Social media spreads conspiracy theories at lightning speed. Artificial intelligence can replicate hate so well we can’t tell fact from fiction. The tools we build today—algorithms, code, platforms—carry consequences beyond our intent. Once again, those designing the future often fail to ask: What are we really creating, and who might be harmed by it?

Marion’s diary reminds us that history is not inevitable; it is built one decision at a time. The Holocaust wasn’t just the failure of good over evil—it was the failure of imagination: of engineers, workers, and ordinary people who could not, or would not, see where their choices were leading. If we fail to think critically in this era of rapid innovation and boundless possibility, we may realize too late that we’ve built something beyond control. We must speak up, challenge complacency, and act. To remain silent is to give hate permission, to let prejudice shape our future. Marion's words call us not merely to remember, but to choose courage over silence, responsibility over passivity—to build a world in which history can never again unfold unchallenged.