There hasn’t been a time I didn’t know of Ben growing up. I didn’t expect to see him at the Schlieben camp where my grandfather had been a survivor.

I knew dark pieces of a jigsaw. He told me of the cold and the hunger and what my grandfather had looked like.

It gifted me an understanding to my core that is unforgettable, that he shared with me and millions of others.

Afterwards in Schlieben we sat with a group of school teachers, non-Jewish, who has stopped the camp from being bulldozed. In that moment he was alive. He spoke about his family, his hope for the future, that he was limitlessly optimistic about humankind’s capacity for goodness as long as everybody learned from the past. That optimism, that light, was the most exquisite articulation of goodness and possibility that I’ve ever been so close to.

As the survivors dwindle, as their presence among us dwindles, we need to redouble efforts to remember their lives. It’s both a gift and obligation, not a blessing and a curse.

Ten years after his liberation from the worst thing tyranny could ever create, he was representing his country in the Olympics as a weightlifter who became a loving parent and teacher and a great husband. He grabbed back the pen that was taken from him to write his story.

If we remember the past, we have the capacity to write a story that is better than the one he lived. What greater gift is there to humankind than that. His influence is limitless as result.