Middle schoolers filled the Occhiato Student Center on Monday as Colorado State University Pueblo held its 13th annual Holocaust Remembrance Day, bringing together community members, university departments, and young students to honor the lives lost during one of history’s most documented atrocities.

The event, organized around Yom HaShoah, the solemn day designated by Congress to commemorate the six million Jews and millions of others killed under the Nazi regime, featured guest speakers, musical performances, and something new this year: middle school students from Pueblo.

Pamela Richmond, who has coordinated the event since its founding, said the observance has grown considerably. What started as a single program after she studied at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., now draws participants from the music department, history, social work, psychology, and the broader Pueblo community. Her goal has always been to push the conversation past ceremony. “Hatred, bullying, propaganda, kind of having blinders on,” she said, listing the lessons she hopes students carry home. “Those are messages that today are still beneficial for people to be talking about.” She also referenced a poem delivered during the program, written by a non-Jewish pastor, in which group after group is targeted while bystanders stay silent, until no one is left to speak up.

For Helena Atlas-Acuña, a longtime Pueblo community member, the day is always personal. Her parents were Holocaust survivors. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, her parents were living in what is now south-central Poland. Her father, anticipating the roundups, fled east with his brothers and a brother-in-law into Soviet-occupied Ukraine. The Soviets arrested them and held them in a labor camp for two years. Her mother told Nazi authorities she was six years younger than her actual age and was sent to a textile factory in the Sudetenland, surviving in forced labor through two mills until the war ended.

After liberation in 1945, her mother returned to Katowice, Poland, and her father found her through a chance encounter with someone who knew where she had gone. They remarried in Stuttgart because their records had been destroyed. Her sister was born in Germany in 1948. In 1950, they boarded a ship to New York and took a train to Pueblo, where sponsors through B’nai B’rith had arranged housing and employment. Her father translated his trade, harness making, into mattress work and later upholstery at the Colorado State Mental Hospital.

Atlas-Acuña has shared this history with students for years, but Monday marked the first time she presented to middle schoolers. “I’m hoping that these kids will understand,” she said. Charles Lickert, known to students at Nettie Freed Middle School as Mr. C, said he works to bring that same thinking into his classroom. “I want the kids to realize what’s going on, not only then, but what’s going on now and how it all relates to the world around them.” He added that the process matters, not just the outcome. “It starts a little bit at a time and then we get this horrific thing in the end.”

The presence of middle schoolers was itself a statement. Atlas-Acuña, who also speaks at Pueblo South High School each year when teachers cover World War II, said the age of the audience does not diminish the importance of the message. “At any level, the more you educate, the more chance we have of changing things around for the better.” Richmond echoed that. A world where everyone looks and thinks alike, she said, would be a boring one. The point is to appreciate difference and to recognize what happens when that appreciation fails.

The 13th annual observance ran as part of a campus-wide effort across academic departments and included community volunteers who helped chaperone student attendees throughout the day.