Individuals of all ages turned up Wednesday and Thursday to listen to Patrick Hicks share his journey through areas of Poland  that were hit the hardest during the Holocaust. 

The University of Northern Iowa’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Education held the event to open the minds of attendees,  providing an idea of the scale of horrors from the Holocaust. They also focused on what the current-day students are doing to memorialize those who perished through mass execution methods. 

Hicks was brought to UNI after finishing his newest historical fiction book, “The Commandment of Lubizec: A Novel of the Holocaust and Operation Reinhard.” The code name “Operation Reinhard” referred to the Nazis’ plan to murder the  Jewish population of Poland. 

“I wanted to absorb the knowledge of the events and put [it] on the page in a unique way,” Hicks said. “I wanted to not only add color, but make the reader think of things they hadn’t before.” 

Hicks became motivated to write about the Holocaust when he saw a mass gravesite on television that was believed to hold thousands. He was only eight years old at the time. 

As a writer and a historian, Hicks was inspired to better educate those about Operation Reinhard, as well as concentration camps that aren’t known to many Americans. 

During his presentation, Hicks explained how millions of Poles were shipped by train to death camps. 98 percent of them would be dead after one hour. He also spoke about the 37,000 men, women and children lined up along a wall in Pawaik Prison and shot in the head; to aid in the mental imagery, Cedar Falls, Iowa has a population of 40,000. 

Hicks showed images of the Nazis dynamiting, demolishing and destroying the cities, wiping them off of the map without a road left to travel among the remains. 

“I would think to be in Patrick Hicks’ shoes and go to Europe focusing on the Holocaust would be really emotionally draining,” said Chad Franson, senior finance and economics major. “You didn’t actually live through it but you are seeing what they lived through.” 

Hicks described other concentration and death campws, including Treblinka, where 900,000 people were murdered. .

 “I cannot imagine that,” Hicks said. “My imagination fails me… to murder 10,000 in one day.” 

Hicks concluded his presentation with the story of Janusz Korczak, a children’s author and director of an orphanage who bravely walked into a death camp with his 200 orphans. It took the audience a minute to recover before several spoke, breaking the silence.

“I thought it was very striking,” said Roxanne Kaale, a senior biology major. “You forget as you go in life…the devastating things that happened during the Holocaust.”