Ted Kempinski — Honorary Consul of Memory, Holocaust Education Activist, and Scholar

Ted Kempinski is the Honorary Consul of Memory for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in the United States — appointed in November 2024 by Museum Director Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński at the National Council for the Social Studies conference in Boston. In this role he advances the Diplomacy of Remembrance of the Museum in the State of Massachusetts, connecting American educators and institutions to the primary sources and living mission of the world’s most significant Holocaust memorial site.

His work as Honorary Consul is grounded in a decade of concrete educational partnership with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. In February 2024, Haverhill High School became the first public school in the United States to bring the “Auschwitz. In Front of Your Eyes” program to students — a live, narrated virtual tour of the former German Nazi concentration and extermination camp conducted in real time from the site itself. Kempinski initiated this partnership after attending professional development at Auschwitz in the summer of 2023, where he witnessed the program firsthand and asked: how can I bring this to Haverhill?

In January 2025, he was the only public school teacher in the United States invited to attend the 80th anniversary commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz — present at the site where 1.1 million men, women, and children were murdered, alongside survivors, heads of state, and international dignitaries.

In 2025, he coordinated with the Anne Frank House to bring a traveling exhibition to Haverhill’s middle schools, training 40 students to serve as peer guides — giving young people the tools to teach their own communities about the history and its present relevance.

He is a doctoral candidate in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Gratz College, where his research focuses on the intersection of Catholic institutional history, Nazi persecution of the Polish clergy, and the politics of memory and beatification in the postwar Church. His current scholarly work — the first English-language treatment of the five Augustinian friars of Kraków who were arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 and died at Auschwitz and Dachau — has uncovered previously undocumented connections to the RSHA church suppression program documented at the Nuremberg Trials.

After 27 years, he is still in the classroom. As Lead Teacher of Holocaust and Genocide Education at Haverhill High School in Massachusetts, he brings the full weight of his archival research, his institutional relationships, and his direct experience at primary sites of Holocaust history to his students every day. The classroom and the archive are not separate worlds for him. They are the same mission.

A little hope always outlasts hate.