BY | JAN-SHAW-FLAMM '76 PHOTOGRAPH BY | RANDALL SCOTT

Seven-year-old Ann Millin was looking around the Bungalow Bake Shop on St. Paul’s Grand Avenue when she noticed some customers with numbers tattooed on their arms. When she asked why, her mother hustled her out of the store and explained: “You know your daddy fought in Europe against Mr. Hitler because he was an evil man. One of the things Hitler did was put people in camps and kill them. These are people who survived. When they were in the camps, they were numbered.”

The impression made by that observation decades ago proved as indelible as the tattoos. Today Millin ’69 works at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. as a historian and special assistant to the director of education.

She nearly missed out on the job. While teaching at the University of Kentucky and finishing a Ph.D. in Jewish history at Cincinnati’s Hebrew Union College–
Jewish Institute of Religion, Millin spoke one day with a Holocaust Museum photo archivist, who mentioned that he was leaving his job. Applications would be accepted for just 48 more hours. “I ran to FedEx to get my resumé in by the deadline,” says Millin. “Two weeks later I interviewed, and they gave me the job that day.”

That was eight years ago. Now Millin is working on a propaganda exhibition with a contemporary purpose: “The Nazis made massive use of the emerging technologies of the time—radio and film,” she says. “Now there is the Internet, one of the most powerful propaganda vehicles today. By looking at the Nazi use of propaganda, can we teach our citizenry how to recognize propaganda and respond to it critically? To understand how propaganda can be used to persuade citizens to give up their rights and forgo their responsibilities?”

Millin co-developed the weeklong program “Institute on the History of the Holocaust: Confronting Hatred, Preventing Genocide, and Cultivating Moral Responsibility.” It was a response to a resolution by the United Nations, under the leadership of then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan ’61, that an annual Holocaust remembrance be created. Held in May 2007, the program was designed to help U.N. information officers from 10 countries in the Western Hemisphere develop educational programs in their homelands.

Although her job has many interesting parts, training military and FBI recruits is especially rewarding, says Millin. "When we train the West Point cadets and the Naval Academy plebes, we talk about what it means to defend the Constitution. With the police we talk about what it means to serve and protect. The army, the police—virtually every profession in Germay—went along with Hitler, and we ask them to reflect on that."

Part of a generation once notably suspicious of police and the military, Millin no longer shares those sentiments. She meets hundreds of young recruits face-to-face and says, “They are so committed and so fine morally, and they’re putting their whole selves on the firing line. I thank God for these people and for what I’m learning from them.”

Because the museum’s founders envisioned a living memorial, the museum’s Web site, www.ushmm.org, deals with the history of the Holocaust but also features information on contemporary genocide—such as the situation in Darfur—and encourages people to act.

Much of the Holocaust Museum’s subject matter is grim, and students often ask Millin how she deals with that. Her reply: “The job I have is the job I wish for each of you, where at the end of the day, you can say, ‘I have done a little bit today to repair the world. I have made a difference.’ ”