EDUCATION
GET READY FOR THE NEXT CHAPTER OF
MARGARET'S LEGACY
Honouring the past through re-evaluating the way we are teaching about the Holocaust, antisemitism and citizenship for the next generation.
Rooted in the story of Holocaust survivors Margaret and Arthur Weisz a'h, Margaret's Legacy began with the production of a widely shown documentary and has grown into a dynamic education initiative focused on meaningful, values-driven education.
At a time of rising antisemitism and growing distance from lived memory, Margaret’s Legacy is committed to helping people, specifically pre-teen to young adult ages, engage with history in deeper, more personal ways. Our approach is grounded in exploring the most current evidence-based research, ongoing reflection, and real-world relevance.
In its next chapter, founder Danna Horwood expands her personal work within the organization through her powerful memoir exploring intergenerational trauma, identity, and resilience, inviting the next generation to not only remember the past, but to actively engage in healing, growing and shaping our collective future.
THE HISTORY OF
MARGARET'S LEGACY
Danna Horwood grew up surrounded by stories; stories of war, survival, rebuilding, courage, loss, and the fierce determination to create a life filled with meaning.
Storytelling became her way of honouring those stories, understanding herself, and offering her children the emotional roadmap she wished she had inherited.
As Margaret's Legacy grew, Danna realized that Holocaust education wasn't just about teaching facts and dates, it needed to be about connecting with people, their stories, and their emotional inheritance, especially today, as first hand survivor interactions are becoming more and more difficult to come by.
Empathizing. Grieving. Listening. Sharing. Connecting.
The original documentary that she produced began as a passion project to teach her own young children about the horrors of the Holocaust and their grandparent's story in a way they could understand. Her oldest was 11 at the time.
The documentary was so well done that school administrators, teachers, museum curators and community leaders began reaching out so they could show the film. Danna, her father, her children and passionate educators began to travel around North America to present Margaret & Arthur's Story.
It reached the hearts of thousands (by now, tens of thousands), but Danna felt like something was missing.
While audiences from all backgrounds were connecting with the micro History of her grandparents, the underlying messages she was hoping to convey weren't converting into action on a global scale. With antisemitism on the rise, today's youth are connecting with the Holocaust through a completely different lens.
Danna and her team realized intuitively that unless we begin to encourage other Holocaust educators to look at history through a values based lens, there might be no way for the next generation to truly understand what went wrong and what we might do differently as a society today in order to heal and move forward, grow and learn.
This new outlook birthed the first stages of the next chapter of Margaret's Legacy.
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SHIFTING FOCUS
As a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and a daughter deeply shaped by her parents' emotional lives, Danna lived her own version of inherited fear, strength, anxiety, resilience, and emotional patterning.
Her healing journey was not linear.
It involved (and still involves) unraveling stories she didn’t know she had inherited, breaking patterns she didn’t consciously choose, and learning how identity is shaped as much by personal experience (and silence) as it is from our inheritance.
Danna’s experiences with postpartum and seasonal depression and her grandmother's compassion for her, deepened her understanding that pain does not need to be justified in order to be real. Her grandmother Margaret was her anchor.
Through her ongoing healing journey, Danna learned that life is complicated, full of ups and downs… and that she is certainly not alone.
As she learned to allow for more vulnerability and transparency in her life she began to realize that everyone has something they are going through. And it's the narrative that we craft in our own minds that either keeps us stuck or finally allows us to heal and move forward.
WHY NOW?
After her father Tommy passed away, Danna found herself untethered. For a long time, she couldn’t move forward.
The work paused. The direction blurred. The voice that had guided so much of her life was suddenly gone.
And then, slowly, she returned to the manuscript she had written.
Not the polished version she had been working on. The first draft. The one filled with Tommy's handwritten edits, sticky notes, messages in the margins.
As Danna began to read and re-read her book, the pages were no longer just marked up with ink, but with tear stains of grief.
What began as something she had written for her children became something she needed for herself. It became a way to heal her own inner child parts she hadn’t fully connected with yet.
And as she worked through her pain and grief, Danna began to feel that sharing her book was more urgent than ever with the rise in antisemitism and hate based violence. She started to recognize that while access to information has never been greater, understanding, empathy, and moral clarity feels more and more out of reach.
As the generation of survivors continues to fade, memory alone is no longer enough.
If we want the next generation to carry these stories forward in a meaningful way. We don't want the holocaust to feel like ancient history they learn about in museums and books.
We want the next generation to feel truly connected to universal values that have the power to change the way we view history and approach current events.
We want to zero in on values the survivors carried with them in the hiding or in the concentration camps and as they built their new lives after the war. The values held by upstanders who saw through the propaganda and risked their lives to save Jews. The values of the soldiers who enlisted of their own free will to stand up and join the war efforts to help defeat the Nazis. The values of the heroes who helped the Jewish refugees find a sense of safety and community in a whole new world so they could rebuild their lives with dignity.
By shifting focus toward values, we start to look at history from a new, constructive and inspiring lens. The lessons become less about facts and dates and more about what history reveals about human nature, and what that means for us today.
