Edith Grosman walked through the doorway of what once was an army barrack — now the local Poprad, Slovakia high school — seemingly unfazed.

Seventy-five years earlier, Edith, her sister Lea, and nearly 1,000 other Slovakian Jewish girls from across the country were corraled in that same building under Nazi orders.

Unbeknownst to them, the barrack was the last stop before being sent to Auschwitz. And that cohort of young women would be known as the first organized transport of Jews to the Nazi death camp, now infamous for its gas chambers and crematoria.

Edith was at the school to meet with Slovakian President Andrej Kiska. Together they unveiled a plaque commemorating that first transport.

As Edith walked down the school’s brightly lit but narrow hallway, she didn’t immediately recognize her surroundings. But as she neared a meeting room in the school’s south wing, she admitted her heart was pounding.

The pair chatted informally over coffee but Mr. Kiska didn’t shy away from asking probing questions about how to combat the rise of anti-Semitism in the country.

Racist tropes and hatred toward Jews that belong in the past but permeate the present.

Her answer was simple: education and honouring the past horrors of the holocaust.

The meeting with Mr. Kiska and the plaque unveiling launched a weekend-long series of remembrance events marking the 75th anniversary of the girls of the first transport.

Ms. Grosman (née Friedman) was 18 at the time and and her sister Lea — whom she idolizes — was just shy of 20 when the train headed for Auschwitz departed the Poprad railway platform on March 25, 1942.

On March 25, 2017, Ms. Grosman was back on that platform. She was again surrounded by strangers’ faces but no longer had Lea by her side — she died at the camp.

But this time the throng of unfamiliar faces posed no threat to Ms. Grosman. They were a group of dignitaries and citizens, family and friends, gathered to honour the 1,000 girls of the first transport.

The day was cold and windy and the sky was a brilliant blue. The train station stands under the shoulders of the High Tatras mountains range that borders Slovakia and Poland. Auschwitz is approximately 200 kilometres northwest of mountains.

The memory of the horrible fate of Jews in World War 2 is lucid in the minds of the people who were paying their respects on that March day.

Throughout the ceremony, during which history professor Pavol Mestan and the Israeli Consul in Slovakia spoke, Edith mostly held her composure.

But as she looked up to register the number of people honouring her and the girls, laying wreaths and many saying a small prayer, she let out a quiet cry and lament.

The generations after the war have to pay for the sins of their forefathers. It’s terrible — they had nothing to do with the Nazis or the camps but they are the ones that are now filled with regret.

Edith Grosman

Addressing the group Edith said, if unleashed, hate will lead to evil deeds.

“It is up to you to bring up your children and your grandchildren in such a way that they will not have to be standing like you, honouring the dead,” Edith said. “I wish you strength to learn to never to hate.”

“Hate is the most terrible evil that led to this,” she said, pointing at the pictures of the holocaust victims, survivors like her and the murdered girls of the first transport.

Professor Mestan said it’s impossible to grasp the horrors of the death camps and persecution of the Jews during the war.

“The more we think about this Jewish catastrophe, the Holocaust, a catastrophe of all humanity, the less we understand it,” Professor Mestan said. “Thousands of books have been written on this theme. Philosophers, psychologists, and historians and even neurologists have given us some great work but the mind will not grasp it. How could this happen?”

He said now the study of the Holocaust is more careful, circumspect and inquisitive but Holocaust deniers walk among us.

He added even in the Slovakian parliament there are those that make attempts at revisionism — people who make it their mission to deny history.

Avital Gershon, Israeli consul in Slovakia, said, for the same reasons Ms. Grosman and Mr. Mestan emphasized, educating all generations of what hatred can lead to is imperative.

“We must…educate our generation and the next generation to eliminate violence and anti-Semitism from society,” Ms. Gershon said.

“We are here for the memory of these women who were murdered and in the memory of 6 million Jewish people who were killed in a brutal and inhuman way — people robbed of their right to live.”