Here’s why former Heat star Ray Allen is taking teens to Auschwitz for Thanksgiving

It’s Sunday afternoon and most of the tables are taken at Grown, the airy, hip South Miami health-conscious restaurant owned by former Miami Heat star Ray Allen and his wife, Shannon.

Sitting at a corner table, sipping on a smoothie is the 10-time NBA All-Star, speaking passionately about his fascination for the Holocaust and his 2017 visit to the Auschwitz and Krakow concentration camps in Poland. The trip so deeply moved him that he, along with Judge Marilyn Milian of “The People’s Court,” are helping organize a trip there during Thanksgiving for their families and 15 predominantly non-Jewish high school students from Miami-Dade County.

The five-day program, led by Holocaust educator Aley Sheer, will focus on diversity, prejudice, hatred, racism and genocide. Students will visit Auschwitz camps, gas chambers, museums and have Thanksgiving dinner with Holocaust survivor Sam Peltz of Delray Beach, who will share his courageous story of survival.

Allen’s deep interest in the Holocaust began in 1993, when he was a freshman at the University of Connecticut and watched the film “Schindler’s List” for a class. The movie tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a German member of the Nazi party who saved the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories and bribing Nazi officials.

“I walked out of there with this profound desire to figure out how to make the world a better place,” Allen said. “Schindler was a guy who figured it out. He realized he was saving people’s lives. He knew he was tiptoeing with death. He fought the fight. All the silence helps the haters, helps the oppressor do his job. If everyone in the world watched this movie, they’d get it. Don’t worry about it being Jewish people, white people. Think about it as human beings. One race trying to annihilate another. We’ve seen it far too often.

“I left that movie thinking, `How can I help and make sure this never happens again?’’’

Five years later, while a member of the Milwaukee Bucks, he was in Washington, having lunch with then-team owner Sen. Herb Kohl, a Democrat who represented Wisconsin at the time. He told Kohl he had some time to kill before their flight, and Kohl, who knew Allen’s favorite movie was Schindler’s List, suggested they go to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“We only had two hours, but my jaw dropped walking through that museum,” Allen recalled. “I was learning things and seeing things I didn’t know before. The room with the shoes. I knew I had to go back there because two hours wasn’t enough. When we came back to D.C. the next time, I reached out to the museum. I told my coach I’d love to take the team there. Our flight didn’t get in until 6 p.m., so the museum agreed to stay open late for us. Every single player and staff member who went was deeply, deeply moved.

“I remember them sitting on the benches, getting teary-eyed watching the videos of the survivors’ stories. It’s not about being Jewish or not Jewish. It’s about the human condition and what can happen if we stand by and let hate take over.”

Allen made it his personal mission to expose people to the Holocaust during the rest of his playing days with the Seattle Supersonics, Boston Celtics and the Heat. Whenever his team played road games in Washington, he visited the Holocaust Museum and invited teammates and team staff to join him. In 2016, President Obama appointed Allen to the museum’s board.

“Whenever I show up at a Holocaust event or talk about the museum, people look at me funny and ask, `You’re not Jewish, why do you care?’ Really? So, you have to be Jewish to care about millions of people killed horrifically by another human being?”

He got a similar reaction when he traveled to Puerto Rico in 2017 after Hurricane Maria.

“I went to Puerto Rico when the hurricane hit because a lot of my friends and people in this community are Puerto Rican,” Allen said. “We took food, packed boxes and saw the devastation. When the charter plane landed back in Fort Lauderdale, with Ricky Martin, Jorge Posada, Chayanne, Pudge Rodriguez... a gentleman says to me, `What are you doing going to Puerto Rico? You’re black.”

“This is the problem. We get so tribal. When something happens, `That’s their problem. That’s not our problem.’”

Sheer, the president of Holocaust education program “In Humanity’s Footsteps”, agrees that non-Jews should also learn from what happened in the death camps, which is why he is partnering with Allen and Milian on this Thanksgiving trip.

“People think the Holocaust is just a Jewish thing; it happened primarily to Jews but it’s the most universal of any story we know,” Sheer said. “At Yad Vashem [the Holocaust museum in Israel] they teach that if we only teach Jews about the Holocaust, we’ll have another Holocaust of educated Jews. That’s what is drawing us together to try and take a program idea that we know works — March of the Living, a high school program that is primarily for Jewish teens — and try and do the same with the other 98 percent of the population.”

Milian met Sheer through her family’s longtime involvement with Camp Fiesta, a camp for children with cancer that Sheer co-founded. Like Allen, she has always been interested in the Holocaust and wanted her three daughters and other Miami-Dade young people to get a deeper understanding of it so it will inspire them to eradicate hate.

“It can’t just be Jewish people who never forget,” Milian said.

“The message we want to give is it’s not just education about what happened; it’s to get kids thinking, broadening their minds and understanding the role they can play in stopping hate in their lives,” Milian said. “One thing we’re going to focus on is the bystanders, the people who say, `That’s not my issue, don’t want to get involved, as opposed to the people who chose not to be bystanders. We want kids to become that second kind of person.”

Allen grew up in a military family, and said that helped open his mind from an early age. He spent parts of his childhood in England and Germany, where he lived among kids of all colors and religions. He is deeply committed to helping inner-city, predominantly black schools, and his foundation funds and hosts computer labs at those middle schools every year. He is equally committed to causes of other ethnic groups.

It bothers him when people suggest he is neglecting black causes by visiting Auschwitz and serving on the Holocaust Museum board.

“I didn’t go to Poland as a black person, a white person or a Jewish person,” he explains. “I went as a human being. We get too hung up on all the labels we put on people. We should want all people to care about our issues, not just people who look like us. We are all human, and we need to pay attention to the other genocides taking place in Rwanda, Bosnia and Cambodia.”

In 2017, a New England rabbi named Simon Taylor met Allen at a fundraiser, the two got to talking, and Taylor invited Allen to join him on a trip to Poland. Allen went, along with two friends. They visited Auschwitz, Warsaw ghetto sites and Schindler’s factory. They met nuns at a monastery where hundreds of Jews had been hidden and saved from the Nazis.

They met a family that had found buried Jewish tombstones when they were digging to add onto their house. During World War II, Jewish headstones were stolen and used as construction materials. Allen’s traveling group helped the family take the tombstones to a Jewish cemetery.

One of the most emotional stops was in the small town of Ciepielow, where Allen visited a farmhouse where a non-Jewish family had hidden six Jews under their kitchen floor.

“We walked into the kitchen, looked down into that space and it was tiny and dark,” Allen said. “The people hiding down there could only come out at night. Somebody told on them, and the Germans came and gathered everyone and took them behind a barn and killed them. There were 10 people living in the house, but only nine were there that night, so the Nazis, to fill the quota, took another little boy from next door and killed him, too.”

The one son who was not home that night came home to find his whole family murdered. He grew up and raised his family in that house. Allen got to meet his grandson, who lives there now.

When he got back, he wrote in The Players’ Tribune: “I had seen so many documentaries and films on Auschwitz, but nothing really prepares you for being there... you’re standing in these rooms where so much death has taken place and your mind is trying to come to terms with all that’s happened in this space. One question keeps repeating over and over and over in your mind: How can human beings do this to one another?

“This is not history. This is humanity. This is now. This is a living lesson for us as a people.”

And it is this lesson Allen, Milian and Sheer are eager to share with their children — Allen has five, Milian three — and the 15 Miami-Dade students who are paying $2,450 to accompany them on the Nov. 27 to Dec. 2 trip. They are keeping it small this first year, but hope with sponsors to be able to open up the program to more students in the coming years.

“Our ultimate goal is to create upstanders, not bystanders,” Sheer said. “I don’t care, any participant, whatever their race, creed, national origin, body type, sexual preference, everybody faces hate. The overarching theme is what can we do to unite all kinds of people. Where we’re taking them, Auschwitz, that is the end result of hate. When hate goes unchecked, you get death. We’re taking them to teach them what hate can do.”

For more information, go to ihfootsteps.org

This story was originally published September 25, 2019 at 1:46 PM.