Wolverines join USC Shoah Foundation leadership program, visiting Washington and Auschwitz-Birkenau on a journey that challenged them to use the platform of college athletics to confront hate, antisemitism, and injustice.
ANN ARBOR, Mich. | For Michigan gymnast Sophie Parenti, the enormity of Auschwitz-Birkenau was difficult to comprehend in statistics alone.
So she started counting her steps.
Over roughly five hours at the former Nazi concentration and extermination camp in Poland, Parenti estimated she took approximately 10,000. In her mind, she began imagining each step as representing one person whose life had been taken.
"And that's just 10,000 people," Parenti said.
The exercise could not capture the full scale of the Holocaust, but it gave the University of Michigan student-athlete a deeply personal way to confront a history that suddenly was no longer confined to textbooks, documentaries or museum exhibits.
"You get there, and you feel the weight," Parenti said. "We step off the bus, and you feel the weight of that place immediately."
For Parenti and fellow Wolverines Jahzara Ranger and Penelopea Gordon, that weight became part of a larger lesson about leadership, responsibility, and what it means to have a platform in college athletics.
Michigan participated for the first time in the USC Shoah Foundation Student-Athlete Global Leadership Program, joining student-athletes from USC and UCLA for an immersive experience in Washington, D.C., and Krakow, Poland.
The journey centered on Holocaust education and confronting antisemitism and hate. But for the Michigan contingent, it also raised a distinctly modern question for college athletes:
What responsibility comes with having a voice?
