Ray Allen first learned about the Holocaust when he was in middle school.

"We read Anne Frank’s diary," he says. "I didn’t know if it was just a story that people told. I didn’t realize it was an actual event until I watched "Schindler’s List" in 1993."

When "Schindler’s List" opened in movie theaters, Ray Allen was a rising star at the University of Connecticut. The Milwaukee Bucks chose him with the fifth pick in the 1996 NBA draft. While the Bucks were on an East Coast road trip in 1998, team owner Herb Kohl invited Allen to join him on a tour of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Allen first visited the Holocaust Museum when he was with the Bucks. (Jonathan Daniel/Allsport)

"And it was scary," Allen says. "The room with the hair, the room with the shoes, it was human. You see the real human side of it. This wasn’t just a museum of wax figures or ideas, it was something that belonged to real people. They were annihilated."

Soon, Ray Allen would encourage his teammates to join him on tours of the Holocaust Museum whenever the Bucks were in Washington to play the Wizards. When he was traded to the Seattle Supersonics, and later to the Boston Celtics, he did the same. Andres Abril, who works with the U.S. Holocaust Museum, remembers meeting Allen almost 10 years ago. He remembers Allen's quiet intensity.

"He doesn’t say a lot," Abril says. "He wanted his teammates to have an experience that was meaningful for them. And so I think he knew that letting it happen was the way to do it."

The Celtics would go on to win the 2008 NBA title. By this time, Allen had established himself as one of the greatest shooters of all time. He picked up another title with the Miami Heat and retired from basketball in 2014.

That meant more time for family and for charity work. And for playing an occasional round of golf with President Obama, who appointed Allen to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council in 2016. Allen wanted to learn about the Holocaust in depth and up close.

"To see and to feel what these people went through," he says. "To put my feet on those grounds."

Trip To Poland

Rabbi Simon Taylor hadn’t even known who Ray Allen was until they met at a fundraiser. But after he heard Allen speak about the Holocaust, Taylor told him he had to go to Poland to learn more in person. Taylor had been to Poland several times. His family on his paternal grandfather’s side had lived there before the war. Most of them were murdered in the Holocaust.

Allen gave an impromptu speech to a school group also heading to Poland to study the Holocaust. (Elan Kawesch)

On April 30, 2017, Taylor and Allen bumped into a large group of school kids who were also traveling to Poland to learn about the Holocaust.

"We got all the kids together in the airport terminal, and Ray spoke to them about how important it is to go to Poland," Taylor says. "And he hadn’t even been himself yet. And then, of course, he fielded a bunch of other questions about basketball as well."

The small delegation consisted of Taylor, Ray Allen and two of his friends. They landed in Poland on May 1. They had planned a three-day trip, and Allen wanted to see all he could. They began at Warsaw ghetto sites. They met nuns at a nearby monastery where hundreds of Jews had been saved from the Nazis. Allen even got to meet a Holocaust survivor.

Moshe Tirosh is the last survivor of the Warsaw Zoo. As a 6-year-old boy, Tirosh and his sister were hidden for weeks in the basement of zookeepers Jan and Antonina Żabiński, who saved hundreds of Jews during the Nazi occupation.

Allen spoke with Moshe Tirosh, a Holocaust survivor who hid at the Warsaw Zoo during the Nazi occupation. (Elan Kawesch)

"And Moshe got to show Ray all around the Zoo — the house, exactly where he hid, the crazy conditions — and explain to him the really gruesome stories of things that he saw and what he went through to survive," Taylor says. "To watch Ray revere this Holocaust survivor, as him being the hero, and to eat up every word that he had to say, reliving his memories from hiding in the Zoo, it was very special."

Visiting Auschwitz

The next day, the group headed to Auschwitz, where over a million Jews were murdered.

"It was freezing," Allen says. "I was dressed from top to bottom, warm, and I can only imagine what the people in the camps felt like wearing only pajamas, and some of them with no shoes and no socks. And people slept on straw. And if you slept on the bottom bunk, you were sleeping on the ground.

"There’s nowhere that you can hide. You’re stripped of any humanity. You could tell how it just would break everybody down."

Ray Allen exploring Auschwitz barracks in May 2017. (Elan Kawesch)

"Ray came out of Auschwitz very moved," Taylor says, "and felt a connection to Auschwitz and the Holocaust that he never had before, however much he had read, and however many museums he’d been to. Standing in those places and seeing with your own eyes, and hearing the stories in the places where they actually happened, is a completely different experience."

"I think it’s a trip that every person should make," Allen adds.

But the trip wasn’t over yet.

"There was a family from this small town that were excavating to extend their house," Taylor says. "And it turned out that part of the foundation of their house was built using Jewish tombstones."