In honor of Yom HaShoah. This essay was originally written for the Holland and Knight Holocaust Remembrance Project.
There is a number that is carved into the stone of memorials, sealed in black lettering in history books and burned into the memories of Jews worldwide. It is a number that has come to symbolize the devastation brought about by the Holocaust, a favorite target both of its deniers [1] and those most committed to preserving the memory of the Shoah [2]. It is a number that represents a tragedy of inconceivable scope and unimaginable horror.
In the early years of Hebrew school, when asked “How many Jews died during the Holocaust?”, I could quickly and easily provided the answer of six million. If the question were phrased slightly differently, and I were asked instead “How many people died during the Holocaust?” I would have given a similar answer, tentatively (with the detachment a number too large to imagine allows) a couple million more. It would be an answer given without the same certainty, an answer nobody taught me. My answer was to the wrong question, and the number I learned, in both Jewish classrooms and secular ones, was far too small.
Great, then, was my horror to learn that the Jews were not the only victims of the Holocaust, that Mennonites like those in my father’s family had been persecuted just as were mother’s Jewish family, and that there were more, millions and millions more, than I had ever known. I was shocked to learn that ordinary German, Polish and Russian people had died alongside Jews in the concentration camps; shocked to learn that Josef Mengele, whom I associate even more than Hitler with the inhumanity of the Holocaust, saved the most ghastly of his experiments for Romani children [3].
I can write at great length and with great passion about the horrors of the Holocaust; I can summon, with all the words I possess to describe destruction and hopelessness, the images of prisoners forced to dig their own graves and of human ashes falling like snow over the camps; but as long as I remember a Holocaust of six million, those gas chambers and graves are occupied only by my people, and all of my writing is dishonest.
Throughout my life there has always been an Israel - I have only ever seen a Jewish people with a vital population; rebounded, victorious, but I understand now how precious and extraordinary this fact is. I understand how lucky I am that the Jews are still here to speak up.
As a Jew I have an obligation to tell the full story. My generation is the last that will ever know survivors, and we are bound to keep the Holocaust’s memory alive and speak for its dead. If we are the ones to make sure that the remembrance, history and lessons of the Holocaust be passed to a new generation, then we must ensure that the remembrance we pass on is the whole truth. We must remember and speak for all the dead. To forget, or worse ignore the others is ultimately to dishonor the memory of our own; it is to diminish in scale the atrocity we have sworn to make the world remember forever.
This is the truth: as many as five hundred thousand Romanies, nearly half the population, died at the hands of the Nazis [4]. 3.3 million Russian prisoners of war, over half of those interned, were murdered by the third Reich [5], as were numerous German political prisoners, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons and 1.9 million Poles [6]. The gas chamber, before its widespread adoption in death camps, was used to exterminate some two hundred fifty thousand disabled members of the German community, among them five thousand children [7]. And in addition to all these, never forgotten, are the six million Jews.
There are groups that object to the use of the term “Holocaust” to refer to anything but the slaughter of those Jews during the Second World War [8], but this is a terrible mistake. That name represents all the atrocities of the war, and to deny the other eleven and a half million as part of the Holocaust is to participate in a similar kind of revisionist history as those who deny its existence. It is to refuse to count nearly two thirds of the dead on the same kind of technicality with which they discount our six million.
Numbering all seventeen and a half million, though, is more important even than simply maintaining the honesty of the historical record. If we do not count all the dead, then we have missed entirely the lesson of the Holocaust, and have diluted the promise of “never again.” We owe it to the memory of the victims to teach the full history to everyone. What is desperately needed, in the community at large but especially within the Jewish community, is to remember a Holocaust of fully seventeen and a half million.
But to give full recognition to the victims we must take an even broader view, and understand the parallels to our own time. Otherwise we continue to see the Holocaust as something that happened to our white-skinned, brown-haired ancestors and so miss the Holocaust that was Rwanda and the Holocaust that is Darfur. Genocide is still happening, and the world’s failure to act in Cambodia and in Africa stems in part from a vision of the past horror that is too narrow, and does not allow us to see those others’ death and ours as the same. My generation must understand, rather, that Armenia and Poland and Cambodia and Rwanda and Darfur are equally hideous blots on the record of history. We must be made aware of the fact that we have failed in our sworn task, that it is happening again and this time we, too, are turning a blind eye and again refusing to count these dead among the victims of genocide. And if we do not acknowledge them, then we can never do anything to help them. Any effort to fight genocide must begin with a complete understanding of those past, and we must begin by understanding each and every one of the Holcaust’s victims.
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