"One death is a tragedy: a million deaths is a statistic," said Joseph Stalin. Unfortunately, this tends to be the truth. Numbers are a useful tool for measuring things that are too big for us to understand in any other way, e.g., how far it is from earth to the sun. But using numbers often blunts the reality of human tragedies.The Yad Vashem site tries to make the victims of the Holocaust something more than just statistics. Its database is an attempt to preserve a memory of as many individual victims as possible.
Browse through the database, and look through some of the individual pages of testimony. What do you find interesting/memorable in these pages?
I looked at three individual pages of testimony; Zili Heinrich, Ryszard Henrik Rozenman and Boris Shukhman. All three were murdered in the Shoah. Zili was twenty year old nurse from Germany (she would have been around my age). Boris was a little boy from Belorussia and Ryszard was a teenager from Poland. The memorable part about the database and the people in it is the fact that they are so ordinary, just like all of us. They had a life, goals and families. But they were singled out and dehumanized. A teenager, a nurse and a little boy. Scrolling through the database I was looking at ordinary people of all ages and occupations. But that is what made it unsettling and so tragic. That genocide is committed by humanity against humanity.
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