Six million. Six million Jews who were killed during the Holocaust. It’s an unfathomable number, meant to provoke a sense of overwhelming bewilderment. As a kid growing up, going to Jewish day school my entire life, I can’t remember the first time I heard the number. Six million seems likes it has been forever ingrained in my consciousness—if I hear the number used in a different context, my gut reaction is to associate it back to the Holocaust. I can rattle off the names of the concentration camps, throw down the dates of the Nuremberg Laws, Blitzkrieg, Anschluss, and provide some harrowing (and true) stories. Some would say this proves the success of the Holocaust education—I am another piece of living proof of this horrifying period of human history and will ensure that it will happen, as the refrain always goes, “Never Again.” But is it really working?
For approximately the last 13 years of my life, like I did just yesterday, I have observed Holocaust Memorial Day. Unfortunately, for about 11 or 12 of them I have sat silently in my seat, unable to feel anything, praying for the tears to come, and feeling horrible with myself, like a monster, when they don’t. “What is wrong with me?” I always wondered. I know now that I was far from the only kid sitting unfeelingly on a middle school gym floor during a school-wide memorial service that invariably involves the lighting of candles, reading of war-time poetry, and pictures of survivors. I understand the importance of educating further generations about the Holocaust, that memory must be vigilantly preserved and the urgency of ensuring its relevance, but is there such a thing as too much education? Have I been educated to the point of saturation, that now as a young adult, when I actually have the capacity to try to meaningfully process the events of 1939 to 1945, nothing seems as new as when I, as a 5-year-old, first encountered the Holocaust? Have I “remembered” myself into numbness?
An attempt to improve Holocaust education must first identify the purpose of the exercises. Is it to honor the murdered and mourn their deaths? To bring the Jewish community together in commemoration of a communal tragedy? To keep alive the promise of “Never Again,” and to stand as bulwarks against future inhumanity? There has been a recent push to end Holocaust memorial services with a plea to “Save Darfur,” as a way to make the promise of “Never Again.” real. However, some recoil at the idea of lumping the Holocaust together with other genocides. As tragic as the genocide in Darfur is, and no matter how high the death toll is, it is (thankfully) far from the number and rate of the Holocaust. And from a certain point of view, this numbers game sounds reasonable, and so the resistance to include Darfur or Rwanda in Holocaust Memorial Day can be understood.
However, this kind of arithmetic is extremely dangerous and narrow. This mathematical logic is eerily reminiscent of the Nazi dehumanization of the Jews, and the other five million non-Jewish “undesirables” killed in the war. The humanity, the personal history, emotions, thoughts, hopes, and dreams of these 11 million were ignored by the Nazis. This made their mass murder all the easier and more systematic. To judge a tragedy by a head count and rationalize emotional responses based on number is to apply similar logic. Death is death is death, and while historical contexts and motivations for the genocide must be recognized, a human life should be mourned unto itself. The Sudanese orphans’ lives aren’t made any less miserable because the death toll of their own genocide hasn’t reached quite as epic proportions. Parents don’t mourn their children less because they were murdered alongside fewer of their brethren. Is the only reason the Holocaust is so important is because of its sheer enormity? Isn’t one Jew killed by the Nazis, one Darfurian killed by the Janjaweed, enough to evoke moral outrage and prompt action?
Perhaps that then should be the message of Holocaust Memorial Day. One life—be it Jewish, Roma Gypsy, Rwandan, or Sudanese—is precious. One life cut short is a tragedy. Don’t send children away with the number six million ringing in their head. Just have them remember the number one.
The author is a Barnard College first-year. She is an associate editorial page editor.