How many Jews were killed in the Holocaust? About six million.
How many more Jews would be alive today had their ancestors not been killed 70 years ago? Far, far more. It’s scary to consider how many more.
Schindler’s List is an extraordinary movie for many reasons. It closes with the faces of the actors, survivors, and their children. The 1200 Jews who Oskar Schindler saved grew into 6000 by the film’s release about twenty years ago. All I can do is speculate: with that fivefold growth, the six million Jews would be over 30 million people today. The Nazis brutally murdered not only six million Jews and others, but their children and grandchildren who would never be born.
Likewise, Schindler saved not just 1200 Jews but their future families for all time. For this reason, Isaac Stern – Schindler’s right hand – gives him a ring at the end and says that it has been engraved with Hebrew from the Talmud: “Whoever saves one life saves the world in kind.” Each person is a world. Like Adam and Eve, each person is the top of a limitless family tree.
Studying and commemorating the Holocaust presents an unavoidable tension. Of course we have to focus on its unprecedented enormity and consider six million. What does six million even look like? This question was at the center of a remarkable documentary called Paper Clips. One rural community without diversity embarked on a school project in which they studied the Holocaust and collected paper clips from anyone and everyone in order to grasp the idea of six million. After a slow start, they found wild success and collected over 29 million paper clips (frighteningly close to my 30 million estimate of total Jewish lives lost). It’s a wonderful project, but it hurt me to see all the paper clips piled up in stacks. Because each clip represented a unique soul. When we highlight the total scale, we focus on a number instead of the individual humanity of each person.
The other approach is to emphasize the individual. It’s for this reason Schindler’s List focuses on a list of individuals, all with real names. In fact, the movie’s opening English word is “Name.” Yet when we highlight the individual stories alone, we lose sight that the Holocaust was so devastating precisely because so many individuals were lost.
Today, during Yom HaShoah, let us commemorate both six million and one: the former to mark the total devastation; the latter to mark the individual whose singular life – and that of their future family – was snuffed out. May their memories be for a blessing.
Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi Alex Freedman