By: Kate Chaillet
“It’s not six plus zero plus zero, it’s one plus one plus one.” This simple and admittedly obvious statement, spoken by our tour guide at Auschwitz, profoundly hit home for me. I had woken up that morning prepared to be disturbed, scared, broken-hearted, and a number of other painful adjectives that can only be expected when visiting such an evil place. While waves of these emotions did wash over me that day, what really caught me by surprise and knocked me off my feet was how personal the museum at Auschwitz was. The insufficiency of the material I had learned over the years in school about the Holocaust struck me. 6 million Jews. Men, women, and children. Selection. Gas chambers. Crematoriums. 6 million. 6 million.
Before I went to Auschwitz, I knew, of course, that 6 million was a large, titanic of a number, but I was told once by my middle school math teacher that there’s a limit to the number of objects, or people, we can picture in our minds. We can’t even picture one hundred; we don’t stand a chance at 6 million. The exhibits at Auschwitz turned what had previously been an unimaginably large and tragic statistic into individual people. People with families, with jobs, houses, pets. People who complained about their work, who bickered with their spouses, who made lunch for their kids, who cried, who laughed, who hated, and who loved. I guess the way to think about it is like a map of the world. You look at the whole globe, and there are too many lands and lakes and mountains to possibly see and hold in your mind at once. Then you zoom in, and now you can see cities; these are the individual people. There’s too many of them to possibly remember all the names, but the one you’re looking at, there was a whole universe inside that city, that person. They had people they cared about, others they could not tolerate, likes, dislikes, hobbies…they had secret desires and selfish thoughts that burrowed in the corners of their minds. They were perfect and imperfect. They were human, just like you and me.
In retrospect, what continues to haunt me is not the image of the mass graves or the gas chambers, but this one home video of a little girl jump-roping, taken before the war. Her brown curls are escaping her barrettes, her smile is sparkling and innocent. She has not a care in the world; all the world is spread out at her fingertips, and she can not wait to explore. I felt numbness when I stood in the gas chambers or sat before the ominous Dome of Ashes at Majdanek, but before this girl I felt pain.
Another revelation I had as we stood there, so insignificant and so broken in that video room, connected to something my English teacher said in class this past year. We were studying Native American literature, and she reminded us that the Native American story did not start when the European settlers invaded their land; they had had full centuries of relative prosperity before calamity struck. I think that is something we also must apply to the victims of the Holocaust. In the video room at Auschwitz I, the people were not dressed in blue in white stripes, with emaciated figures and hopeless expressions. They were healthy, happy human beings, and all I could think was, I wish I could have known them.
The question I keep coming back to is, how are we supposed to remember all of them? Not just their names, but their stories. When I hold them in my prayers at night, how do I honor and remember each one? They don’t deserve to be nameless, faceless numbers. We must spread their names, their stories, and both their beautiful lives and their tragic ends to corner of the world. We must uphold their memory, and spread a little kindness everywhere we go.