Everywhere I looked in Jerusalem there were names, names of people. Not only streets were people named but names of people were on buildings and sites incongruous to my mind. We aren’t talking about names of historical figures like Paris streets. We aren’t talking about political names like Washington Mutual Bank or Thomas Jefferson Middle School. We are talking about the names of people who built or sponsored or lent their names in some fashion to the infrastructure and microstructure of Israel. These names hung in the periphery of my vision. My fleeting reflection on the practice attributed it to a quirk of culture or some need to recognize one’s contribution to the modernization of Jerusalem. Unusual to be sure. Worth a question of Avi? Not so much.
Then I went to Yad Vashem. And I looked at the faces. Of the men, of the women, of the children. Of the mothers, of the fathers, of the brothers, of the sisters. Of the grandfathers, of the grandmothers, of the aunts, of the uncles. Of the lovers, of the lonely. Of the musicians, of the artists, of the businessmen, of the teachers. Of the faithful, of the secular. Of those at work, of those at play.
And then I watched them murdered in the street. And then I watched them murdered by starvation. And then I watched them murdered by disease. And then I watched them dig their own graves and murdered. And then I watched them murdered by gas.
Then, liberation. And the bulldozers pushed the naked, emaciated bodies into mass graves. Piles of them. And I watched two women pick up the naked shriveled twig of a corpse and carry it, two arms, one leg, one leg dragging along, over to the edge of the trench and with a swing threw it on the pile of limbs, torsos, and skin covered skulls.
Liberated, I found myself in the exhibit of the central database of shoah victims names. One final time I looked at the faces. Only six hundred faces this time. Six hundred faces but these with names. And surrounding me were thousands of volumes of millions of names of the murdered and empty shelves for the unnamed million. And I understood the importance of names.