{"id":1839,"date":"2021-01-28T14:06:16","date_gmt":"2021-01-28T14:06:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thewitnessexet.wpengine.com\/?p=1839"},"modified":"2021-02-17T10:25:03","modified_gmt":"2021-02-17T10:25:03","slug":"1839","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/?p=1839","title":{"rendered":"Looking past the number of the Holocaust"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \t<\/i> Read Time:<\/span>4 Minute, 4 Second <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n

Over six million lives were taken in the Holocaust, every\none of those lives an individual with their own thoughts, feeling and hopes for\ntheir future which were cut tragically short. In place of the lives and opportunities\nthese people could have had, we are instead left with their stories,\npotentially some of the most important stories to share, so that we can keep\nthe promise of \u2018never again\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking at the Holocaust, you can choose to focus either on quantitative or qualitative facts. To put the Holocaust into numbers<\/a>, while the precise start date for the Holocaust is disputed, over 100 Jews were murdered in Kristallnacht in 1938, before the war had even started, with those people being guilty of no crime except being Jewish and not fitting Hitler\u2019s image of the Aryan ideal. After Hitler had decided on \u2018the final solution\u2019, over 500,000 Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen throughout the German occupation of the Soviet Union. When looking at the combined impact of events like these and the other components of the Holocaust such as death camps, 6,000,000 Jews were murdered. This was over a third of Jews at the time and the Jewish population has still not recovered to the pre-war numbers<\/a> by some counts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, it would be wrong to take the lives of millions and\nsynthesise all of the individual people into one homogenous mass when every\nsingle person had their own experience of the trauma. Looking at such a deeply\npersonal event as the Holocaust so broadly would be to erase the personal\nimpact- it is important to look at the victims of the Holocaust as the people\nthat they were, not as just a small part of a larger number.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zigi Shipper<\/a>,\nfor example, if you just view him as a number, is one\nout of 3.5 million Jews<\/a> who lived in Poland in 1939, facing the threat of Nazi\ninvasion. Looking at him like that, you miss the real ups and downs of the\nfascinating life he has led. Zigi was born in Poland and lived with his grandparents\nafter his parents divorced, with the whole group being moved into a ghetto when\nthe Nazis invaded. After his grandfather died from malnutrition, he was\nselected to be placed in a lorry likely going to a concentration camp. He ran\nbut was eventually taken to a camp when the ghetto was liquidated. He was first\nsent to Auschwitz-Birkenau where he was separated from his family, and then\nsent to various other camps, at one point contracting typhus but being forced\nto keep marching or be killed. Upon liberation, Zigi discovered a letter from\nhis mother who he had not seen since childhood and moved to England to reunite\nwith her. There is no denying that Zigi is so much more than just one out of\n3.5 million.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, even this analysis doesn\u2019t quite grasp the reality\nof those involved in the Holocaust, because it is essential to remember that\nthese people are more than just the Holocaust. Zigi may have faced all of that\ntrauma, but it is important also to think of him as a son to his parents, the\nfather of his child, and the grandfather to his grandchildren. Everyone tied to\nthe Holocaust is a real person with dimensions past just the context of the\nHolocaust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The importance of stories like this lies not in their tragedy, but in the warning they carry and the lessons to be learnt. It is important to not only mourn the losses of the Holocaust but also learn from them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the UK, 1\nin 20 people do not believe the Holocaust even happened<\/a>, showing rising\nlevels of ignorance and disregard for the lived experiences of people like\nZigi. Over in the US, a man was wearing a pro-Holocaust\nhoodie at the Washington protest<\/a>, signalling the rise in antisemitism. In\nChina, Uyghur Muslims are being forced into \u2018re-education\u2019 camps and being subjected\nto horrors like forced\nsterilisation<\/a>. Therefore, there is no denying that people are failing to\nlearn from the lessons of the Holocaust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is through the lens of history that we can come to understand why greater education on the Holocaust is needed and why it is important to look at the Holocaust from a human perspective. The Holocaust is much more than just a timeline of events and numbers, and if we look at it as such, it is all too easy to miss things like the emotional cost of the genocide or how truly in humane it was. Additionally, looking at the Holocaust without acknowledging the emotional aspect makes it too easy to dismiss the rising danger of a repeat of the horrors, allowing the rise of neo-Nazism in the west and ignoring the Uyghur Muslim camps in China.<\/p>\n

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Over six million lives were taken in the Holocaust, every one of those lives an individual with their own thoughts, feeling and hopes <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":1840,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1839\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}