"One death is a tragedy: a million deaths is a statistic," said Joseph Stalin. Unfortunately, this tends to be the truth. Numbers are a useful tool for measuring things that are too big for us to understand in any other way, e.g., how far it is from earth to the sun. But using numbers often blunts the reality of human tragedies.The Yad Vashem site tries to make the victims of the Holocaust something more than just statistics. Its database is an attempt to preserve a memory of as many individual victims as possible.
Browse through the database, and look through some of the individual pages of testimony. What do you find interesting/memorable in these pages?
The database is a great idea to combat Joseph Stalin's statistic quote. I was hoping to see more detailed stories as that would provide an even more connection to humanity. That these names were people with feelings, dreams, goals...
ReplyDeletePerhaps some stories are in the database and I did not come across one.
Unfortunately I did find a reminder of why a project such as the database is so important; an example of how someone can be forgotten as if they never existed.
Nute Marcu. All that is known of him is the name attached to records of a location. An example of how easy people are lost; found in a site intended to remember.
Matthew Traylor