One in Six Million
In the cold, dark days of December, I was blessed to co-staff a weeklong trip to Poland to visit sites of pre-Holocaust Europe. The trip was made up of Jewish college students from across the country, including a group from Rabbi Akiva Yanez’s Olami campus programs at UC and Miami of Ohio.
Why, you may be wondering, do I consider it a blessing to travel to a country that is known as the world’s largest Jewish graveyard? Why go to Poland at all? Why not leave history behind in the eerie forests and bleak towns of Central Europe and travel to sunny Florida instead?
We go to Poland, I explain to students, because it is important. It is important to understand what it looks like when anti-Semitism spirals completely and utterly out of control. It is important to stand and listen to the silent echoes of buildings that once teemed with Jewish life. It is important to tour cemeteries that bear witness to a world that was. It is important to speak about the unspeakable, to be silent where there are no words, to learn to articulate, on some level, the enormity of what happened, to develop the skills that enable us to pass these messages on to the next generation. This is why we go.
To understand the enormity of six million is, of course, impossible. If you were so motivated, you could actually count to the number itself. It would take a while, but you could do it. But even if you counted to six million, you could never, in six million years, understand the implication of six million of our Jewish ancestors being murdered. Six million lives. Six million futures. Six million worlds. Six million. Six million. Six million.
On the site of the former death camp Treblinka are 17,000 stones, each representing a community that was lost. Seventeen-thousand is a lot more fathomable a number to the human brain than six million. But when you’re talking about communities that a mere 85 years ago overflowed with Jewish life and spirit, communities that were wiped off the map, it’s a very large number.
Of the 17,000 stones at Treblinka, there is one that calls to me every time I go: the stone that represents the city of Bialystok. Before the war, Bialystok was a thriving center of industry and culture, with more than 90,000 inhabitants, of which at least 40 percent were Jewish.
One of these Jewish inhabitants was a man by the name of David Sznajder. David, my great-grandfather, was a family man who cared deeply about his people and about his community. His oldest son, Abraham, my grandfather, was able to leave Poland in the days before madness took over. My great-grandfather, however, was not so fortunate.
On Friday, June 27th, 1941, David was forced inside the Great Synagogue together with 1,000 friends, neighbors, and family members. All exits were hermetically sealed before the building was doused with gasoline and set on fire. There were no survivors.
David is my one in six million. When I go to Poland — when I go to Treblinka — I stand next to the Bialystok stone and speak about my great-grandfather. He’s my one, and his wife Ita — my step-great-grandmother — and his children Leibel, Esther, Eliyahu, Eliezer, Mendel, and Judith are my two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight. My great-aunt Chana is nine.
I’ve been to Poland many times, and every time I go, I unravel another layer of understanding of those times and of the immensity of the tragedy that befell our people. When I’m there, I can do so in a way that reading a book, watching a movie, or even hearing a survivor speak cannot. As much as I would love to be on a Miami beach for winter break, my soul craves meaning. And in the land where millions of our ancestors lived and thrived for centuries, where millions were obliterated for the simple crime of belonging to a holy nation, there is so much meaning to absorb.
We are blessed to live in a community that cares deeply about Jewish memory and continuity, and regardless of whether Poland is in your future travel plans or not, there is something each of us can do to honor those whose lives were taken: seek out our own one in six million. Find one person, and then learn about him or her, connecting to the beauty of his or her life and doing what we can to bring light into a world once overtaken by so much darkness.
Am Yisrael chai.