Jerusalem (special)--There are two important ways that people who did not live through the 
Holocaust try to grasp it--through the numbers and through the photographs.  Both are 
inadequate.   Worse, in some cases, they perpetuate one of the objectives of the nazis: 
dehumanizing their victims. 

In a powerful appeal last month to the Shalom ‘98 Mission of the United Jewish Federation 
of San Diego County, Rachel Korazim, an educator on the staff of Israel’s Yad Vashem 
Memorial, urged people to look beyond the numbers and the “bad pictures” and to try to 
recapture the memories of the Jews who perished in the Shoah. 

“Imagine a Jewish family...before the war has started,” she urged the visiting San Diegans.  “They don’t know that the war is going to start. You only know a day later... A day before you don’t. ...So they have a dinner.  They take a picture.  The dinner table looks so beautiful, and Joseph the bar mitzvah boy looks so smart.  ‘We love the picture so much, we will be generous--why don’t we make a few extra copies and send it on to Aunt Sarah in Dallas and maybe to cousin Moshe in San Diego?’”  Such photographs, she said, which still may be in family photo albums in communities that did not perish, are recoverable.  “We must make an effort to remember life as

Rachel Korazim

it was,” she exhorted.  For it is photographs of pre-Holocaust Jewish life that really tell the story of the Shoah--that tell something of the people whose lives were snatched from the world.

The other photographs--the ones that everyone thinks of when they think of the Holocaust--tell stories that the nazis wanted to tell, or which the Allied troops which liberated the camps wanted to tell. None of the photos tell the story Jews and other victims need to tell--that every one of the persons who died in the Holocaust was a unique individual with a rich heritage. 

“You need to think whose eyes are behind the camera,” Korazim said.  “Who is taking the 
pictures?  Who has the ability to walk with a camera in hand in a ghetto or in a death camp? 
... They  do.  It is not a mommy taking pictures of her children. If she had a camera, she already sold it for bread long ago.   And they  have an agenda.  In the case of Terezin...at least for one single day, they brought in photographers, made a sham coffee shop, a sham park, a sham theatre and put on a sham soccer game.  They took a picture of all that--used the pictures in an advertisement for a film called Hitler Gave the Jews a Town, and the day after all the participants in the picture were on the train to Auschwitz.  The coffeeshop was no more. 

“On other occasions, pictures are used thoughtfully for the future,” Korazim added.  “We know that from the speeches of nazi propaganda people. They were going to prove to the world that they did a universally humanistic service; they were cleansing the world of this vermin. If that is your agenda, you are taking a certain kind of picture.” 

Korazim turned to her friend Rebecca Newman, a San Diegan who serves as the national campaign chair of UJA’s Women Division, and asked her rhetorically, “Would you hope that in a bad situation that you could hold onto who you are....like washing your face, laundering your underwear, combing your hair, being who you are?  Even if maybe you had to starve, wouldn’t it be important that you have soap?” Newman nodded agreement. “Yes,” said Korazim, “for a while at least.” 

Turning back to the rest of the 90-member San Diego delegation, who were joined by a smaller delegation from Dallas, Korazim continued: “If a nazi photographer comes to her ghetto, does he take her picture? No way. She might....arouse some sympathy. He doesn’t want that. So what am I saying? That the pictures are false? No, they are true. 

But next to them, there are other pictures which are not recorded. The struggle to live another day, of not letting go, of keeping up for the sake of your wife, for the sake of your children, for the sake of your father.” 

(After returning to San Diego from the Shalom ‘98 Mission, I had the opportunity to watch the Roberto Benigni movie Life is Beautiful , in which a father, using humor and imagination, tries to shield his son from the reality of their incarceration in a death camp.   Holocaust survivor Gussie Zaks later told me she was horrified by the fictional film and by people in the audience laughing at the Holocaust.  But, thinking of Korazim’s talk, I suggested to her that maybe Benigni had done a service.  Even though his account was fictional, he made us focus on a single family, and realize that they had a history and a legacy; that they were not simply faceless victims.   A story like this one, perhaps not so dramatic, nor so humorous, but one of uncommon bravery for the sake of a child, very well might have been “one of the pictures which are not recorded.”) Korazim said just as the nazi photographs had a point of view, so too did those taken by the Allied forces.  General Dwight D. Eisenhower directed Allied photographers to document every atrocity, so that the nazis could be brought to trial for their barbarism. The pictures accomplished that necessary goal. 

But-- “I want to make this point with your permission, even at the cost of causing you some pain,” Korazim said. “Excuse me.” She asked us to imagine that a parent of ours is lying in the hospital, dying, and that one of our children asks “when can I go see grandma?” 

“You will answer, maybe choking, ‘you know what dear....I would rather that you didn’t.... because I would like you to remember her as she used to be.’ This is something we do for two reasons: we want to protect the young one....but also we want to protect the memory of the older persons as they used to be,” Korazim said. 

“The Holocaust victims did not get that act of generosity from us. Their pictures were taken 
at the worst moments in their lives and this is how they come down in our memory, and we 
neglect to remember that the year before, six months before, sometimes a day before, they 
were still businessmen in a suit, with a briefcase, with their hair combed and their fingernails done, and that they spoke fluent Polish, Czech, German, Yiddish, French....and when you look at them, you forget...that they did not choose to look that way.” 

Besides the pictures, there were the numbers. Especially that number, Korazim said. You 
know which one it is. Six Million. 

“We have been taught because of the enormity of the number to deal with the Holocaust 
mainly through numbers,” Korazim said. “And I think it has done something to us--I know 
that it has done something to me. ...You open a book of history, any book, and you open to 
the page with the tables-- you know the tables, the number of victims in each country that 
are arranged, normally, by size, so forever on the top of it you will find Poland with 3 million 
(murdered Jews), and then you go one below and there is the Soviet Union....Your eyes go 
down the list and you reach the bottom and it says Denmark, and if you are not a total 
tzaddik, for a split second you might have the following thought: “So, it wasn’t too bad in 
Denmark.” 

“It was horrible there!” Korazim exclaimed. “Five hundred people were killed for the mere 
fact that they were born something.  ‘Yes, but don’t be flippant here; you know what we are 
talking about as compared to Auschwitz,’ she quoted an imaginary detractor. 

She responded: “We have internalized it! We have accepted Auschwitz as our yardstick to 
horror.  And anything less....look at the Survivors, the ones who spent four years in hiding. 
When they speak in public, they will say, ‘Oh, I am not a real Survivor; I was not in the 
camps.’ They themselves scale themselves on the nazi scale of horror.” 

Korazim said she once gave a lecture in Montreal about the Holocaust to an audience of 
Jews and non-Jews. At the end of the session, she said, a gentleman in the audience said although she had used the number six million he had heard “that it was only five and a half million.” 
She said that after counting to ten to calm herself, “I gave the best professional effort I 
could give. I told him that the scholars say this -- that these are from German sources, 
which for some reason are supposed to be more trustworthy than the Jewish sources.  I 
said that no matter which sources, they always come to six million.” 

The educator says now she wished she had stopped her answer there. However, “I had to 
address the issue, so I said the following: ‘You know what, sir, for the purpose of what we 
are doing here this morning, does it really matter if it was six million as I said, or five and a 
half million as you heard? All I want to do is have you understand the nature of the thing: 
the pursuit after every last child or woman...as long as you understand the nature of the 
thing.” 

She was satisfied with her answer until the break when a woman came up, and said “the 
half million that you gave up maybe included my mother?” 

“And suddenly it dawned on me,” Korazim said. “There are 500,000 differences (between 6 
million and 5 1/2 million) and every single one is someone’s mom or dad, and a person who 
matters. They are total 100 percent human beings. I gave up a Jewish community that is 
larger than San Diego’s Jewish community and Dallas’s Jewish community combined.  I 
was ready, flippantly, in one sentence to make the point to give up a community that was 
five times as big as the (Jewish) people in San Diego. It can happen to us when we are 
trained to deal with the Holocaust through numbers.” 

Korazim challenged her audience to name one of the Six Million. 

We all knew names like Anne Frank and Hannah Senesh, because of the books and stories 
that have been told about them. Some of us knew of relatives who had died, but most of us 
did not remember their names. At best we could say something like “my grandmother’s 
sister” or “cousins” but we could not tell the name, nor anything about the person. And, 
according to Korazim, we were not unlike any other group to whom she has lectured. 
The lecturer asked us, in the future, not to be content with the numbers, but to learn a 
name, and better yet, to learn about the life of that person. 

I thought about Korazim later when I was reading a book that had been written by a friend of 
Zelda Goodman, the chair of the recent San Diego Jewish Book Fair. At the Mercy of 
Strangers: Growing Up on the Edge of the Holocaust  by Suzanne (Bamberger) Loebl told 
the tale of how she survived in Belgium by posing with forged documents as a Christian 
domestic worker. Hers was the story of trying to live as normally as she could, while fearing 
discovery at any minute.  The sub-title of her book indicates that what Korazim says is true: 
we have internalized the standard of Auschwitz as our index of suffering. Constantly in 
fear for her life, forced to misrepresent her religion, Loebl thinks of herself as living only on 
the “edge” of the Holocaust. 

Korazim’s request to us that day was to learn one name. Thanks to Loebl’s book, I was 
able to learn the name of David Seligman. On page 67, Loebl wrote: “None of our close 
friends complied with the German summons (to report Aug. 15, 1942, to a camp in Malines, 
Belgium).  One exception was David Seligman.  He had left Germany only in 1939, his Gentile wife having divorced him.   Alone and destitute, this sweet forty-five-year-old man befriended us.  He was extremely grateful to my mother for her hospitality and was especially fond of my young sister.  In spite of my mother’s entreaties, David left for Malines. We never heard of him again.”