My sense of horror and sadness from the Holocaust was renewed by watching the video Never Again, Never Again from My Two Cents Worth. How do your really mentally process the fact that six million people were systematically murdered? I cannot comprehend how a government program, even of a dictatorial tyrant, seeks to exterminate an entire people resulting in the deaths of six million people.
Other despots like Stalin might have been responsible for the deaths of more people than the Nazis. And Stalin's quote that "One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic." might indicate how such a horror can happen. Once you remove the value as a unique person from an individual and just categorize him or her as part of a group based on race, religion, or some other factor, I guess it makes it possible for those carrying it out to rationalize it. The very thought is sickening. Clearly the Nazis were able to dehumanize their victims so they could carry out the demonic orders.
The video brings home the individual tragedies as you look at each face. Each one of those six million victims was an individual with a life, hopes, dreams, and his or her own story just like every other one of us. Each was loved by his or her own family and friends. Each was valuable as an individual entitled to the right to live a life to its fullest and that basic right was denied by a nation that determined that all members of a given people were not entitled to any rights, not even the right to life.
Each of us is valuable as an individual human being because of who we are, not because we are a member of a certain race or religion or any other group with which we identify. It is our own uniqueness as a human being, that very individuality, that makes each of us worthy to be valued.
