The Shoah: the Destruction of European Jewry

In the autumn of 5699 (September 1939) Germany invaded Poland, home to more than three million Jews. First came disenfranchisement: the yellow star, confiscation, bans on professions. Then the ghettos—Warsaw, Lodz, Vilna, Kovno, Krakow, Theresienstadt—where tens of thousands died of hunger and typhus. In the summer of 5701, following the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen followed the front lines: mass shootings at Babi Yar near Kiev, Ponary near Vilna, the Ninth Fort near Kovno. In January 5702 the Wannsee Conference turned annihilation into state policy, and the death camps began operating—Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau.

By the spring of 5705 some six million had been murdered, among them a million and a half children. Whole worlds vanished: the shtetls of Lithuania, Volhynia, Galicia and Podolia, the hasidic courts, the yeshivot, the libraries, the dialects and melodies. Communities six and seven centuries old ceased to exist within weeks.

Jewish tradition offers no explanation and does not attempt one. What remains is memory, names, and the duty to continue: Yad Vashem has now gathered roughly five million names, so that each victim has a name and not a number.