Every year prior to Holocaust Memorial Week, my synagogue conducts a vigil in which we read the names of Jewish children from France whom the Nazis deported in cattle car convoys to Auschwitz and other death camps. Their identities are known to us almost exclusively from lists the Nazis meticulously compiled, which were later confiscated by Allied forces. The lists were documented by Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, renowned Nazi hunters and Holocaust historians who published them, first in French, then in an English language volume by New York University Press, entitled French Children Of The Holocaust. The book, nearly nineteen hundred pages long, lists the names, ages, addresses, and deportation locations of more than eleven thousand French Jewish children, some of them as young as two and a half. It also contains a large collection of pre-war photos of them, preserving the last images of their individuality as young people who were once alive and free. Serge Klarsfeld once remarked that to preserve their memories most appropriately, he would have produced a book eleven thousand pages long, if he could have.
We recently held our vigil with the simple and dignified understatement that has marked our memorial for many years. Every twenty minutes, from 6 AM until 6 PM on the Sunday after Passover, volunteers entered the quiet of our sanctuary and slowly read the names of those children who would have otherwise been condemned to namelessness. We used no elegies or liturgy of grief and mourning, though our community does remember the dead through music and liturgy at other times during that Week. As one person would come to the end of his or her reading, another person would come up to the reader’s table to continue calling out names. Other than that brief overlap of readers in the rotation, each of us stood alone. We would mostly stumble over the children’s French and German names, as if stumbling over their bodies, outlining with our voices their fading, ghostly remains.
Early that morning, I took my place at the reader’s table and began my part in the rotation. I view the Holocaust through very personal lenses, not only as a general assault on humanity but on my specific humanity as a Jew, as well. Nonetheless, as I proceeded, I felt a familiar numbness setting in, brought on by that emotional morphine which helps us to separate ourselves temporarily from human realities too horrible to fully confront. I found myself growing more disturbed by the almost robotic casualness with which I, or anyone, could read the names of babies butchered by anti-Semitic monsters, as if they were nothing more than items on a grocery list.
That moment of profound disconcertment made me aware of just how critical an act of human defiance it is to read these children’s names out loud. The average German internalized and acted upon Hitler’s racist ideology that Jews and other minorities were subhuman. On those convoy lists, each precious child’s life was reduced by the Nazis to the name, origin and age of a repulsive piece of junk to be shipped off, out of sight and memory of decent citizens of the master race. Paradoxically, by preserving the bare bones of personhood of each of these little ones, the Nazis provided us with a fragmentary yet relentless impetus to protest against their brutality: one that puts flesh on the children’s bones, breathes a tiny bit of life back into them, and retrieves, if only for a second, the individual, dignified narrative that belonged to each life.
By objectifying and despising an entire group of human beings, racism cuts a quick path to state sponsored persecution and genocide. I know that I cannot bring back any of these murdered children. Yet reading and remembering that each of them was once fully alive, I am doing something, however small, to resist that evil human impulse which sent them to their deaths.
Dan Ornstein is rabbi at Congregation Ohav Shalom and a writer living in Albany, NY.
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