Victims of the Holocaust
Introduction
Following my visit to Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, I wrote the following:
"In Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau it is estimated that 1.1 million people perished at the hands of the Nazis. On visiting the site, one is made all too aware of this horrific toll, through the piles of shoes, suitcases, hair and other belongings taken from those who died there. The Nazis' patent lack of humanity and the subsequent dehumanization of its victims, has left us not only with a death toll too large to comprehend, but a collection of personal artefacts - now massed into single objects - from which we struggle to find the men, women and children to whom they once belonged."
We struggle in effect, to see the individuals, but among the 1.1 million dead are 1.1 million names: people - individuals - who lived, just as we live now.
It was my original intention to look solely at the victims of the Auschwitz camps, but after studying the Holocaust further and visiting sites such as Majdanek and Bełżec, I decided to broaden the scope of any research to include all victims of the Holocaust. Of course, this at once presents me with difficulties, not least because an estimated 6 million people died during the Nazi terror. However, such is my involvement in this subject, I would hope that any work that I produce would be seen as made to the memory of all those who suffered and died during these terrible years.
My aim in this part of the site therefore, just as it is with much of my work on the Holocaust, is to 'find' the individuals among the 6 million dead. That does not mean I am looking to write up the lives of those who died (although reading any such material is vital in this endeavour: it's also worth remembering here that those who survived - such as Primo Levi and Jean Améry - are also victims) but rather to understand what makes us individual, what it is that makes us human beings. To find the individuals we have to know first what it is that makes us so.
One of those things is memory, whether we are remembering the victims of the Holocaust or a moment in our own lives. And one of the ways we keep our memories close, is through photographs (see next page).