I Am Not A Number

"I am not a number!"

Rabbi Michael L. Feshbach,

Temple Anshe Hesed, Erie, Pennsylvania

During my junior year in Israel, studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, I took a course on the Holocaust taught by a professor named Ze 'ev Mankiewitz .It was a strange thing, indeed, to take a course on the Holocaust, to take exams and be graded on our knowledge of the mechanisms of death, to write academic papers on the inner workings of hate .It was strange, but it was important. And there is at least one session from that class that will stay with me forever.

We were talking about the guards in the camps. One student raised her hand. "How?" she asked. "How could they have done that?"  There was a very brief silence. And then Dr. Mankiewitz, who is a native of South Africa, told of a trip he had taken to the land of his birth several years after having made Aliyah (moved to Israel).

It was a snowy July night, and he was with friends, after a night at the theater.        Standing near their car in the parking lot was a shivering black child of about seven or eight, in a torn coat. As his friends walked past the boy without even breaking their stride or focusing their eyes, Mankiewitz turned to his friends ... and he realized ... that they simply did not see a human being standing there. They did not even notice, because this boy was not a person to them.

As a classroom is a limited setting, so too is a film. How can a film, a play, a novel, any work of art at all capture the horror of the Shoah, the Holocaust? In scope of course, no matter how many piles of bodies or shoes are shown, it cannot. As any work of art, even in retelling a fact-based story, Schindler’s List, (which is now to be shown without commercial interruption on national television) falls short of that mark. In this film, a high percentage of the characters with whom we become involved survive. This, alone, makes its portrayal of the Holocaust too sugar coated.

But it also probably enables the film to reach and touch such a large audience. Besides, the point of art cannot be to show the full scope and scale of the most sordid story of history. What art can do is show a glimpse of the story, and the most basic building block that allowed this horror to happen.

It can show ... how human beings turn each other into something less than human .It can show the act and the outcome of people treating other people as objects. And this Schindler’s List does as powerfully as any other film I have ever seen in my life.

The balance between human touches and the process of dehumanization is brilliant. A young girl waves: "Good -bye, Jews." Some people reduced to papers, others to ashes. Suitcases carefully packed, then flung aside .A jeweler working on separating out precious metals ... presented with a pile of human teeth. Condos into ghettoes, gravestones into footpaths. The randomness of murder. The futility of hope. A single camera shot into the dark and open eyes of a child, clutching his mother’s skirt. People struggling to figure out the rules ... but in the kingdom of the night, where people are not people, there are no rules to figure out.

But this can only be a Steven Spielberg film ... because the reverse process is shown a well : how, for one man , statistics that are numbers on paper , that are merely cheap labor, true objects in the line of production ... become , to him, real people. Slowly .Gradually But completely.

And in the midst of it all, in an ocean of black and white, are the burning yellow flames of the candles ... and a mysterious red dress.

Never again, we say. But never again what?

It should be never again -- not just to the height of the horror -- but the mundane evil that we can not only see in this film, but also relate to. For there is an evil here that is not just Nazi in nature. It is something we see in our everyday lives.

Never again should we allow any people to treat any other human beings as objects.           Never again should a skater skate that saw her rival as only an object to be clubbed out of the way.

Never again should we Jews, of all people, speak derisively of any other people as a whole group, we who have been the objects of such groupthink. ("Goyim, this" or "shvartzes that", for instance -- how many times have we heard it ... or even said it?) The frustration of our history may make this hard, at times. But we must try.

Not too many years ago, there was a short-lived and extremely popular television series in which everyone was referred to by a number. The show was called "The Prisoner," and the ex-spy was number six. But in the opening sequence of every show, he stood on a beach and waved his hands in frustration and shouted at the sky ... "I am not a number. I am a free man!"

As are we all ... not numbers ... but free men and women. Each one of us ... is a human being ... b 'tzelem elohim, made in the image of the Most High, endowed with divinity, touched by God ... and worthy of respect in life ... and in death. Each one of us a story, each one of us a universe, a whole precious world onto ourselves. It is something that we must not -- that we dare not ever forget. About anyone!

It is not the lesson of the Holocaust. That is too large for a class or a work of art, ungraspable, unfathomable .There is more to the Shoah that just that. It stands out, burning in our minds and our hearts and the face of pure evil itself. But to treat other people as people ... it is, to me, the message of this film, and one of the most important lessons of life.