Visualizing Jews who perished in the Holocaust

It difficult to imagine that it has only been 65 years, less than your average person’s lifetime and mere three decades before I was born, since an estimated 6 million Jews, among them over 1.2 million children were brutally murdered in the great calamity we call the Shoah, or Holocaust. These deaths comprised two-thirds of European Jewry and one-third of world Jewry. Just let this sink in for a moment – every third Jewish person that lived in the world 65 years ago was murdered! Some of my own relatives perished in extermination camps of Poland and some while fleeing Nazi advance into Ukraine in 1941. Most of the Jews in my own town were subjected to mass executions by shooting. Miraculously, my grandmother, who carried a baby in her womb (my uncle) was able to escape on a train in the nick of time under heavy bombardment, but her sister perished on that very same train. Such a large number of extinguished precious Jewish souls is very hard to grasp in one’s mind. It’s even harder to imagine that this mass murder of the Jewish people happened in the span of only 4 years, a mere 1460 days.

I have decided to create a visual representation, probably the first of its kind online, that would illustrate and perhaps help bring closer the reality and enormity of this tragedy. Click “Read more…”  and scroll down to see the graphic (and be sure to scroll all the way to the very bottom of the illustration).

Each of the 6,000,000 tiny human shapes represents someone’s wife, husband, father, mother, daughter, son, grandfather, grandmother, sister, brother, grandson, granddaughter, cousin, uncle, aunt, and a friend who were murdered for one simple reason: they were Jews.

You can do something today to help those who survived but still paid an enormous price by losing everything they had, often even their faith in G-d. Support Chevra USA charitable organization that helps bring food, clothing, and medicine to the elderly, impoverished and largely forgotten Jewish survivors of the Shoah.