Every once in a while, I wonder what we truly lost in the Holocaust. What art, what science, what medicine, what invention? Who died before curing what disease?
Lair Simon pointed me to this article on Margret and H.A. Rey, the creators of Curious George–who escaped the Nazis by bicycle.
The article made me wonder again: What have we lost due to all those murders?
I wonder how many important things we lost due to all the deaths–the soldiers, the civilians, the victims of the Holocaust–all gone, and their potential, too.
I am reminded of the mishna here,
“Whosoever destroys one life in Israel is as he would destroy the whole world”
As you point out it’s more than losing people, it’s losing everything they would have accomplished, down to the smallest good deed.
I have often thought this about the 1914-18 war. We could have lost Tolkien for a start. Then there were the 5,000 Polish officers murdered in the Katin forest in WW2. So many.
And in these PC days, the use of the word evil is disdained by chattering classes. Idiots, all of them.
World War I destroyed the communities of Judaism in Europe and World War II shaped the course of Judaism today. The religious divide that we have today, the “streams” of Judaism, the very concept of “ultraOrthodox” can be shown to be the result of World War II. The current state of Orthodoxy, for example, has, according to the Rabbi Berel Wein, the result of the fact that a greater percentage of Hungarian Jews survived. Their tendency to rigidity in religious matters has propagated throughout the Jewish world.
The people who became the leading Zionists of the postwar period were not the main Zionist thinkers and activists. Those had remained in Europe to train people and work for Aliya of their communities. As a result, they were trapped by the war. Similarly, the religious Zionist movement was wiped out. Consider the course that the history of the state of Israel might have taken without the war, with the extra millions of people that would have been able to come with their skills and attitudes. The current attitudes of the “ultrasecular”, “antireligious”, or even “antiZionist” left would never have been able to become as established as it has.
I always knew that The Man In The Yellow Hat was a closeted Nazi.
The fact that we will never know what was lost is perhaps the second greatest tragedy of all, the loss itself being the greatest tragedy.