CBC News: World leaders gather for opening of Holocaust museum

CBC News: World leaders gather for opening of Holocaust museum

How many people is six million? An enormous number. There are many entire countries that are smaller. There are vast cities with fewer people. Can the human mind even comprehend loss on that scale? Take the grief a family feels when they lose one person. Now take all that grief and multiply it and multiply it until you have a sea of grief that stretches to the horizon.

It is no wonder there are holocaust deniers. If you're going to try and make the argument that Jews control the world (one of the signature traits of anti-semitism) then you have to drain that sea of grief. Why? Because nobody could possibly believe that anyone who controlled the world could ever willingly endure that much pain.

Something like this museum is perhaps the best way to combat holocaust denial. It breaks down that impossibly large number and tells the stories one story at a time. And telling this tale one story at a time is the best way to restore dignity to people who had their dignity unrighteously taken from them by unspeakable evil. Telling stories like Hanna's Suitcase makes the tale about the innocent, for there really is no story concerning the evil people who did this; not one, we can understand, at any rate.