How Do You Explain the Holocaust to a Child?

My five year old nephew in New York loves clocks and calendars. He’s a very bright boy (not that I’m biased), and he makes sense of the world around him by doing what we all do, which is putting things into time and place. So the other day, when I was FaceTiming with him, I was not in the least bit surprised when he started examining the wall calendar.

He knows his numbers and letters but he isn’t reading properly just yet. (My poor sister is desperately trying to make sure that he won’t be bored in school, and he keeps pulling up over her shoulder and recognizing words that are well beyond his not-yet-literate level.) He knows, for example, how to recognize his own name, and he showed me where his birthday is on the calendar. Then he showed me his cousin’s birthday, and then his father’s birthday. And then we flipped back to this month’s page, and he asked me about specific dates:

“What does it say on April 22?”

“That’s called Yom Ha’atzmaut; it’s Israel’s birthday! It’ll be a big celebration.”

“And what does it say on April 21?” (I have no idea why we went backwards.)

“That’s called Yom Hazikaron. It’s the day we honor all of our soldiers.” I figured that would mean something to him—my husband, who did his mandatory service and now serves in the IDF reserves, is my nephew’s hero.

“And what does it say on April 14?”

And there I caught my breath. How do I explain Yom Hashoah to an innocent, sweet five year old boy? How can I possibly explain to him what we are commemorating without telling him that we are honoring the memories of six million Jews who were murdered simply because they were Jews? In the end, I said something along the lines of, “We remember the Jews who used to live in Europe.” It felt inadequate, and I have been grappling for a better answer since then.

That moment has been tugging at the edge of my mind since it happened, not just because I couldn’t—and can’t—fathom how to answer his question. When faced with his innocence, I was forced to reckon with the fact that with my own innocence long since gone, I can say the number six million without shrinking in horror from it.

The truth is, it’s almost impossible to wrap one’s mind around how enormous the number is. If you’ve never seen the film Paper Clips, I’d encourage you to watch it. Six million is approximately two-thirds of Israel’s current population. Six million is 75% of New York City. Six million is nearly double Los Angeles, almost three times the size of Houston, and just about the entire population of Miami.

Six million is staggering. But when it’s just a number, we can rattle it off in conversation. It’s when we realize that six million is actually six millionindividuals, with lives to live and families to build and fears and dreams—that’s when the horror begins to sink in. It wasn’t just six million. It was six million worlds that were shattered, as broken as the glass on the night of November 9, 1938, never to be picked up and put back together. It was families, grandparents, fathers, mothers, children as innocent as my nephew, exterminated like rats, all for the crime of being born a Jew.

Six million is also ten times the number recorded having left Egypt. We find ourselves now between Passover and Shavuot, the bridge between the Exodus and the revelation at Sinai. Every year, I think about the fact that 80% of the Israelites died before the Exodus. It was a bare fifth of the people that lived to see the redemption. And yet, from those 600,000 remaining, a nation—the most tenacious, stubborn, and stiff-necked nation—was born. Against all odds, that nation is still here.

And against all odds, that nation is once again thriving in its homeland, thanks, in no small part, to the ones who survived the inferno of the Holocaust.

I recently heard an interview with Eli Sharabi, who was taken captive from his kibbutz on October 7, 2023 and held hostage by Hamas for 491 days. In one of the questions, the interviewer asked Sharabi if he ever compared his experience with the Holocaust, and he very definitively said no. The difference, he explained, is that during the Holocaust, we did not have a homeland. We did not have an army. We had almost no way to defend ourselves, and certainly had nowhere in the world to turn for refuge. Yet now, for nearly seventy-eight years, we have been able to come home.

I’m still not satisfied with the answer that I gave to my nephew. Somehow, though, in my mentioning those who lived, I unintentionally echoed Lincoln’s words in his Gettysburg Address: “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.” Because we’re not just remembering a number. And we’re not just remembering the people who died. We are remembering the lives that they lived, the people they loved, the dreams that they dreamed.

Moreover, we remember—and honor—those who survived, the ones who took it upon themselves to continue to live, in spite of everything that they went through. Through blood, sweat, and tears, they rebuilt themselves, this nation, and this land in ways that their parents could hardly have dared to dream.

To paraphrase the prophet Ezekiel, by their blood we shall live. We will ensure that the dead shall not have died in vain by continuing the legacy of the survivors. We will continue to build. We will continue to live.

And we will always remember.

In memory of the six million holy ones who perished in the flames of the Sho’ah