c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, is supposed to have said: “The murder of one person is a crime, but the murder of a million people is a statistic.” Not surprisingly, the Nazis made Stalin’s cynical statement an evil reality.

During the Holocaust, the Nazis tattooed identification numbers on the arms of Jewish victims. After all, it’s easier to murder a number instead of a human being.

And even sensitive eyes can glaze over when confronting the grim fact that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust; many in unmarked graves, gas chambers and crematoria.

That is why the doomed teenager Anne Frank became a global symbol for the 6 million. We can focus on a single person with a name, a life, and, in Anne’s case, a poignant diary and a radiant face. But what about the other 5,999,999 victims? Unless they were family members or friends, the murdered Jews are merely Stalin’s “statistic.”

But something remarkable happened a few weeks ago guaranteeing that Holocaust victims will never be numbers burned onto an arm or simply a gigantic statistic.

Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, placed 3 million names of Holocaust victims on its Web site. It represents the world’s largest database and it has already received nearly 2 million visitors or computer “hits.” The Hebrew words, Yad Vashem, are from the biblical book of Isaiah (56:5): “Even unto them will I give in My house and within My walls a monumentâÂ?¦an everlasting memorial, that shall not be cut off.”

People throughout the world can now search for specific information about the men, women and children murdered by the Nazis, and can perhaps discover the existence of a previously unknown relative who perished in the Holocaust. In addition, Yad Vashem is seeking additional names, photographs, diaries, and other details of victims’ lives in an effort to post as much information as possible on its Web site.

Yad Vashem officials sadly note that time is their enemy because the generation of Holocaust survivors, the primary source of information, is dying out.

Compiling the victims’ names is a giant undertaking filled with pain, sadness and difficulty. For example, many European towns and villages where Jews lived are spelled differently depending on which nation ruled the area at any given time. Lvov, a city in today’s Ukraine, was once known as Lemberg. Danzig is now the Polish Gdansk, and Koenigsberg is today’s Russian Kalinograd. Bratislava is the former Pressburg.

There are at least 1,520 ways to spell the popular name “Isaac” in three different alphabets: Latin, Cyrillic and Hebrew. The Yad Vashem data bank includes 40,000 Jewish family names with 370,000 spelling variations.

A further complication: Yad Vashem has received millions of pages of written testimony about Holocaust victims, all in different handwriting and alphabets.

Avner Shalev, Yad Vashem’s chairman, described the Web site’s purpose: “It’s to see the faces, to look into the people … they were human beings … he was an artist, he was a shoemaker … it’s a different kind of remembrance.”

My family was fortunate because no known relative was among the 6 million victims. But I searched Yadvashem.org using the surnames of my maternal and paternal grandparents. The results that appeared on the computer screen were deeply moving. There were many Rudin Holocaust victims, but the entry for “Shmuel (Samuel) Rudin,” my grandfather’s name, immediately caught my attention. Shmuel was born in Lithuania in 1911 and died in his early thirties in the Landsberg concentration camp during World War II. “Peretz Rudin,” born in Vitebsk, the hometown of the artist Marc Chagall was only six years older than I and he, too, was a Holocaust victim.

Were Shmuel and Peretz my distant cousins? I will never know, but I will now include them in the prayers I recite each Holocaust Memorial Day. Thanks to Yad Vashem, I am aware that many Holocaust victims shared my last name. It is a sobering reality.

The Yad Vashem memory bank is a chilling reminder that Jewish children born in the 1930s and early 1940s, my generation, were potential victims of Hitler’s “War Against the Jews.” Luckily, I was born in Pennsylvania, and not Transylvania, the territory Hungary and Romania have long contested and whose Jews were murdered.

When people of all religions, races and ethnic groups go online and visit the Yad Vashem Web site, they will see the faces and learn about the lives of some of the 6 million. It’s one way to deny evil triumphs to both Stalin and Hitler.

MO/JL END RNS

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s Senior Interreligious Advisor, is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.)