The Holocaust Happened to People One at a Time: That's How History Works Though It's Hard to See. It's Just People and Choices.

History is just people and choices. Same as anything else. Not that choices are easy. To the contrary: Most of them are quite hard and we wouldn't wish our hardest ones on anyone. The Holocaust is no different and awareness of it seems to be fading as time passes, in spite of heroic and enormous efforts to prevent exactly that. Perhaps in reaction to that baffling reality, I find myself turning more and more to the small stories about choices and the documents about individuals and communities and their actions that stubbornly keep memory alive. Here is a fragment of a story about a small part of my family and what happened to them.

Twenty-five years before I was born, my people was targeted for extermination. Some of us had lived in Europe for two thousand years. Do people realize that in 1933 there were 9.5 million of us there - mostly far away from Germany; and that when 6 million of us were slaughtered it was such a large percentage of the total global Jewish population at the time of 15 million? The total world Jewish population has yet to recover from the loss and hovers now around the same 15 million. Just for context, according to Pew Research, the world population includes?2.3 billion Christians, 1.6 billion Muslims, 1 billion Hindus, and nearly 500 million Buddhists. But the numbers can disorient. The important point is that following centuries of virulent, dislocating and deadly antisemitism there was a massive enterprise mobilized to achieve extermination of Jews known widely as the Holocaust or in Hebrew the Shoah. And that it was very, very successful. The facts matter. When we get behind the numbers and into individual stories, we recognize ourselves in the unimaginable.

When you hear the word "survivor" in relation to the Holocaust it can mean many things. At least in the case of Lithuania, where my family had lived for generations, it is generally not someone who stayed there. Almost no Jews who did not flee Lithuania early survived. Certainly if you did survive you didn't go back, find your house, clean up, resume life. That is simply not a thing. It was refugee status, years in UN Displaced Persons Camps, and new identities in far away lands. In the eastern European context, a Shoah survivor is generally someone who left Europe before the Nazis came to power or at least before their death squads fanned out across the east (it was considered too far to run the trains to Auschwitz from there) or maybe it is someone who fled and defied all sorts of odds, and was found near death in a camp or ghetto, starving in a forest or hiding out somehow. Notably, one of the few to survive from Lithuania - a ghetto, labor camps and more, was the artist Samuel Bak, whose work has been featured at Boston's Pucker Gallery since 1969 and speaks for itself in telling what he saw with his eyes, what he endured, and what we lost. The Family, for instance, a piece he created in 1972, is both window and mirror: Vivid, revealing and impenetrable, unforgiving, all at the same time.

In all, six million Jews, including many of my cousins and including my Grandma Sonia's brother with his wife and daughters were among those intentionally murdered because they were deemed by the duly elected German government and its allies to be racially inferior and toxic. I almost typed that this was false and then realized that to do so would be absurd. And then realized further that I need to say it. The antisemitism of the Nazis and their partners was based on lies, falsehood, slander and criminal deceit. It has no basis or justification.

My grandma Sonia (Matz) fled antisemitism in Lithuania about a decade before the Nazis came to power. When I was in my 20s, visiting her in Florida, she told me some important things about her family that I had not heard before. When she fled her hometown and her country in the early 1920s as a young adult, she was with her parents and all but one of her siblings. She left her life behind and went seeking opportunity and security in a Jewish homeland under British rule at the time - the land that is now Israel. She told me that all her life she still still woke up in the middle of the night sometimes, calling out for that brother who stayed behind. His name was Joshua and like my Grandma Sonia, he was a dentist, trained in Lithuania. They were close. His wife was Sara. Their daughters Chana (16), Chaviva (10) and the entire remaining Jewish population of the town of Kalvaria (Lithuania) were murdered on the same day in 1941. Shot in a line and buried in mounds not worthy even of being called mass graves. Records show that after they were killed the local priest led a group that looted their possessions, businesses and homes. Those are facts, not reflections or metaphors. Joshua, Sara and the girls and their Jewish neighbors were murdered by Nazis and by their own local government and their Christian neighbors, rounded up like livestock and shot dead, buried in a heap, in a ditch, right there in their own town - where our family and other Jewish families had lived for generations. Facts. Painful facts.

So a good sized group of our family - including Grandma Sonia and her other siblings (not Joshua) led by their parents Tova and Nathan Matz made it to British Palestine between 1924 and 1925. My Grandma set up a dental practice in the family's building on Allenby Street in Tel Aviv. Eventually got married. Others did their thing, pursuing education, their professions and passions, culture, love. And the family there has grown at this point to its sixth generation. Counting my cousins there takes all my fingers and toes. They are Israelis of widely varied occupations, personal opinions, personalities, passions and perspectives. Some have also emigrated to the US but the great majority is still in Israel, contributing, thriving, living. My family, like many others, added to the unbroken chain of Jewish life in what we call Eretz Yisrael (the land of Israel) with the idea in mind that Jews would never be safe in the violent antisemitism of Europe. Even my Grandma's brother Joshua, I was recently told, managed to visit Tel Aviv to see what they were building there. By the time he decided to uproot his family and join them it was too late. Jews could no longer leave Hitler's grasp. His fate was sealed.

Late in 1941, My Grandma Sonia and my grandfather Dov (Tarsy) made a choice to leave Tel Aviv for the US because she and my grandfather had a way to make it happen and that's what they thought was best for them and their nearly one year old baby who was to become my dad. He was born in Jerusalem in 1940 like most Jewish babies were if their families in Tel Aviv could arrange it. Why? In part because Jews there believed the Nazis loved antiquity too much to bomb the ancient city. By 1941, General Rommel and his tanks were approaching and bringing uncompromising genocidal hatred of Jewish people with him. As the Nazis and their accomplices got closer to the Holy Land, some elected to flee again. My grandfather Dov's cousin Emanuel fought the Nazis by enlisting in Jewish battalions in the British Army. And my grandfather Dov had a US passport. He had come to America from Lithuania for college in Pennsylvania and worked in New York for a bit before going back to Tel Aviv. So they played the cards they held. They made what was no doubt a painful choice in the flow of historical events that split up the family again and made my dad come to America in a basket. That choice to move again made my father an American boy in Brooklyn and then a physician and professor who has trained thousands of doctors and treated more patients and cared for even more families. And he served in the US Army in Vietnam, coached basketball and baseball, helped me buy my first car and pursue my dreams, and is a grandfather to 7. This American man, my dad (and of course my mom and so many others) made me possible - and because of his parents' forced choice made me an American. It was only this way because of my grandfather's passport. The United States was not admitting Jewish refugees at the time. The country I call home was closed to Jews and German tank columns were approaching the place that had been identified as a refuge, imbued with antisemitic fallacies and murderous intentions. I often wonder what his life would have been if things had been different. If my grandmother had chosen simply to stay in her home and carry on with her life, hoping for the best it is without any doubt the case that she would have been murdered too and that my dad, my brothers and I, and our kids would not exist. A big piece of history can get very small, very personal when you break it down. Life and death of a family tree. With war well underway in Europe, my grandparents and my infant father traveled east via Baghdad and Siam, arriving in Hawaii only a few weeks before the Japanese attacked the US base at Pearl Harbor. They then got to California and across the country - making choice after choice after choice.

To go or to stay - to go again in pursuit of greater security and opportunity or to remain in a place where it was at least possible to build something. Choices. We like to say that Jews "always have a bag packed." I wrote about that a few years ago, wondering if things got bad again where we are supposed to go and what kind of place it should be. When the iron curtain fell and Lithuania became independent (again) in 1990, I made the naive mistake of saying something of a congratulatory comment to my Grandma about it. After all, my perspective was formed through the lens of an American kid growing up in the shadow of a Cold War with the USSR. Her response? "Lithuania? That is not my country." My Grandma Sonia is buried in Israel, next to my Grandfather, Dov. As for Lithuania? No-one in my immediate family talks about the place, going there or otherwise. Some cousins have been, and came away feeling like my Grandma did. It's not our home and there is little evidence that it ever was. Even our deteriorating cemeteries that held generations of Jewish family members left with no-one to care for them or visit were robbed of their headstones for sidewalks and building materials.

Whatever our level of piety or even education as Jews, our culture and tradition teaches us to ask why about almost everything. But with the Holocaust and matters of survival we know there is not an answer that makes sense. There are no people who deserved to die and none who deserved to live. There are no reasons. To contradict my own thesis - there are not even always choices - as William Styron's popular novel and the film Sophie's Choice made so many of us ponder. Margot Stern Strom called these "choiceless choices" (coined by Lawrence Langer in looking at the tasks required of Jewish prisoners inside the camps) and none of us has any right to sit in judgment or to project our own logic on the unimaginable. The problem with this conclusion however is if it risks taking bystanders off the hook for not putting a stop to countless small insults, stepping stones, stereotypes, policies, caricatures, slanders that built into a crescendo and ultimately overwhelmed all reason. We are left back where I began, which is simply that I need to look at the small picture to find my feet and make meaning. The Holocaust happened one person at a time no matter how you look at it. The printing presses that produced Goebbels' propaganda machine were operated by people. The machine of genocide is a human construct no matter how mechanized it is. And that means people making choices.

Another aspect of individual action during the Holocaust that is important to look at carefully is the choices made by rescuers. Ervin Staub is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He writes that "Moral courage means acting on one's values in the face of potential or actual opposition and negative consequences." Staub has done extensive research on the choices made by those who risked their lives to save Jewish people during the Holocaust, and across a large body of awe-inspiring examples most of which are nothing like the now well known Oscar Schindler. He has expanded the work to look at mass trauma, genocide and even policing in the US via similar frameworks. During the Holocaust, people hid neighbors in their barns and attics, adopted Jewish babies to pretend they were their own, forged papers, sabotaged manufacturing processes, gave food and water to those literally dying of hunger and thirst. How did they make these choices when so many others did not? "People learn by doing and change as a result of their own actions," Staub writes. "Rescuers often agreed, in response to a request, to hide someone for a short time. As they did so, they became more committed to those they were helping. Their care expanded to others and they came to see themselves as people who will help." Can you imagine looking deep into such a special topic only to find that making brave choices takes practice just like everything else?

My glimpse inside a personal story hardly scratches the surface and probably gets a few details wrong too. I offer it only because I am thinking about the particular, not the big polemic of enduring and lethal antisemitism. Well catalogued documents reflect a record of exactly what happened to this small part of my family - Joshua, Sara and their girls. I recommend the book Holocaust by Bullets by Father?Patrick Desbois?for more on the eastern Europe story of murder by neighbors that contributed a million or more to Hitler's body count. I share this fraction of a story about part of my family because I can. It's no more and no less tragic than many other stories people can tell about their families. This year we laid to rest both the great educator and movement builder Margot Stern Strom and the great Nazi hunter and author Allan A. Ryan, Jr., each of whom taught the world (and me) distinct and rigorous lessons about memory, justice and choices. Both were focused on the consequences of ordinary, daily decisions we make that add up to the life or death of people, ideas, communities, nations. And both gave generously to help us find that focus in our own lives.

How many business owners, laborers, skilled tradespeople, mothers, fathers, entrepreneurs, investors, engineers, teachers, priests, engineers, doctorate holders were aware, complicit, active, zealous in this effort at extermination and still would be today? It is well documented in fact that doctors and others with advanced degrees were over-represented in the German mobile killing units that came to towns Eastern Europe to systematically murder Jewish people. Education? Life experience? Science? What is supposed to be the antidote to ignorance and blame? The high intellectual and civic visionaries who founded the modern state of Turkey also conceived, planned and executed an intentional genocide targeting their Armenian neighbors, slaughtering more than a million and nearly eradicating the oldest Christian nation on earth. This great nation we call the USA was conceived in the highest ideals of western civilization and yet embedded within it and within the personal lives, value systems and wealth of its courageous, enlightened founders was the hereditary policy of unlimited generations of enslavement for humans of African descent. Fellow human beings who had been captured and shipped to our shores as human chattel, dying in chains, building a nation. Today millions of people fleeing trauma on a similar scale are received here in the US only in a trickle and with skepticism, politics and a very hard row to hoe if at all.

Memory fades and will continue to fade in every generation. All we really have is the capacity to learn right from wrong and to emphasize teaching it. I want STEM to be SCHTEM, adding civics and humanities to the ubiquitous science focused acronym. Kind of clever that it sounds like Yiddish? Maybe. Generation after generation too many of us are missing the point. We are responsible for making up our own minds and being part of solutions. Antisemitism has not been relegated to the proverbial annals of history or even, it turns out, to the margins. The survivors of the Holocaust are of course even fewer in number every year. It is urgent that we respond to antisemitism and all forms of racism, bigotry, exclusion, violence and cultural destruction by counting ourselves among the survivors, the targets, the victims whatever our story is. The attack of bigotry has to be witnessed as an attack on humanity. And it is urgent that we see those displaced and migrating worldwide not just as our ancestors but as ourselves. People. Choices. What would we do? How dare we judge them for doing what they deemed necessary to survive, babies in baskets, splitting up families, walking out of their homelands and not looking back. Do we really not have room for them at our table - and a need for their strength and will if they want to be part of our communities?

I tell my business school students the same thing I started this piece with - all there really is at work, at home, in life, in history -- is people and choices. May the memories of the victims of the Shoah - the Holocaust - be blessings and may we remember the facts. New chapters of horror are being added to history all the time. We can do better. When I think about this now I think of Joshua, Sara, Chana and Chaviva. I wish I knew them. The girls at least would have been at a recent family reunion of sorts we had in Israel last November. Children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of all the other Matz family siblings were present including my own children. It made me miss my Grandma Sonia. I am grateful for what she told me, and for what I have learned. I understand it is my responsibility to teach. Tomorrow is the last day of the semester and my class will be wrapping up a few months' journey into some rich topics about business and leadership. We may not talk about genocide in particular; but we have framed the whole course around an examination of where and why good people make bad choices. We will end the course where it began, noting that business, like everything else, is no more and no less than people and choices. What else do we have?

The poet (and survivor of the Holocaust) Sonia Weitz of blessed memory was my friend and teacher. She was born and raised in Krakow, Poland until the Nazis came. As a teenager she survived five different concentration camps, forced marches across hundreds of miles and emerged alive, miraculously staying together with her beloved older sister Blanca the entire time. All the rest of their family was gone. Gassed in death camps by people who followed orders. Slaughtered. Her parents, her other siblings, her cousins. All gone. Except Sonia and Blanca. She dedicated her American life - yes she too came here - to fighting for human rights and dignity for all people and telling her story. People thought it seemed gracious and poised when she did it because she was so strong but it took everything out of her every time. And still she went back for more, to school after school, advocating, urging, pleading for decency. Sonia made unimaginable choices, and first among them was the choice to live which I sensed she had to make anew every morning. She wrote many important poems while passing several years in UN refugee camps after the war, including “For Yom Ha’Shoah” which needs no explanation. (Yom Ha’Shoah?is Hebrew for “Day of Holocaust Remembrance.”) I read it every time I lead a tour of our humble Holocaust memorial in Boston.?

Come, take this giant leap with me

into the other world . . . the other place

where language fails and imagery defies,

denies man’s consciousness . . . and dies

upon the altar of insanity.

Come, take this giant leap with me

into the other world . . . the other place

and trace the eclipse of humanity . . .

where children burned while mankind stood by

and the universe has yet to learn why

. . . has yet to learn why.

Andy Tarsy is principal of Emblem Strategic LLC and Conscious Customers. He teaches Business, Ethics and Value Creation at Boston University's Questrom School of Business. He is a docent for the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston, Massachusetts and former Executive Director of the Anti-Defamation League of New England.