After finishing Night, by Elie Wiesel, today, I wrote a poem (if you haven't read it yet, see below), and I've written other poems as a response to the book before (look at the "poem" tag).
Then, a thought came to me- how much worse, in terms of the number of deaths, was the Holocaust than 9/11? The Holocaust has an unknown number of fatalities, but I used the rough estimate of 11 million (as used in the documentary Paperclips and on about.com in an article I found that contained holocaust facts)- 6 million for Jews, and 5 million for the other groups persecuted against, including homosexuals and gypsies.
6,000 people died in 9/11. 11 million divided by 6,000 is roughly 1833. To honor 11 million people, one would spend a minute of silence 1833 times a year, which equals to be about 5 times a day. Compared to 5 minutes a day, a minute a year seems like nothing. That is the difference between the Holocaust and 9/11.
If a person made 100 pencil marks on a piece of paper a day, one mark per fatality, 9/11 deaths would be covered in 60 days, but the Holocaust deaths would take a person 110,000 days, or more than 300 years. It would be an impossible feat to carry out in any less than 3 lifetimes.
What does this tell us? That there are so many things around the world that aren't taken account for. Yet we must value the things in life that are beautiful, because there are too many depressing things in life to think about. I feel like I need to do something to honor this belief, but nothing is coming to me. For now, this blog post must suffice.
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