The human mind can only conceive of so much tragedy at once—and when lost lives spiral into the hundreds, then thousands, and then millions, when murder becomes a wide, seemingly unending mass, we lose our ability to see its victims as anything more than an abstract, almost theoretical, collection of lives. In this way, a second crime is perpetrated: Human beings are reduced to a gruel of misery. At Yad Vashem, the sheer enormity of the book mirrors the breadth of the crime it records, but the names, each one clearly inscribed, stand out against the mass of the thing, like stars dotting the
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