Chapter 315: A Hand and a Name

On the nineteenth of August, 1953, in Jerusalem, The Knesset passed a law. It established an authority of remembrance And named the authority with two words from Isaiah. A hand and a name. The verse had been spoken to the childless: A memorial and a name, better than sons and daughters, A name that would not be cut off. The law took the words for the murdered. It did not say the verse had been kept. The law's title sets the Shoah, the catastrophe, Beside the heroism. The halls were not yet the charge. The charge was the statute. The law's first article is the six million Of the Jewish people murdered By the Nazis and those who helped them. It names also the households, the communities, The houses of prayer, the schools, The institutions of mercy, Destroyed in a plan to blot out the name of Israel From under the sky. The statute says six million. The names are kept in Yad Vashem's book of names, And this faith takes them into its ancestor days, every one. The killing was a procedure Before any memorial had a statute. On the twenty-second of June, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. In the territory taken that summer, Jews were shot beside the towns. On the twenty-ninth and the thirtieth of September, At Babyn Yar, the ravine at Kyiv, The Jews who had been gathered there were shot. A ravine is a place and two days. It is not an explanation. On the thirty-first of July, Hermann Göring Charged Reinhard Heydrich To prepare what they called the final solution Of the Jewish question in Europe. An order to prepare is not the first grave. The shootings were already underway. On the twentieth of January, 1942, At Wannsee, in Berlin, Heydrich sat with the officials of the ministries. The minutes count eleven million Jews in Europe As the people the plan named. That count is the plan's. It is not the number of the dead. Do not give the murder to the meeting. The meeting arranged the offices. The killing did not wait for the minutes. At Oświęcim the camp was called Auschwitz. There a number was put on the body. The number is not a name. On the seventeenth of January, 1945, The last roll call of that camp's system Counted sixty-seven thousand and twelve. In the days after, about fifty-six thousand were marched out. On the twenty-seventh the Red Army entered And found about seven thousand still there. The people on the roads were not freed by the gate. Do not give the end of the killing To the day an army arrived. The same law names a further charge. Those who were not Jews, And who risked their lives to keep a Jew from being taken. It calls them the righteous among the nations. In that year the law did not judge the cases. The judging came later, one person at a time, On the word of the person who lived. If the one who lived is gone, and left no word, The register may not hold the rescuer. The rescue is not thereby cancelled. A life kept is a particular act On a particular day. It is not a proof the century came through. The deputies of Herut did not cast a vote. The bill passed. The house then stood for five minutes. Hold the name. A name in the authority's care is a register Set against an erasure that was also a register: Lists for trains, numbers on bodies, Minutes that counted a people as a plan. The later list does not make the earlier list just. It does not return a body. It does not try the offices. Take this consolation, for a scripture owes one: The murdered are kept by name among the ancestors of this faith, And the righteous who hid them are kept beside them, And the verse is fulfilled in the keeping, not in the authority that borrowed its words. The striving that can be named is the particular hand That kept a person alive, And the labor, afterward, of setting a name Where a procedure had set a number. The law can order the labor. It cannot order the death undone. Count the authority from the day the Knesset gives. Keep the question the statute cannot close. Who was killed, by name. Who lived, and by what particular refusal. This chapter has the dates. The names are the work the law ordered, And they are not finished here.