History of Sorts

The average book contains around 110,000 words. It’s estimated that approximately 11 million people were killed during the Holocaust. If each victim’s name were listed—just their names, without any stories or details—it would take about 100 books to include them all. But most victims had three names: a first, middle, and last. That triples the total to roughly 300 books to record their names. Nothing more.

Just imagine the scale of that loss.

The Silence Between Pages

Three hundred books, spines aligned in grief,
Each page a whisper, each name a leaf
Torn from a tree that once reached high—
Now only shadows cross the sky.

Ink on paper cannot contain
The weight of sorrow, the depth of pain,
But still, we write, for silence kills—
And memory climbs the quiet hills.

Each volume swells with names once sung
By mothers soft, by fathers young;
Children laughing, lovers near—
Now etched in print with falling tear.

A name, a life, a candle burned—
Whole generations never returned.
Not numbers, no, but souls and dreams,
Torn from the world by monstrous schemes.

Three hundred books—too few, too small—
To bear the burden of it all.
Yet better this than none at all:
A library that dares recall.

For every name, a world was lost,
A silence bought at endless cost.
But ink remembers, paper stays—
A light defying darkest days.

So let them rest upon the shelves,
These books that speak for ghosts themselves,
And may we read, and may we weep—
And never let the darkness sleep.

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