Red Chairs

Two weeks ago, in commemoration of the terrible 44-month long siege of Sarajevo that began exactly twenty years ago this month, 11,541 empty red chairs were lined up along Titova Street, Sarajevo's main thoroughfare, to symbolise the number of men, women and children killed by Bosnian Serbs during those long dark days. The images are extraordinarily powerful - the lines of chairs seem to go on and on, creating an image of a river of blood running through the heart of the city.

The siege of Sarajevo was only part of the Bosnian War; in total, an estimated 100,000 people lost their lives in the Balkan conflict. The Bosnian Serb policy of ethnic cleansing, and, in particular, the massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, made it abundantly clear to the world that genocide did not end with the defeat of Nazism in 1945.

Two weeks on and it is Yom HaShoah, the day in the Jewish calendar when we commemorate the genocide perpetrated against us. Part of the philosophical and historical discourse that has surrounded the Shoah includes the question of uniqueness - whether the Holocaust represents a unique event in human history or not, and, if it does, what makes it so. In many respects, and perhaps particularly since the war in the Balkans, the debate seems perverse. What does it really matter? For the families of the victims of Sarajevo or Srebrenica, as for the families of the victims of Theresienstadt or Treblinka, the effects are no more or less horrific. The pain of such meaningless, cruel and incomprehensible loss is much the same. One empty red chair is one too many.

Yet today is Yom HaShoah, so my thoughts turn to the six million. And it occurs to me that the sheer scale of the Shoah does in some way mark it out from Bosnia. If one red chair is one too many, 11,541 red chairs is utterly unbearable. 100,000 red chairs is beyond comprehension. But six million red chairs? Six million? There are no words.

There is, however, an image. The 11,541 chairs in Sarajevo, laid out in 825 rows, stretched to almost an entire kilometre in length. But six million chairs laid out in the identical formation would require almost 430,000 rows, and would cover practically the entire length of the State of Israel, from Eilat in the south to a few kilometres short of Metulla on the Lebanese border. That is no exaggeration. It would extend that far.

(Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, begins at sundown on Wednesday 18 April)