More than Names

The murder of six million Jews was more than an act of destruction. It was an act of purposeful erasure. The Nazis did not merely want Jewish people dead — they wanted them to disappear without a trace. No names. No records. No memory. Obfuscation was the final stage of the Final Solution.

Yad Vashem has spent decades fighting back. The Hall of Names holds more than four million names rescued from the void. It is a monumental act of defiance. But as we gather each Yom HaShoah, I find myself lost among all those names — because names alone are not enough. A name without a life is still absence. Who are they; the people behind those names?

Let me tell you about one of them—Sabina Gutter.

Sabina was eleven when she arrived at Majdanek death camp. Her twin brother Pinchas survived. Sabina did not. There is no record of her date of birth or death. She exists only because her brother talks about her — without him, she would be what the Nazis intended: as though she never existed.

I first met Pinchas in 1998 in Cape Town, where I was conducting interviews for the Cape Town Holocaust Memorial. He told his story with extraordinary courage — but there was one moment he could barely describe. At Majdanek, he watched his twin disappear around the corner of a low brick building. All he saw was her golden braid. And then she was gone.

The following year, Pinchas visited the UK National Holocaust Museum, which I had co-founded. He mentioned he was thinking of writing his memoirs. I pushed back, suggesting the world already had many Holocaust memoirs. He shook his head. “You don’t understand,” he said. “When Sabina disappeared, I erased her from my memory. In the midst of Majdanek and the six other camps I would pass through, I could not survive carrying the full weight of losing my twin.” He paused. “I have no recollection of her face. Her smile. Her eyes. All I remember is the golden braid disappearing into oblivion.”

And so we began a search. For five years, Pinchas and I traveled through memory together — to the Łódź Ghetto, to Warsaw, to Majdanek, across dozens of hours in Toronto and Cape Town. After five years, he concluded we were no closer. The trauma had buried her too deep.

But something remarkable had happened. I had come to know Sabina.

I knew about the Polish candy, Krówki, she liked. I knew about them fetching cholent from the baker after Shabbat. I knew about their visits to the family farm in Wieluń — the geese splashing through the mud, their grandmother in her big apron, their grandfather with his horse and cart. I knew about the Simchas she attended, the Shabbat table, her father’s cigars as he read the Talmud, the goose fat rendered for Passover. I knew all of this because Sabina had been everywhere Pinchas had been for the first eleven years of their lives. Through his testimony, she was restored to me — even as she remained lost to him.

That is the miracle and the purpose of testimony.

Memory is not only about mourning the dead. It is about giving them their lives back. With no name, no story, no witness — it is as though you never existed. But when we listen, when we ask, when we record and preserve and share — we do something almost sacred. We restore a human life. Sabina is not a name on a wall. If feel like I know her.

On Yom HaShoah, we speak of six million who were murdered. But I also remember the nine million who lived. Nine million Jews who got up every morning, took their children to school, and strove every day to survive, because they believed in life. That is true resilience.

Sabina’s mother, Helena, was not thinking about her daughter’s death when she braided her hair in the Warsaw Ghetto despite the lice. She was making her ready for the day, striving for normalcy in a world determined to deny it.

To focus only on murder is to grant the Nazis a posthumous victory. Our task is to remember the nine million as they were — whole, alive, irreplaceable.

I have sat at Temple Beth Am many times watching young girls the same age as Sabina stand at the bimah on their Bat Mitzvahs, their whole lives ahead of them. This Monday evening, I will share Sabina’s story as part of our Yom HaShoah commemoration at Beth Am— not to remember her death, but all that lay ahead of her.

Sabina Gutter has no formal documentation to prove she ever lived, save her name at Yad Vashem. But she is not confined to oblivion. Through the testimony of her brother, and through every retelling of her story, Sabina has her life back. We can say her name — and in doing so, overcome the permanent erasure the Nazis intended.

Stephen D. Smith, PhD, MBE, is co-founder and CEO of Our Jewish Story, and  Executive Director Emeritus of USC Shoah Foundation.