The Six Million and First Victim

The Six Million and First Victim is Bella Shmozic’s name for Chaim Lerner as a possible casualty of the Holocaust decades after surviving it. The phrase makes a provocative claim about trauma’s persistence: survival may preserve a person’s life without ending the damage, and the act of bearing witness may itself become a burden. But the book does not establish that Lerner killed himself, or that the Holocaust caused his death. Instead, it sets Shmozic’s interpretation against conflicting accounts and returns to the question through other characters’ encounters with suicide, guilt, and inherited memory.

Origin and Meaning

Shmozic coined the phrase in a New Yorker essay published soon after Lerner’s death. She called him “the six million and first victim, and the eighth Holocaust writer,” connecting his possible suicide to the deaths by suicide of writers who had survived or written about the Holocaust. Her sequence included Paul Celan, Tadeusz Borowski, and Primo Levi; Eli Wiesel was presented as an apparent exception among the chroniclers she invoked. The phrase therefore works both as an individual epithet for Lerner and as an argument about a recurring, unsettling pattern among writers of the Holocaust.

The number is rhetorical, not a claim that Lerner’s death can be added literally to a historical count. Its force comes from the collision between survival and victimhood: Lerner had lived for decades after the Holocaust, yet Shmozic proposed that its consequences might still have claimed him. The label turns the time between survival and death into part of its meaning. It suggests a wound whose effects can be delayed, concealed, and difficult to distinguish from the ordinary troubles of a later life.

The Blind Man as Allegory

Shmozic supported her reading with a short story Lerner had published a year before his death. Its protagonist is a sixty-year-old blind man who wakes one morning able to see. What first appears to be a miraculous gift—colors, familiar faces, sunsets—becomes overwhelming. The man cannot process the flood of sensation and dies of a tumor. Shmozic read the story as an allegory for the Holocaust writer: a person compelled to see horror without the distance or mediation that might make it bearable.

In that interpretation, sight is at once the writer’s vocation and the source of danger. The writer sees more deeply than others and must turn what is seen into a story; yet the story’s image of sudden, unmanageable vision suggests that witnessing cannot always make experience coherent. The allegory gives the expression its distinctive imaginative structure: what seems like a blessing becomes a curse, and the capacity to see becomes inseparable from the risk of being overwhelmed. Still, the story is evidence of Shmozic’s interpretation, not proof of Lerner’s private motives or the cause of his death.

A Disputed Explanation

The narrative places Shmozic’s account beside uncertainty about both Lerner’s death and his political outlook. Some colleagues at the Hebrew University reportedly believed that he had been preparing a forceful condemnation of Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. His family denied that he was planning to publish such a statement and said they had heard no fundamental critique of Israel from him. One close colleague, by contrast, claimed to have seen a draft in which Lerner had effectively disowned the Jewish state. The competing accounts leave open whether political disillusionment, Holocaust trauma, other hardships, or some combination could explain the apparent fall from his balcony.

The narrator likewise resists treating Shmozic’s thesis as settled. Lerner had depression and age-related illness, had lost a parent, and lived with pain in his knee and hip; the account questions whether such difficulties explain suicide, but does not replace them with a definitive answer. It asks whether the Holocaust might have been the deeper wound, then turns the label into a problem rather than a verdict: What does it mean to survive? Did Lerner survive the Holocaust, and can a writer who bears witness be said to have survived? The phrase gathers those questions without resolving them. Its explanatory power and its danger are the same: it can make a baffling death legible, but it can also reduce one person’s life and uncertain death to a single inherited trauma.

The Phrase in the Family Story

The book’s treatment of suicide gives the expression an intimate counterpoint. Judah Loeb travels to Israel to investigate Lerner’s death, but the subject is difficult for him to raise with Hannah Loeb, his daughter, whose mother, Mary Loeb, died by suicide when Hannah was five. Judah worries that the loss might have left a delayed psychological wound, even though Hannah appears healthy and well-adjusted. When Hannah eventually asks whether he ever thought of killing himself, his answer is no; the moment brings the investigation’s abstract questions into the history of a father and daughter who have already lived with suicide’s consequences.

A later conversation complicates any attempt to collapse different acts of violence into one category. Kamal calls suicide cowardly and cruel to one’s family. In a letter to Hannah, however, he distinguishes his attempted murder from Mary Loeb’s suicide: he describes himself as a murderer who tried to kill, while presenting Mary as a woman who was ill and afraid, and whose death was already likely to come soon from her disease. His account does not erase the harm or settle the moral questions, but it resists equating an attempt to kill others with a person’s decision to end her own life. The contrast sharpens the book’s concern with labels: words such as victim, murderer, survivor, and coward can disclose a moral distinction, but can also simplify the circumstances they name.

At the story’s close, Hannah receives Mary’s suicide note after it has been withheld for twenty-seven years. Judah responds with irritation and renewed incomprehension, objecting to the note’s explanations and to its claim that Mary knew why she had to die. Hannah answers that why was never the right question. That exchange does not confirm Shmozic’s theory about Lerner; it clarifies the limits of the kind of explanation the phrase offers. The Six Million and First Victim remains a way of naming the possible afterlife of trauma, while the surrounding narrative preserves the uncertainty, personal differences, and unanswerable questions that no single label can contain.