"Just a Number"

People tend to want to classify things. There needs to be a way to distinguish between large populations of things such as humans. And no, we don’t distinguish each other just by our personalities or our faces. This statement may not be true on a small scale such as your group of friends at school, but there are more people out there who distinguish you and the person sitting next to you by a different method. By a number.

We are constantly given numbers that represent us. We are given a social security number, a school id number, a phone number. We are constantly being defined by numbers. We are defined by our salaries, the number of square feet in our houses, our standardized test scores, our GPA.  Even our DNA and genes turn us into numbers of molecules.

Humans try to pride ourselves with the fact that we are “humane,” a word we created. The numbers we associate with ourselves now don’t harm us; however, it’s nothing in comparison to what the numbers engraved onto the Jews’ arms meant during the Holocaust.

The numbers that are used to describe us now are adding on to us, rather than replacing us. But the only thing the Nazis saw when they looked at their prisoners at the camps, were the numbers they put on the Jews’ arms. It is sad to think that a 6-digit number was all that was needed to represent them. That one number represented their personality, family, occupation, and basically their entire life. To me, that is inhumane, squeezing a person into a small number in unethical.

As shown in Maus in volume 2, page 26, Vladek still has his number etched into his arm, “and here they put me my number.” In the picture he traces the number with his finger as he remembers the time when he was just a number, not a human, but just a number. That number on his arm was all that was needed to tell others that he should have been dead and that the fact that he is alive is a miracle. Seeing that type of number on his arm makes the person next to him feel pitiful towards him, because they can’t imagine what harsh conditions he had to live through. That number still defined him and other Jews years after the Holocaust, and it shouldn’t have had that power.

Numbers shouldn’t be used to define us, but they can still add on to us in a positive way. But as a society, I think we should be careful before these numbers take over, as we seem to be adding more and more as society is rapidly developing. Humans are not just numbers.