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MetroWest Jewish News, January 12, 1995 Donna Ezor One million, 1,000,001, 1,000,002, 1,000,003, 1,000,0004... Winter turns to spring and summer to fall, and Seth Kramer's still counting. One by one, the West Orange resident counts grains of rice, recording on paper each batch of 100, and putting them into jars -- 39 in all -- that "take over" the 23 year old's room. These grains of Carolina white rice have helped Kramer better understand the atrocities of the Holocaust. One year ago, the West Orange resident began counting six million grains of rice, in an effort to comprehend the magnitude of the number of Jews killed by the Nazis. He's reached 1,200,000 so far, and he's determined to reach the six million mark. As a student at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Kramer filmed segments of his counting in order to document his efforts. When he was assigned to "create a piece that's personal to you" for a film class this past fall, Kramer decided to make his counting project into a complete film. The result is a 15-minute, untitled film that depicts Kramer in action throughout the months, shows newspaper clips and photographs of the Holocaust and includes a segment of an interview with a Nazi guard from the film Shoah. Kramer's film has been entered in the Black Maria Film Festival, directed by his teacher, John Columbus and will be screened Saturday, Feb. 25, at 8 p.m., at Morristown Unitarian Fellowship. It's also entered in the Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival and is scheduled to be shown in that city April 11 at the YM-YWHA. There was another reason Kramer chose to illustrate his counting project for the class assignment. One of his fellow students, he explains, is a neo-Nazi and a Skinhead, and her work often portrays such incidents as cross-burnings in Alabama. After viewing her films, Kramer says, "I did my film as an answer to that." Although Kramer had learned about the Holocaust and visited concentration camps in 1990, "there is a great difference between knowing the facts about what happened and actually understanding what happened," he says during the film. "I think the greatest barrier to my understanding of the Holocaust has always been the number of Jews that were murdered, 6,000,000, by the Nazis." Kramer says he found the number "too large to comprehend." Two years ago, when he was working on an art project for school that required using 700 cotton swabs, Kramer recalls that the swabs started reminding him of bodies. He wondered, "What if I represented six million bodies in something physical that you could look at?" After discovering that it would take "60,000 worth of Q-tips to reach 6,000,000," Kramer says he started to realize the magnitude of that number. Rice, he says, is considerably less expensive, and it "kind of looks like bodies" in a large-scale aerial photo. It has the same lifeless, colorless quality, says the student. In addition, "it's kind of a food of poverty" and so many people on the planet use it as sustenance. Kramer says he uses Carolina brand, instead of something less expensive, because it doesn't fall apart easily. His film shows him at work counting and marking down the numbers throughout the seasons, as a clock ticks in the background and calendars illustrates the passage of time. A variety of music and television clips are included in the background. He hopes such elements as segments from The Late Show with David Letterman and Jeopardy! will not be taken in the wrong way. They are not meant to downplay or belittle the meaning behind his efforts or the Holocaust. Instead, there are intended to show a "little war" in which cultural obstacles can easily stop the study for truth. "It's always easiest not to study the Holocaust and to go and have fun," says Kramer. The film, he says, is about being a Jew in contemporary America and being "stuck with the Holocaust legacy." Although he was born a generation after the Holocaust, he says, "we are also part of the Holocaust" and responsible for teaching about it once there are no survivors left to tell the stories firsthand. He only intended the film to be a class project, and not for public viewing, but Kramer hopes the work will generate interest. This way, he says, when people see how long it's taking him to count 6,000,000 grains of rice, they'll better understand the number of Holocaust victims. He admits sitting and counting rice for two hours a day for several months has made him the butt of jokes. "People tend to laugh at first... Once they start to realize how many people died they don't laugh anymore... It really makes them think." To the Nazis, he continues, "the Jews were just grains of rice that they had to count up and jar and label as soon as possible."
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