A few days ago it was Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I heard a commentator on the radio suggest how someone living in Utah might put Holocaust statistics into perspective.
Approximately 11 million people were killed in the Nazi Holocaust (including 1.1 million children). Six million of those victims were Jewish.
The current population of Utah is about 3 million people, so the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust was approximately twice the population of Utah, and the total number of people killed was close to 4 times the current population of Utah.
For me, visualizing just Salt Lake City being vacant of people, all the buildings downtown and all the homes vacant, the streets with no cars moving on them, no one on the sidewalks, no one in the suburbs, and then imagining that scene all across Utah, freeways with no cars, all of Utah's cities and towns empty, all of the children gone, and then doubling that and quadrupling that vast loss of life is a helpful visual aid.