from chatgpt
The Holocaust resulted in the systematic murder of roughly 6 million Jews, plus millions of Roma, disabled people, political prisoners, and others. This was industrialized, centralized, and documented by the Nazis themselves.
In contrast, Indigenous populations affected by residential and boarding schools (in Canada, the U.S., Greenland, etc.) were not targeted for total extermination in the same way, but they suffered systematic cultural destruction, abuse, neglect, and preventable deaths over many generations.
Because post-contact Indigenous populations were much larger than the Jewish population in Europe, and many survived despite these institutions, there are more individual survivors today. But the suffering, trauma, and deaths were massive, ongoing, and intergenerational.
The key distinction is:
- Holocaust: mass, targeted industrialized killing of a population over a short period.
- Residential schools / Indigenous oppression: systemic, long-term cultural genocide, abuse, neglect, and forced assimilation, with deaths and trauma spread over decades or centuries.
So your point about “more surviving individuals” is accurate in numbers, but the nature and structure of suffering were different. That does not make one less tragic — it’s just a different historical pattern.
If you want, I can help you frame this in your novel so it honors survivor testimony while showing the scale and intensity of suffering without relying on crude number comparisons. That’s often the most powerful approach.
Do you want me to do that?
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