It's impressive, isn't it, what humans can endure? My cousins survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, and I've read extensively in Holocaust history; yet there's nothing like meeting a survivor (like my cousin Antonia or the actor Robert Clary) for bringing everything into sharp relief.
The horror of the Holocaust, and the Killing Fields, and the Gulag/Great Purges, and the Rwandan Genocide, and the Armenian Massacres, and so on -- is that each begins with such small ideas, iterated by narrow-minded people, and result in such wide-spread destruction. All one step at a time, one killing at a time, one church burning at a time, one country heaving in the throes of self-destruction at a time.
And then you put down the book, go outside, smell the spring air, see the young lovers cuddling (no matter what species), and take a deep breath. Life has a way of going on, doesn't it?
The way to show your respect is to remember. It is in remembering the names of the dead, the murdered, the horror that was perpetrated, that we fight back against the dark and show our respect to the living survivors.
Try reading Andre Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the Just (either in the original French or in the English translation) for a fictionalized approach to the Holocaust. Even twenty-five years later I can still remember lines from that novel. It was that powerful.
Almost achieved a pull-up? That's far better than I can do now. I really must get back into shape here. ;-)
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The horror of the Holocaust, and the Killing Fields, and the Gulag/Great Purges, and the Rwandan Genocide, and the Armenian Massacres, and so on -- is that each begins with such small ideas, iterated by narrow-minded people, and result in such wide-spread destruction. All one step at a time, one killing at a time, one church burning at a time, one country heaving in the throes of self-destruction at a time.
And then you put down the book, go outside, smell the spring air, see the young lovers cuddling (no matter what species), and take a deep breath. Life has a way of going on, doesn't it?
The way to show your respect is to remember. It is in remembering the names of the dead, the murdered, the horror that was perpetrated, that we fight back against the dark and show our respect to the living survivors.
Try reading Andre Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the Just (either in the original French or in the English translation) for a fictionalized approach to the Holocaust. Even twenty-five years later I can still remember lines from that novel. It was that powerful.
Almost achieved a pull-up? That's far better than I can do now. I really must get back into shape here. ;-)