Reactions in the Face of Genocide

I didn't realize until today how differently culture's deal with genocide. I've been to Yad Vashem, and to Washington's Holocaust Memorial Museum, and I never even considered that one could deal with genocide differently. During Birthright this winter break, after visiting Yad Vashem we sat as a group and discussed what we had seen, discussed the idea of genocide, the implications of genocide, and what responsibilities' humanity holds in the face of genocide. Today though, there was none of this. Not because our leaders didn't organize it, not because we didn't know what to say, but because we couldn't. There was silence, only silence, punctuated quietly by repressed sobs. Yad Vashem is moving, it is personal and illicits reactions, but it allows for intellectual reactions, for the thought process to continue, for one to see, remember, and attempt to understand. There was no intellectualizing what we saw today, no understanding; it was difficult to even feel. There was the stench, the overwhelming stench, and the vision of arms helplessly attempting to shield the face from one's awful fate, infants clutching mothers, hair still visible on heads mutilated by a machete's blow. The whole world stopped, it was so shocking. No movement, no thought, hardly even feelings. Just naseau and fear.

The juxtaposition of the beauty of G-d and the cruelty of nature was difficult to grasp. Rarely, if ever, have I seen a land so beautiful, so touched with light and growth, life and vitality. But these awful visions, these bodies, the thousands, almost a million lives lost, are incomprehensible, especially somewhere so spectacular.

I'm not sure what the memorial accomplished. I'm not saying, and I definitely don't believe that it accomplished nothing, but I'm not sure it was a better means of representing genocide then those used in other parts of the world. Without a doubt, it succeeded tenfold in eliciting an emotional response, but a response of disgust, fear, and an overwhelming wordless sense of pain, loss, despair. I felt almost wrong, walking through the bodies, seeing the forms, covered in lyme with flesh and clothing still attached, still posed since the moment of their death. Is it disrespectful? Does it help one remember, without becoming lost in death, destruction, and despair? Does it assist in the promotion of peace? The answers to these questions I do not know, and doubt I ever will. The one thing I do know, and know I will know forever, is the vision of the mangled bodies in their final rest, the fear and despair conveyed by body language unchanged, still expressive, after 15 long years.

--Jory Hanselman