Remembering genocide

Inroads: A Journal of Opinion, Summer-Fall, 2008 by Don Cayo

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No need for words ... Let the silence speak for you.

--A visitor to Washington's Holocaust Museum

My travels over the last year have taken me to some of the vilest places on earth. I don't mean landscapes that are ugly or unpleasant or unsafe. No, these places are home to such acts of evil that they are no longer fit as venues for ordinary life. So sullied have they become in human memory that their only remaining role is to serve as reminders of how low our species can stoop, how thin the layer of what we call civilization really is.

How well do they serve that role? What lessons do they hold for the world? What lessons do they hold specifically for me, a privileged citizen of the world who has never been touched by war and violence?

My first stop, in March 2007, was at Tuol Sleng, the high-school-cum-prison in Phnom Penh, and at the nearby Killing Field where Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge minions murdered 20,000 Cambodians, many of whom had first passed through Tuol Sleng. In January 2008 I visited the chillingly efficient Auschwitz I and its sprawling suburban death camp, Birkenau, where the Nazis killed as many as a million and a half men, women and children, mostly Jews. Two weeks later I was in Rwanda. I hired a taxi in Kigali and set out on a self-guided tour of two simple churches in rural Rwanda, one small and one large. It was in these infamous buildings that frenzied machete-wielding Hutus beat their way though barred doors and windows, even gouged holes in the brick walls, so they could hack and slash to death thousands of their Tutsi neighbours who had put their faith in the sanctity of their church and in God.

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I also visited two powerful memorials to the world's better-known genocides and their millions of victims. The first was the solemn United States Holocaust Museum in Washington. The second was the smaller, simpler but just as evocative Genocide Memorial Centre in Kigali.

I wish I could tell you that this series of visits had its origins in high-minded determination to track evil to its roots and probe the dark depths of the human soul. In reality, the genesis was much more mundane. This was a quest born by accident, a byproduct of an unusual itinerary. Other duties were taking me to Cambodia, to Rwanda, to Washington and within cheap-flight side-trip range of Poland. This happenstance prodded me to overcome my reluctance to witness these sites of horror that I knew only from the printed page. That plus the belief that it is the duty of every human being to think about evil from time to time and it would be wrong to pass up an opportunity to enhance that reflection.

I came away from these visits with a dull ache in my head and in my heart. What I saw, read and heard underlined what all of us know but I, for one, have too rarely thought about in depth: that some flaw in our species not only allows these kinds of things to happen--it makes them commonplace (see page 132).

I set out with a lot of questions. I accepted from the beginning that I would never be able to fully grasp what goes on in the minds of the people who conceive and orchestrate horrors such as these. But I thought it important to try to understand how the leaders of oppressive regimes can persuade so many ordinary people to buy into their designs, or at least to keep their heads low and say nothing.

I thought it just as important, perhaps more so, to personalize my reflections. It's easy for people like me to maintain lofty convictions when we live coddled in one of the safest countries on earth. But if my life unrolled in a different time and a different place, would I find the courage to act in the way my beliefs demand? Or would I too be complicit in such crimes ?

Moving beyond the hypothetical, what of my actual responsibility as a citizen not only of Canada, but also of the world? If the perpetrators of these vile acts are guilty of the ultimate crime against humanity--and they are--then what of the rest of us? Do I and my generation share the guilt for turning our heads away from the unending chain of horrific events that have happened in almost every corner of the world?

Finally, how can we--as individuals and as the world at large--draw lessons from these failures of humanity? How can we ensure--or at least improve the odds--that they don't happen again? All of us, ordinary folks and world leaders, always vow "Never again" when confronted with such horrors. How do we ensure that, the next time we say it, we finally mean it?

You won't find many answers in the paragraphs below. But these visits crystallized the important questions in my mind.

The amusement park of evil

Some people walk through these sites in tears, many in thoughtful silence.

And then there are the louts. One jerk argued loudly with his guide who wanted him to turn off his cell phone in Birkenau, and I couldn't help hearing two loud-mouthed women dissect the petty dramas of their lives as we stood in line to see where tens of thousands had died in the crematorium. I saw a man sneak a smoke behind one of the less visited cell blocks at Auschwitz. I chafed at the gigglers with their private jokes, at the know-it-all doggedly expounding this theory and that, at the shameless picture-takers who popped their flashes everywhere they were asked not to--even inside the Auschwitz crematorium.