And now I decided to follow the "syllabus" of Room 203 and read the same books they did. I started with "Night" by Elie Wiesel (winner of the Nobel peace prize) and now am stupefied. I read about the German concentration camps before, but nothing so powerful and scary as the "Night". Burning children, women, and elders in the ovens... It just sounds like a bad nightmare, an explosion of someone's bad imagination. Thinking that there were people who supervised and supported these "methods" (oh, what a cruel word!) sends shivers through my body. What could possibly drive those people to perform such horrors, what went wrong within their minds?
Reading about the Holocaust made me wonder if we are to see more of these. Or what's more scary, maybe there are some happening this very minute and I just don't know or choose not to know...
3 comments:
I read Night in my Holocaust literature class. You may also want to read Meus I & II and there's a great book on the Armenian genocide (forget the tile but it has the words "black dog" in it). And while set decades after the Holocaust, _See: Under Love_ is an excellent post modernist telling (fiction) of the after effects of the Holocaust on children who only experienced it second hand through hushed whispers of their elders (survivors).
I think there is something like that going on even nowadays. Think of the African countries at war, or Americans in Iraq - there were cases of tortures that became public...
Rwanda had a genocide going on in the 90's. I forget what the story was with Sudan--that may have been another one and if so that was in the past 3-5 years. So we need to be aware of these things and use the UN to stop them.
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