How Will You Remember?

International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2020

What does it sound like when 11 million lives are ended over the course of just a few short years at the hands of a state system based on fascism and hate? Perhaps, as Terrence Des Pres writes in The Survivor it is simply “an endless silent scream rising to a sky forever heedless of man’s anguish.” Close your eyes. Listen carefully. Reach for it: millions of silent screams drifting through the air all at once. Do you hear it yet? Do you also hear the sound of your heart breaking open?

Over the past 3 years, I have read countless books about genocide ranging from memoirs of those who survived the Holocaust to tomes about what happened in Rwanda to thousands of pages of meticulous research chronicling the genocide of Indigenous nations in the United States and much more. Each of the works I’ve read has influenced my creative endeavors and crawled inside my very person hood.

Yet, the work that I find myself thinking most deeply about today, January 27th, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, is the aforementioned title, The Survivor. In this book in 1979, Des Pres wrote:

“We live in an age of genocide, a time of willingness to remove humanity in chunks from the path of this or that policy.”