{"id":14143,"date":"2022-11-30T07:02:06","date_gmt":"2022-11-30T15:02:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=14143"},"modified":"2022-12-04T20:28:38","modified_gmt":"2022-12-05T04:28:38","slug":"message-of-the-day-human-rights-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=14143","title":{"rendered":"Message of the Day: Human Rights"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Monuments To The Unthinkable<\/i>, The Atlantic Magazine, December 2022 Issue<\/span><\/p>\n

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The cover story in the December Issue of The Atlantic Magazine, Monuments to the Unthinkable<\/em>, poses the question: “America still can\u2019t figure out how to memorialize the sins of our history. What can we learn from Germany?”<\/p>\n

The author, Clint Smith, is a Black American author who has been studying, writing about the history of, and struggling with these issues for many years.<\/p>\n

He recently decided to travel to Germany, specifically to Berlin and Dacau, to experience first-hand how the Germans have memorialized the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

His article is a masterpiece of insight into and description of historical fact and experience–past and present–which is nearly rendered indescribable by the very nature of the subject matter.<\/p>\n

One of the central aspects of the article is the Memorial To The Murdered Jews Of Europe in Berlin.<\/p>\n

His words had a special resonance for us. As we have written about previously, two of us were in Berlin recently, mainly to support, research and film the refugees from another genocide in process–in Ukraine<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We visited and filmed at the\u00a0Memorial To The Murdered Jews Of Europe<\/a> on Good Friday, kindly admitted because of our purpose, as the last two entrants that day.<\/p>\n

The following excerpts from the article reflect our own experience as well:<\/p>\n

The memorial to <\/span>the Murdered Jews of Europe, recognized as the official Holocaust memorial of Germany, sits in the center of downtown Berlin, just south of the famous Brandenburg Gate and a block away from the site of the bunker where Hitler died by suicide. Designed by the American Jewish architect Peter Eisenman and spanning 200,000 square feet, it consists of rows of 2,711 concrete blocks that range in height from eight inches to more than 15 feet tall. The space resembles a graveyard, a vast cascade of stone markers with no names or engravings on their facade. The ground beneath them dips and rises like waves.<\/em><\/p>\n

The memorial is significant not only for its size and location\u2014the equivalent, in the United States, would be the placement of thousands of stone blocks in Lower Manhattan to honor those subjected to chattel slavery, or on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., to remember the victims of Indigenous genocide\u2014but also because it was constructed with the political support and full financial backing of the German government. …<\/em><\/p>\n

When I visited the memorial, the sky was overcast, its long sweep of endless gray matching the color of the stone columns beneath it. A group of young people took selfies in front of the columns, some throwing up peace signs or puckering their lips as they sat cross-legged on top of a stone. Two women stood in between the shadows, their faces covered in tears, and held each other\u2019s hands. A class of students looked up at their teacher as he explained what lay behind him, their eyes moving from him to the columns to one another with a silent solemnity. Three small children played hide-and-seek among the columns, shrieking in delight when they discovered one another. The memorial had become a part of the city\u2019s landscape; different people engaged with the space in different ways. …<\/em><\/p>\n

… I couldn\u2019t help but appreciate the scale and scope of the space. I couldn\u2019t help but admire how centrally located it was in the city. There was no missing it. There was no avoiding it. No other nation on Earth has done anything quite like it. Not the United States for its genocide of Indigenous peoples or centuries of enslavement; not France or Britain for their histories of colonial violence; not Japan for its imperial projects across eastern Asia. …<\/em><\/p>\n

Walking through the monument\u2019s columns amid the cacophony of the city all around me felt haunting, but appropriately so. It is a space meant to haunt, meant to overwhelm. But beneath the stones, in the memorial\u2019s underground museum, there was only silence.<\/em><\/p>\n

I stepped into one of the subterranean exhibits. The room was dark but for illuminated glass panels underfoot. Other visitors moved through the space like shadows, each of us silent, looking down at the glowing glass beneath us. Below each pane were letters, diary entries, and accounts written by people who had been murdered in the Holocaust.<\/em><\/p>\n

The full article, and links to it and other related articles, are here:<\/p>\n

MONUMENTS TO THE UNTHINKABLE<\/a><\/p>\n

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By Clint Smith,\u00a0Photographs by Marc Wilson, The Atlantic Magazine, December 2022 Issue<\/p>\n

America still can\u2019t figure out how to memorialize the sins of our history. What can we learn from Germany?<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial site, in southern Germany\u00a0(Marc Wilson for The Atlantic)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The first memorials<\/span> to the Holocaust were the bodies in concentration camps.<\/p>\n