Remembering

The way my intellectual curiosity is satisfied as an adult is the same as it was when I was a kid: I stumble upon a topic, leap head-on into it, find out all I can about it, and then move on to something else. Often enough though, subjects come back, even years later. For me, one of those is genocide.

I first grasped the concept in Hebrew school in grade 6, when we had a course on the Holocaust. It hadn’t touched my immediate family, who came here at the turn of the last century, so I discovered it through learning. Our teacher was a survivor herself, and she was brutally honest with us, not shielding us at all from the horror. That was the first time I understood that not everyone was good.

It came back again in my second year of university, when every course I took and every paper I wrote about concerned mass death, terror, and the very worst of humanity. Again I focused on the Holocaust, voraciously reading memoirs and histories. What struck me this time was the industrialization, the planning, the pseudo-scientific justifications, and worst of all, the actions of those who stood by but who knew what was going on.

In the last couple of years, I have turned to Rwanda. Dark as it is, I can’t stop reading about the massacre of Tutsis, how neighbour was able to kill neighbour face to face, how the entire world turned away and let it happen. It is that last question that has stuck on my mind. Hitler watched what happened to the Armenians in 1915 and took notes. It always seems to be “Never again. Again and again, and again.” I wonder why we never learn, and more importantly, what we can do as individuals to try to prevent it from happening yet another time.

Let us begin with education, and at the very least, remembering. The fact that this subject moves me intensely is one thing; we are also fortunate enough to be hosting Barbara Coloroso, who will discuss her new book Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide. This author is famous for her books on bullying, and this one is just an extension of that. She argues that the extreme version of bullying is genocide, and the roles everyone plays in that act perfectly match schoolyard behaviour. You have your perpetrators, victims, cheering squad, bystanders and a tiny few who try to stop it.

It is important for this library to be a resource on this global topic, not just because we can count many in our membership who were touched personally by genocide. This is everyone’s concern, everyone’s problem, everyone’s tragedy.

Barbara Coloroso speaks at the Library at 7:30 p.m. on May 29th. Tickets are $3.00.