On 16 December 2010 23:59, Bob W <[email protected]> wrote: > [...]> > Yes of course Mike. Thanks. I must admit, they seemed quite stoic. >> Were >> > the groups of your quite young? In this day and age it seems >> teenagers >> > grow up almost too quickly what with the internet... >> >> About the same as an average, with one or two older ones. It was >> 16-20 years ago, so maybe there is something in the idea that >> youngsters today are inured. I sincerely hope not. > > I think you have to bear in mind that the camps were liberated 65 years ago. > Putting that in relation to when I was 14-16 years old that would be events > which took place in about 1905. Although people do have natural human > sympathy with other people from that long ago, I would have found it > difficult to relate to being flown overseas for a day and dragged around an > exhibition about the 1915+ genocide of the Armenians, while events such as > the Vietnam War, the Cambodian genocide, the war in Pakistan were immediate, > happening there and then, and all over the papers & TV every day. > > I don't think people become inured but it's hard to see the value of this > when so many things are happening right now which we're not doing much about > and which seem to show that we have learned nothing from the genocides of > the 20th century.
As I and Steve said, there aren't many answers there. But the reality of being in the place where it happened, plus seeing the stuff that belonged to the people (even though I knew it was coming) really hit me. I imagine that one would get the same effect from a Cambodian ossuary or many other types of memorial. Maybe I'm just hyper-emotional (or maybe it's because there is at least a distant possibilty that relatives of mine went through the process) but I found that being present removed the event from the mental storage box and dragged the reality of it into the daylight. I found it one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life, as did most of the people I was with. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
