"A Mother and Her Baby," 1945, Pencil on paper by Zinovii Tolkatchev (Copyright ©2004 Yad Vashem The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority)
Here in the Boston area it's Patriots' Day and All-Marathon-All-The-Time on the airwaves. If it weren't for Michele at A Small Victory, we wouldn't have known today is also Holocaust Remembrance Day.
We just happened to stumble into a remarkable TV show we hadn't heard of before this morning on the History Channel, a high-production-value World War II series called "Band of Brothers." It was the episode titled "Why We Fight." Could anything be more apropos? In the course of the show the men are preoccupied with the minutia of their own lives. Then, driving toward their next assignment, they come out of the forest into a clearing to confront something they cannot, at first, comprehend. It is a concentration camp, but in those days, who had ever heard of such a thing? Who could believe anyone in that day and age could be capable of such barbarism? Even today, people seem to prefer to avert their eyes rather than confront the evil that hovers just beyond the campfire.
Michele directs our eyes to another evil, the Oklahoma City bombing of exactly nine years ago today:
I tried to imagine myself in the place of those parents who lost their little babies that day. I couldn't. I could not, in a million years, image what it was like to be them, to see the lifeless bodies of their children carried out of the rubble in the arms of rescuers.
It's been nine years. How quickly things fade from the big picture. I can find very few news articles about the anniversary. So far, nothing on TV. A Google news search doesn't bring up much. I wonder how soon 9/11 will become the same -- just another date, just another memorial service, something relegated to page 12. I understand the need to not obsess over these things -- but I do not understand the need to let it go, or the need to push it away as time goes by.
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