Yes, one of the things that upsets me about is that every documentory, every news broadcast, every newspaper report that covered it showed some poor individual, either Jew or German, who had been part of this and were having their memories dragged up.
[Wonders if anyone saw the last part of her previous post]
To me, these personal testimonies are far more relevant than any government platitudes and promises. To truly understand the magnitude of something like this, you must put a human face on it. For me, that 'face' was the survivors I have met, and my High School history teacher, who was Jewish, and had been an intelligence officer during WWII. He told us what it was like, from his viewpoint, as a Jew, to hear about the liberation of the death camps. And, until that liberation came: NO ONE KNEW. Not even SIS, SHEAF, or any of the so-called intelligence operations. As one of the survivors at the memorial service said, "We were all alone."
Guru, Din, my feeling is until you put a human face to some tragedy like this, it's like remembering ancient history. For instance, when the walls of Jericho came tumbling down, no doubt, a large number of people were killed, but when we read about it in the Bible, do we feel any emotion? Any sorrow? No, we hardly spare them a thought. This is the danger with the Holocaust, and other mass exterminations. Eventually, the last survivor dies, and the details are relegated to the history texts, and become devoid of the power to shock or cause anger. It is so easy to push such events away, because they are not pleasant to remember. I think having our faces rubbed in them on at least a yearly basis is very necessary to keep them alive, and to keep alive the determination to never let them happen again.
Over my lifetime, the importance of Remembrance Day (Armistice Day) has faded. We used to get the afternoon off school. Those who were Girl Guides or Boy Scouts were expected to come to school in the morning dressed in their uniforms. Some of our teachers who had fought in the war wore their Legion uniforms (Canadian Veteran's Association). We sold poppies, and there was a competition to see who could raise the most money for the Poppy Fund. At 10:30, everyone would assemble in the auditorium, listening to speeches or poems about the war. We sang "In Flander's Fields", then at 11 o'clock, observed 3 minutes of silence, followed by the playing of Taps, then O Canada.
Now, it's quite different. Generally, schools still observe the minute of silence, but the prevailing attitude in many places is that Remembrance Day glorifies war, rather than being a time to remember the dead, and say, "NEVER AGAIN!" When I taught school in Alberta during the 80's, I quizzed my Grade 6 class about the day. Hardly any of them knew it honoured the signing of the treaty that ended WWI. None of them knew anything about the horrors of trench warfare of WWI: mud so deep you could drown in it, the cold, the rats, the lice. I read them poems from Robert Service's 'Rhymes of a Red Cross Man', and it was one of the few times you could have heard a pin drop in that class. (Service had been an ambulance driver during WWI, and his poetry describes the horrors of the war in detail. Very, very different from his Yukon poems, like Sam McGee.)
Nothing quite equals the power of a personal testimony. I was just reading yesterday how Yul Brynner's anti-smoking message has been one of the most effective commercials the Cancer Society has ever done.
So, Din, Guru, if it makes you uncomfortable to hear these testimonies: GOOD! It's supposed to.