"Everybody knew."
Several of our group just watched the powerful Frontline documentary on the Rwandan genocide, "Ghosts of Rwanda." Even though it's not officially part of our program, I thought it would be worthwhile to make a space available for posting thoughts and comments, especially since tomorrow we will be viewing a documentary on Bonhoeffer's relationship to the evils of Nazism and the Holocaust. We are perhaps a little too comfortable discussing the WWII era, which for many of us is a comfortably distant past. Rwanda brings up the uncomfortable fact that anyone who lived through the 1990s lived through a genocide. I wonder what I was doing for those 100 days in which nearly a million human beings were being slaughtered. I wonder (perhaps with Kierkegaard) about the value of knowing a truth--in this case the truth that a genocide is taking place--when I am not prepared to live up to the implications of that truth. Isn't this something that I, not just America or the UN, need to be forgiven for? What do we do with our culpability and where we go from here?
Highly Recommended:
"Ghosts of Rwanda"
Highly Recommended:
"Ghosts of Rwanda"
posted by Living the Leap at 5:17 PM
1 Comments:
I got to do my seminary internship in Germany, in 1979-80. It was in Wuppertal, a city where many members of the 'Confessing Church', which resisted Hitler, lived and worked during WW2.
I noticed that people who lived through WW2 told me about the Holacaust, "We didn't know."
When I had been there long enough to have relationships with people I asked a wonderful group of church women, "But how could you not know? How could you not hear the soldiers taking away your neighbors? How could you not see them? How could not know that your neighbors' homes and apartments were empty?"
After a long silence a woman said,
"We knew. And we also knew that if we spoke up they would come to our homes that night. And we knew that they would not take us away; they would take away our children."
And then I knew that although silence is wrong, I would have almost certainly remained silent too.
I got to know some of Bonhoeffer's students and colleagues. They all spoke of the terrible choices they had to make and of how their decisions, whatever they were, 'right' or 'wrong' still haunted them.
Post a Comment
<< Home