When I came in second place on a popular syndicated television quiz show several years ago, I also came up short sartorially. I was dressed in a coat and tie that I thought looked sharp for TV, but my shoes were more appropriate for a tennis court. I had to wear white sneakers because I'd packed one dark dress shoe but left its mate sitting on the bed in my apartment two thousand miles away.
I've travelled often since then and have never failed to pack both of the shoes in any pair I wanted to take along. Although I'd like to think this is because I'm smart enough to have learned from my televised mistep, it's probably more because packing cannot be a casual process ever again because I've gone through the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
The museum is a magnificent structure packed with artifacts from the systematic attempts of Adolf Hitler and his cohorts to eliminate those people they believed were not human. Contemporary historians have preserved the memories of the Jews and other victims with caring that matches in magnitude the brutality the Nazis applied to eradicating them.
The belongings of those who fell to Third Reich genocides are like so much about the Nazi Holocaust: staggering. Hitler's hate killed legions. Stacks of shoes they once wore make impossible piles in one room. Another space holds so many clothes stripped from the victims that there seems no room for air.
The scope of everything makes breathing difficult, but it makes understanding even more so. Human minds can make sense of many of the infinities of the universes, but our brains reach their limits long before we can grasp the implications of the horrors the Nazis inflicted, of the horrors we are capable of inflicting. As the writer H.P. Lovecraft suggested, it is a mercy that our minds cannot correlate their contents.
The museum's designers have transcended the limits of understanding in a way that is brilliant. It is, without exaggeration, perfectly inspired. They provide each visitor with a booklet at the entrance which contains the biography of one person who faced Nazi atrocities. Each booklet is different because Hitler's efficiency ensured that there could be variety. Your person might have found the strength or the luck to endure while the victim whose life is suggested in the booklet given to the next person through the museum's door might have been crushed by the staggering odds against survival.
As you look at a pile of too many shoes or a stack of too many clothes, you find yourself wondering about one shoe or about a single garment. You ask yourself: Could that have been worn by the person to whose fate this little booklet links me? It makes moving what would otherwise be numbing.
I fear that in trying to open ourselves to coping with our grief in ways that are healthy, we have gone too far. Many public displays of emotion strike me as suspiciously ostentatious and make me think we've placed too high a premium on expression. When we burst into tears when our favorite doesn't win an Olympic medal, for example, what do we have left to convey anguish when zealots cause explosions that kill thousands, or kidnappings that kill one?
But I sobbed as I stood in the Holocaust Musuem in front of a pile of suitcases that had been scattered on the ground near a train that once took people to Auschwitz. Did the person whose life was told in my booklet pack one of the suitcases that now lay at my feet? Did he cry as he did so? Was he able to pack a blanket for one of his children? Was he able to bring with him a piece of food, or anything that might have nourished hope that the Nazis might spare those he loved?
I've never been herded like cattle toward suffering and almost-certain death, but I've done what the owners of those suitcases had done. I've taken bits of myself along as I've headed someplace else. I've packed my belongings along with my hopes. But I differ from the victims of the Nazis: most of my hopes have been realized.
One hope that remains is that we can live in a world that does not tolerate genocide. It is a hope nurtured by the war crimes trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II, when humanity came together to dispel one of its darkest moments with one of its most shining. It was a time when we came together to say that dedication to our ancestries does not justify violence against the ancestries of others, that patriotism does not justify brutality. We said, "NO."
But we have let lapse our commitment to ensuring that holocausts happen never again. There have been genocides that we, the people of the world, have done little to stop. And there have been those that we have done nothing to stop.
We can do better. The ongoing war crimes trial against Slobodan Milosevic provides an opportunity unmatched since the late 1940s. We can use the momentum of the proceedings against him to fuel our actions against all those whose atrocities echo those of the Nazis. We can speak together in one voice to say that one's commitment to a nation cannot be used to excuse one's aggression against a person.
This responsibility rests on the shoulders of every human being, but it rests more heavily on those of us who live in what is often called the developed world. Our standards of living make us some of the most privileged people who have ever lived. Our comforts allow us moments in which we can contemplate fates not our own. Our open systems of government enable us to influence easily the leaders who act in our names.
So we bear a responsibility that we are blessed to bear. It is a responsibility we must carry on behalf of people who were forced to carry their suitcases to a place where they were stripped of the chance to carry anything else.
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