I grew up with memories of the Holocaust being of Jewish descent. I live with a history taught to me, beginning at the tender age of 10 replete with gruesome imagery, even though my specific ancestry left Europe in the 1920s. They were able to avoid extermination at Hitler’s hands but not from the pogroms, killings, and violent persecutions of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, which still occurs across the European continent today (in different forms).
My life has been deeply shaped by the notion that by just being who I am I could be expelled (or killed) from any place at any time. My mother and her family, whose father and his own siblings settled in Cuba after leaving Russia, were also forced to leave the isle when Castro took power in the 1950s. My entire identity has been shaped through these associations as a victim.
I have traveled to a great many places, including Bangladesh (working on women’s rights) and Cambodia (studying genocide prevention and human rights). For the past three months, I was in Bosnia i Herzegovina (BiH) for my master’s research about the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial Center & Cemetery. I was primarily based in Srebrenica for the entire summer, interspersed with visits to various communities and former sites of atrocities, including painful locations in Omarska, Trnopolje, and Kozarac (all three are in the vicinity of Prijedor in NW BiH); Tuzla; Brčko; Teočak; Jasenovac and Stara Gradina (both near Dubica, where the larger Jasenovac WWII concentration camp is memorialized differently in BiH and Croatia, divided simply by a natural river border); and the villages of the Srebrenica municipality.
To say that I do not understand the complexities of life in BiH is more nuanced that a traditionally black and white vantage point. I can never truly understand, no matter how much I learn, read (and I have read hundreds of books about this country), explore, and observe–I am not from BiH. That is the paradox of my work. But, I have come to appreciate what the universal similarities of people’s lives are no matter where they live, what religion they practice, or who they are. We all have blood, hearts, bones, hearts. Friends, families, colleagues, lives. And souls.
While to the outsider it may appear that I am/was more on a journey to find myself especially based on my last few posts, these personal insights are true for those of us who are sensitive to the lessons that these journeys afford. For me, though, they come at a time in my life where I have the maturity, insights, and skills to propel them into action. And that is how I am coming to define my life’s work while educating those persons around me who care to know.
During the BiH war, no one from the governments of international community understood the nuances on-the-ground and so the dying and suffering only intensified. There are some who did take offense. One person at least found her way into the current US administration (Samantha Powers who wrote the book “A Problem From Hell”), currently pushing for intervention on behalf of the protesting civilians in Libya and Syria. (Obviously, this is not the only reason or motivation for US involvement, but that is a separate discussion.)
My blog is therefore to explain to people in easily understood terms what I see, feel, and, above all, bear witness to. Otherwise, we are collectively condemned to repeat the horrors of the past. So, with that, my next blog will focus upon how I chose to end my field research sojourn: in Oświęcim, Poland and a visit back to the site and hellish horrors of my own inherited ethnic/religious genocide: Auschwitz-Birkenau.
See Samantha Power: “A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide”
http://www.whorunsgov.com/Profiles/Samantha_Power
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