"That's all human beings are- just blind people," from Our Town.

When you read about genocide the sun is not supposed to shine. You shouldn’t savor a great cup of coffee or feel the spring chirping of birds warm your heart. Blue sky is not supposed to greet you when you learn about the Rwandan genocide in the early 90’s. You shouldn’t find a warm bath soothing or share laughter with friends over dinner one evening. Movies shouldn’t make you cry or laugh or angry when there is such horror in this world occurring. Everything and everyone should stop at once.

I have taught the Holocaust and Anne Frank’s diary for three years and though the material is not fresh for me, each year I am profoundly moved. I show a video that includes the only known moving footage of Anne Frank. She’s standing at a window in a street in Holland watching a wedding ceremony on the street below. The cameraman filmed the newlyweds then turned the camera up and caught Anne. She smiles and laughs and turns to someone calling her inside. There is no sound and it lasts a few seconds. And each time I have seen it, I feel a great sadness overtake me and this immensity sits upon me; this girl was real and lived in that moment, in real time, and when I consider what befell her, her sister and mother, and the millions of others, I fight to hold back tears. When it plays in my classroom I don’t watch the scene though I point it out to students. I have watched this particular video and highlighted this portion to students twenty, maybe thirty times. And it always reaches me.

The book I found in the library is called A Season of Blood. It follows several South African journalists into Rwanda in June of 1994. They are filming a documentary for the BBC on the Hutu genocide against the Tutsis and sympathetic Hutus. It reads like a journal and the images are beautifully written. Most of the time it is too much to bear and it doesn’t sink in, or I don’t let it. It is much easier to believe things like this do not happen, or that they do not matter because they are a second, third-rate news story in the states, because they happen in a third-world county in a third-world continent, because these atrocities are not happening to us, because if we stopped to pay attention to the millions of screaming voices we’d fall down or explode out of compassion, guilt, sadness. You may find hope in the voices of Rwandans who wish for unification, for an end to ethnic battles, for peace and mutual understanding, but it is a faint hope buried beneath the hacked and gashed bodies of millions. When I learned that the Tutsis enacted their revenge a year later with their own genocide of the hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees, the faint hope disappeared with the smoke from the burning Hutu bodies, shot down by Tutsi soldiers.

If I dared to stop and let this all sink in, if I let the images and stories of the Tutsis and Hutus and Jews filter through my brain, into my body and senses, I’d be paralyzed with horror; as it is, at times I feel moments so overwhelmingly sad that I want to cry out, to explode, to run and scream at the world, to place blame, to find some place to put my outrage that these soulless deeds can be committed in the first place. While I yell at students about bringing pencils to class, help other students understand a Shakespearean sonnet between two characters, work on conflict identification in short stories with other students, find time to rewrite assessment tests, enter data to create charts for previous assessments, and the seventeen million other things that fill up my days, I try to help young people see these horrors so that they might stop them. So I read to students about Rwandan butchering; I show them pictures of the most awful images of victims in concentration camps; I show them videos of starving people in camps and stacks of bodies in mass graves. They need to be shocked out of their malaise, re-sensitized, and when they tell me they feel bad for what the Jews went through, when they recoil from the images I breathe slightly easier because they have to see the injustice, they have to be moved to tears, rage, sickness, and disgust by all of it, by the violence itself, and they have to question how this could happen, why this could happen, and how anyone could think of and do such things. There is still hope if young people are still learning about awful injustices...I can only keep hoping that they are moved to do something about all of it.

I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know where else to put all these emotions and ideas. I did not witness any of these atrocities and yet it is as if I can see the killing, hear the confused and muffled cries, see the woman hide underneath hundreds of hacked bodies and then crawl out eighteen hours later covered in blood and a pain too deep to understand or cure.

But tomorrow comes and sleep awaits. I will make a cup of good coffee in the morning and enjoy sports talk radio on my way to work. 140 young minds will fill and empty my classroom. The sun may shine tomorrow and reveal blue skies, and who knows what the tides may bring in.

Anything else is for the poets and the saints to try and make sense of. Where is hope in such horror?