Comments to this post "I think an important take-away from this is to know and remember that, before the atrocities started, these hundreds of thousands of people weren't serial killers, they were good soldiers, store clerks, administration workers, clerks, etc.... people like the people around you today, every day of your life. These people didn't just fly in one day when mass-murder and torture were suddenly deemed "normal" things to do to other people. They were always there. Here's the thing you must realize: people like this are STILL there, around you, right now. By the thousands. All it would take is another slow normalization of the demonizing of a particular cross-section of your fellow citizens, and many of the people around you, that you think you know well, would step up into their roles as monsters, to repeat history once more. Starting to sound familiar yet?"
"The horror and pain in the elder woman's voice and the haunting still in her eyes just did something to me. It's like obviously the horrors and the murders and brutal treatments happened. You'd have to be really stupid and inhuman to think they didn't happen. But for me, hearing and seeing it in that lucky survivor (lucky to survive but unlucky to have been there and have vivid memories to the day she passed of old age) hearing and seeing it coming from her and off of her made it 101% real. Like, I know it happened but now I KNOW it happened, if that makes sense.
"Seeing the upper soldiers/heads of the horror just... Did something to me also. They were real. Those pics of those men are real, THEY were real, that's all of them in living flesh - though in pic form now, obviously. It's just so messed up that if we could step through those pics, we'd be standing right in front of those men - and they'd have zero pity. Zero. Curiosity, yes. But then we'd be killed for witchcraft, just appearing like that.
"I've never been to Auschwitz or any of the camps, and I don't think I could do it. To stand where victims and torturing murders stood, to see what the victims saw, to lay eyes on what the nazis looked at... I could not handle it. Then again, it would be good to go for a good reason: those who were forced to be there didn't want to go, just like I don't want to visit - but to visit would be the best way I could say, "Your suffering, trauma, horror, and even deaths, I see you. I'm from the future, but I see you. I know the hell you went through. Your voices and pleas are heard. It may be too late, but your stories are heard. I walk where you walked to remember you and keep your memory alive."
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