The silence itself is a form of continued murder. How can we understand that moment, that mind, those circumstances?Ĭonfronted with such a horror, can we ever believe again in the Enlightenment dream of a rational, humane humanity? Europe remains haunted by the act, its victims and the silence. They haunt us and therefore change the future they linger in the memory but that does not give us access to them. All we can do is enter into a sort of attentiveness in which we try to grasp the experience of the victims and the perpetrators, knowing that is ultimately impossible, for although such things happen in a particular time and history, they transcend it. With events like these, the accumulation of knowledge does not result in understanding. We cannot be naïve about this event, artistically, socially or politically. One such event is the Shoah or holocaust of European Jewry in the Second World War. They condemn us to travel in a haunted land looking for meaning and redemption without ever allowing us to think that we will arrive at our destination. They do not allow us to jump the tracks and take up a new journey. Some things are such deep traumas to the soul they become gouged in memory. The experience of History, personal or national, can be an experience of haunting.
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