Last spring I went to the new museum at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. I’d seen Yad Vashem in its old, pre-2005 incarnation, back when I was in my own old, pre-college incarnation, and I’d felt all the obvious things: angry, scared, sad, extremely Jewish.
But nothing prepared me for my adult reaction to the new museum. I suppose post-graduate life has made me more goal-oriented: With every new exhibit, I felt more and more like I should be doing something. All those sepia Jews in the photos on the walls, posing so solemnly on German street corners in 1938—they needed help, goddamn it! Someone needed to go rescue them, someone like me, flush with the privileges that life in America can grant a person if she’s lucky.
The museum spills you out onto a promontory overlooking Jerusalem. It’s supposed to inspire a sense of gratitude: At least now we have this. In my worked-up state, though, it felt like being sent to bed early. Filled with proactive, problem-solving, world-saving energy, the last thing I wanted to do was gaze at a pretty view.
Of course, nothing I could do would help anyone whose face appeared on a photo inside the museum. But it’s not as if that was the world’s last genocide. Back then the Darfur situation was just beginning to gain media attention; what about that? The view from the promontory was undeniably gorgeous, but I would have vastly preferred to see it blocked by a big table staffed by a member of the American Jewish World Service who could grab me by the shoulders and show me how to help.
The movie Beyond the Gates covers another post-Holocaust genocide: the violence that overtook Rwandan in 1994. The clip below appeared in my inbox recently with a polite request to mention it on the site. It involves a UN soldier talking about how proud he is that his Belgian grandparents housed Jews during the Holocaust. If you’ve read Phillip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families, then you know the UN’s peacekeeping force didn’t live up to such noble standards.
I haven’t seen the movie, but the response on IMDB suggests that it’ll leave you with that same frustrating urge to do something—anything—to stop a humanitarian crisis that’s already over. That’s why the American Jewish World Service link is above—and why I’ll repeat it here for good measure.
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