The Importance of Bearing Witness

The Aspen Times (CO) ^ | May 8, 2014 | Melanie Sturm

[Aspenhuskerette]

There are childhood memories so penetrating they run like movie reels in the mind’s eye, molding our character.

My vintage 8mm features my European-born grandmother turning tearful and tongue-tied upon mention of her family, lost in the Holocaust. Her heartbreak, and the gruesome photos I ogled in my parents’ edition of “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” were literally mind-boggling.

When I was 13, Holocaust survivor Gerda Klein appeared in my biopic, helping me Think Again about the unfathomable.

Like a narrator, she recounted her death-defying odyssey from an idyllic childhood through ghettos, slave-labor camps and a three-month “death march” en route to liberation by the American officer who became her husband.

Her story teaches that hope is powerful and morality is a choice — even in the face of monstrous evil. Most importantly, bearing witness to good and evil is the way moral people deliver a better world to our children

[Aspenhuskerette]

Doesn't this describe so much of what's happening today? From the column:

In her famous commentary on the Adolf Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe the conformist tendencies of people who don’t consider the consequences of their actions or inactions. “The sad truth,” Arendt wrote, “is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”