Obligation

Srebrenica. There really are no words to describe the place. Even days later I am still trying to process what I witnessed and cannot think of any words that can properly do it the justice it deserves. While there, I don’t think I spoke a single worde. I couldn’t bring myself to speak. In fact, I don’t believe many of us in the group spoke at all that day.

My sadness turned into pure anger when we spoke to the Genocide survivor in the cemetary. While he was speaking he mentioned that he feels as though he must keep speaking out about what happened to him and his family. He pointed to where his twin brother and his father’s graves are. Only by what can be described as pure luck or divine intervention did he not also wind up buried next to them.

But why must he do this? Continue to open old wounds again and again and again? Fairness does not exist. Justice now feels as though it is a foreign concept. There is no proper justice here. If there were, we would force those who committed these heinous crimes to speak publicly about what they did over and over until every person on this earth knows what they’ve done. Let them be tortured repeatedly by telling these stories. Let the public look into the eyes of evil. Let them be paraded through the streets and looked at as what they are: pure evil. 

But that won’t happen. People like him must continue to tell their story in the face of denial and resistance. He is told that he is not the survivor of genocide because women and children were not victims. He is told to let it go. To shut up and go away. And yet he can’t. He feels this obligation to keep going. “It gets easier,” he says. I don’t know if I believe him, but I want to. I really want to.