This is a good conclusion, but I am still struggling with the concept of how we behave as travelers in difficult and emotionally charged spaces.<\/p>\n
Stop for a moment to consider something. The Holocaust was systematic murder using factory methods. Most of those killed were Jews — my people — but there were also homosexuals, the Sinti and Roma, and anyone who didn\u2019t fit the mold for the Third Reich\u2019s eugenics project. People were slaughtered using systems designed to kill them with the greatest possible efficiency.<\/p>\n
It was a horror.<\/p>\n
The memorial in Berlin was built to remind us of of that.<\/p>\n In early 2008, I went to Cambodia.<\/strong><\/p>\n I loved traveling there and ever since I learned it existed, I had wanted to visit Angkor Wat. But Cambodia was also very difficult for me. I was haunted, Cambodia made me wonder if ghosts might be real. An estimated four million people were murdered by the Khmer Rouge regime.<\/p>\n The details are the stuff of nightmares. I found the weight of history in many of the sites too much to bear. When I say I sobbed my way across Cambodia, I am not being hyperbolic, it is the truth. At the Toul Sleng prison in the heart of Phnom Pehn, I was inconsolable with grief after looking at one row of mug shots in the first room. There was nothing graphic about the photos at all, they were simple head shots of prisoners.<\/p>\n My husband patiently took me by the hand to a park bench in the walled courtyard where I wept until the first batch of ghosts were gone, and then, we went across the street to get a cup of tea in a leafy garden cafe where I cried some more.<\/p>\n We had been to the Killing Fields earlier that day. A cargo of tourists unloaded after we\u2019d been there for about twenty minutes. I alternated between staring, mute with despair, out into the barren fields where so many people were murdered, and circling the pile of skulls encased in the monument. I could hear children laughing in a school yard down the road and thought, “It can’t be good for them to be near all this death.”<\/p>\n As I came around one side of the monument, I saw an Australian couple — both of them in beach wear — he was positioning her for a smiling vacation snapshot in front of the battered skulls of murdered Cambodians.<\/p>\n I went hot with anger.<\/p>\n My husband came around from the other side and looked at my face, he must have seen something was wrong. I gritted my teeth and said, \u201cI am going to lose it. Right here. Right now. Look at them.\u201d Not for the first time, he took me by the hand and led me away. I sat on a bench with our guide, a kind young woman.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know why, but certain people can\u2019t take these places,\u201d she said. “I’ve seen this before, but you’ve got a bad case of it.”<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the ghosts,\u201d I said. \u201cThis country is full of ghosts. How is it they can not see the ghosts?\u201d<\/p>\n I have been traveling and blogging about it for a long time.<\/strong><\/p>\n Long enough that I have seen this kind of blundering before. Long enough that I have stumbled around the edges of it myself.<\/p>\n The last Queen of Hawaii, Liliuokalani, was held prisoner in \u2018Iolani Palace during the overthrow of her nation in 1895. Her room is plain, there is an iron bedstead and a dresser. There\u2019s a bird cage.<\/p>\n I wondered about the bird cage on my blog. It was a metaphor for so many things, and the Queen was a song writer, she wrote Aloha \u2018Oe. My post ended up on a Hawaiian culture forum where I got heat for not doing my research.<\/p>\n \u201cOf course she kept song birds, it\u2019s one of the few pleasures she was allowed during her detainment. Could you not have asked someone before speculating? Before jumping to your own ideas? There\u2019s real history here to refer to.\u201d<\/p>\n I thought my critics rather touchy and also, I was embarrassed. I thought about the Native Hawaiians who still mourn for the loss of their sovereign nation. The story of the end of Hawaiian independence is a current day tragedy for many people who live in the islands. My interpretation of the Queen’s birdcage is not relevant to those wronged by history in that very same place.<\/p>\n My critics were right.<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019ve been told that taking offense at a passing bit of misbehavior at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is \u201cbullshit\u201d and \u201cdebatable.\u201d I\u2019ve also been called \u201cself-righteous\u201d and told that I should “Let it go”.<\/p>\n When I think about the Hawaiians who have told me stories of how unwelcome they were in Waikiki\u2014a place that was once a retreat for Hawaiian royalty\u2014I can not imagine telling them to \u201clet it go.\u201d<\/p>\n When I picture the faces of a generation of Cambodians who have no grandparents — the country is so young — I can not imagine telling them to \u201clet it go.\u201d<\/p>\n When I remember the old ladies with the tattooed numbers on their forearms in the kitchens and laundry rooms in Israel where I worked as a kibbutz volunteer, the words \u201clet it go\u201d won’t form in my brain, much less my mouth.<\/p>\n I have in-laws in Graz, Austria. On a walk through the city when my parents were visiting from the US, we came across a guide giving a tour in English. She was pointing out a tombstone, engraved in Hebrew, embedded into the wall of a government building. \u201cWe don\u2019t know how this got here,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe know exactly how it got here,\u201d I said, in English, loud enough so the guide’s charges could hear me. \u201cGraz was a Nazi hotbed during World War II. The Jewish population was decimated, their artifacts destroyed. Tombstones from the Jewish cemetery were used as construction materials, as road pavers. This one\u2019s just in a very visible location — who knows how many others there are throughout the city?\u201d<\/p>\n I placed a rock on the arch of the gravestone, it\u2019s what Jews do instead of leaving flowers. The guide was furious with me. But she was wrong. It seemed impossible to me that she did not know how this tombstone got here.<\/p>\n History is not something we just let go of, it is not something we should<\/strong> let go of. Actions that diminish the importance of history \u2014 turning a birdcage into a metaphor, a boneyard into a backdrop — cause the facts to disappear, leaving us nothing to learn from.<\/p>\n We know why the stones are there. They cannot speak for themselves.<\/p>\n It is our job to tell their stories or they will be lost forever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" An internet friend recently committed what I thought a colossal blunder \u2014 he disregarded the published rules at a Holocaust memorial in Berlin and then, blogged about it. With pictures. I was critical because he failed to provide social and historical context for his actions. Truthfully, I was less offended than I was surprised and … <\/p>\n![\"Skulls](\"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/cambodia.jpg\" "\\"Skulls")