i was just thinking recently, it is quite simple and well within anyone's reach to really sympathise with a person's plight. one can feel intense sorrow and sick revulsion at the horrors of say the Holocaust or war... i do. i feel v much indeed for the victims of Hitler's 'final solution'. it turns my soul cold and hollow when i try to grapple with the enormity of the numbers who were murdered; i feel sick to my core when i remember that much of what happened to the victims was meditated...

but no matter how sad and deeply one can feel for them, it can never truly be empathy, for the simple reason that we did not experience it. a friend's heartache after a failed relationship, yes, maybe, but not this. it struck me hard while i was reading a Holocaust survivor's memoir that : my god, it really, actually happened to him! and there i was lying comfortably in my bed, the air-conditioning on and it struck me with a pang that no matter how much i want to feel for them i cannot, because i cant, i wasn't there.

what struck me most when i was reading one memoir was the author's simple assertion that his bk, unlike the wealth of Holocaust literature out there, was not meant to be a story of the strength of the human spirit, not a story of survivial aspiring to be anything glorious, but rather, simply, it was just his story...

another thing that resonated, in the 5 or so memoirs ive read, was the one fact that stood out... the truth that they were denied the right to live.... not one bk omitted that fact, not one author neglected to tell it... so few words to read, so few words to describe it, but horrifying, chilling beyond words, such that simplicity is its best and only guise - stark, naked, unavoidable...

those were pple, like u and me, children, mothers, fathers, grandparents, uncles, aunties, friends, strangers, simple ordinary human beings, but with only 1 'flaw' that was race... if it was frightening then, to the stunned post-war world, what is more horrifying is that such racial discrimination and genocide is still present in this 'modern' 'enlightened' 'educated' 21st century. whatever happened to "never again genocide"... and even then, as a term it has been used too frequently, that what it stood for: a declaration of justice, a promise to protect, a reminder (of the past) and for the future, an insistence for the basic right to live... is now sullied, corrupted... just look at Rwanda, Armenia, Serbia, Albania... it doesnt end does it?

we as a species, who pride ourselves on having evolved into 'intelligent' life only shame ourselves...