The Monument

October 10, 2007

Just a few days ago, I was in an eastern European country for a medical conference. On the last day of my visit, one of my hosts took me to a monument near the capital city. The monument covered perhaps several acres of ground, and more lives than I could imagine. It was a monument to the people who had perished at a leader’s hands. There were small plots of ground which represented entire villages razed, often by herding people into a local barn and setting it on fire. Soldiers were stationed outside to shoot any persons who escaped from the fire. Humankind’s inhumanity to fellow humans was striking, but there was more to come.

In another section was a series of upright monuments, much like solid teller windows of a bank, where each division is dedicated to a separate concentration camp. I did not go beyond the first one. Here, behind the collection of small stuffed animal toys placed by other visitors to the site, was a monument to a concentration camp for children. Their blood was used to transfuse soldiers, and when their bodies were too weak for such use, they were fed to the dogs. One in four Belarusians — men, women, and children — were killed during World War II under the three-year occupation by Hitler’s regime. My tears, then sobs, were but a small testimony of the pain and suffering present in that place and in that land.

It is easy to condemn such atrocities, and shake my head in wonder at such horror. Surely such evil is behind us. That is, unless it is true that such evil can exist in all of our hearts. A time of reflection is needed.

What monuments will be built of our own time? Will they be monuments commemorating great accomplishments that have benefited humankind – diseases conquered, lives saved? Or will they be monuments to the vulnerable we have sacrificed to promote our own survival? To the same degree that Hitler was able to choose his actions, so are we. We may not be responsible for millions of people, but we have the power and the responsibility to make our choices well. How we treat the vulnerable in our midst says much about our character. If we extinguish the lives of others — whether very young, very old, or somewhere in between — for our own benefit, we cannot lay claim to moral ground any higher than that on which the Belarusian monument stands.