FW: sad news - latest "Memorial" press release

[Olga Meerson]

With all my technical idiocy, I agree with Paul. In
October 2007, I heard the presentations of Lydia
Golovkova and Arseny Roginsky--each, merely a
conference-paper-long presentation--but with so much
material about massive human tragedies that I cannot
imagine--even for these two short talks--where, by
whom, and with what technical means all that could
be backed up, at least in one trusted place. And
these two presentations were a mere drop in the sea
of the human sorrow documented by Memorial.  If
anyone decided to confiscate and destroy the
materials available in and through the Holocaust
Museum in Washington, or the Jerusalem Yad VaShem,
these would be equally irreplaceable. And as of the
current horrors in the world, I think even you,
Boris, may understand that even adequately recording
them, let alone backing them up, all the
technological advancement available today
notwithstanding, may be difficult because of active
human resistence to all that  tragic knowledge. In
Memorial, there is much, much more than what is
contained in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and
the heart-breaking Shalamov's Kolyma testimony
combined.  Calling this destruction of a vital
testimony a "tear-jerker" is insensitive, to say the
very least. From generation to generation, and from
social class to social class, human ability to
forget the tragedy of the other, even if it is one's
own neighbor, is truly amazing. But as to the
materials confiscated from the Memorial office,
there are still many survivers and their relatives,
who can testify. I think calling the account of this
event a "tear-jerker" is an example of a memory-span
remarkably short even for today's generation, let
alone fort those who may still distinguish between
virtual reality and reality per se.

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