FW: sad news - latest "Memorial" press release

[Robert Chandler]

Dear Boris, Olga and all,

All Olga says is true and to the point.  I myself heard a talk in London by
Irina Flige not long ago and was deeply impressed.  The only small thing I
can add to Olga's words is that the Virtual Gulag project seems to me one of
the most creative and imaginative uses of the Internet that I have come
across.

Vsego dobrogo,

Robert




> 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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