> A few weeks ago I was at Auschwitz-Birkenau and
> walked into a gas chamber that was built to murder me, and looked at the
> ovens a few feet away where they planned to turned by body to ash and
> smoke and unlike a fair number of my relatives who walked into that gas
> chamber, I walked out through the door into the light and air instead of
> leaving via the chimney. It's quite an experience.
Last year I visited a sailing ship museum in Virginia. I had been reading a neo-slave narrative, on the sensible advice of my partner in crime. One of the ships was a slaver. The hull was tiny and airless. All these tourists were running around, when suddenly I thought to myself, damn, countless human beings perished in this hellhole. Each hull was just one small cog in the 300-year genocide called chattel slavery (6 million were murdered in the Middle Passage alone), forerunner of more efficient, mechanized genocides to come. Had to get out into the air immediately or I would've started screaming.
-- DRR