Let statues stand, and teach us a lesson

It is easy to understand the anger behind destruction, however obliteration of the shameful symbols of our past does not erase the fact that these things ever happened.

Some years ago, on a summer day, I stood on the edge of a peaceful meadow outside Krakow, Poland, once home to my family before they left.

Had it not been for the old railroad tracks and imposing building facades there I would never have known this was the site of Birkenau concentration camp, just one of many sites of immense evil, cruelty and destruction of innocent human lives.

The world would have understood if, after the war, the government had bulldozed it, and every other reminder of the atrocities committed on Polish soil.

Instead it decided to allow these monstrous symbols to stand, provoking the world to remember forever the evil of which we humans are capable.

Note that as the Nazis realized they were losing the war, they destroyed most of the site themselves — in an effort to erase forever the evidence of their evil and avoid exposure to the world.

The moral of this story is that it is only by preserving the stark evidence of wrongdoing that humans are able to remember things as they really were as generations pass and memories fade.

So please, let the statues and institutions stand, accompanied by a proper acknowledgment of all the truths behind them. Otherwise we are doomed to repeat them, if not immediately, then somewhere down the line.

“Lest we forget.”

Kathleen Worth Saanich