Victims of Syrian regime honoured at DC’s Holocaust museum

Victims of Syrian regime honoured at DC’s Holocaust museum

By Raya Jalabi, The Guardian

22 October 2014

Entering the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, you are required to take an ID card, a booklet detailing the life of a real person who lived during the Holocaust. As you wind through the museum’s haunting permanent exhibition, with installations taking you from the rise of the Nazi party in the 1930s, through the war years and finally to liberation, you are prompted to leaf through the booklet and learn about “your person”. She may have died, she may have not, but she is your companion throughout this exercise in memory.

The card is intended to reinforce the idea of proximity and reality for visitors, now some 70 years removed from the events of the second world war themselves. Walking through the delicately conceived exhibit, built by James Freed, we are meant to ask ourselves: how could this have come to be? As the museum’s co-founder Elie Wiesel said at the opening: “Ask yourselves how could murderers do what they did and go on living? Why was there no public outcry of indignation and outrage?”

On the ID card’s cover there is a quote from his same speech: “For the dead and the living we must bear witness.”

These words haunted me throughout the permanent exhibition, and I carried them with me as I entered the rooms curated by the Center for the Prevention of Genocide. I had come to see Evidence of Atrocities in Syria, a video installation of images of war crimes from the current conflict.

The images in the video were smuggled out of Syria by a military photographer, assigned to take pictures of the corpses of those who died at the hands of the Assad regime. The 10 or so photographs projected are part of a cache of more than 55,000 images smuggled out on flash drives by Caesar, a pseudonymous regime defector. As the video states, the photos “are believed to show people killed at Syrian intelligence and security agency detention centres”.

The photos are stark: dead bodies, bloodied, starved, often naked and displaying signs of torture. A couple of the pictures show dozens of faceless corpses.

“We wanted to give a sense of the scale,” said Cameron Hudson, the director of the Center for the Prevention of Genocide, “to invoke the kind of systematic, organised and industrial nature of the killings.”

Caesar brought the images to the museum in July 2014, his first stop in Washington. Later that month, he testified before Congress about the pictures and his experiences in Syria.

“Originally, the conversation was about how to preserve [the images] and archive them,” Hudson told the Guardian. “And how do we use these photographs to help bring [the regime] to war crimes trials, so that in 20 years, when people try and deny that this happened, how do we prove to them that it did?”

The centre is mandated to take a “wide range of actions” to make genocide prevention a national and international priority, inspired by the lessons of the Holocaust. They have spotlighted the crisis in Darfur and the Central African Republic, and have been tracking the Syrian conflict from the onset, concerned about the atrocities being committed there.

“We were blown away by the power of these photographs,” Hudson said. “Caesar and his story are unique and of particular resonance to us: he’s not an analyst, he’s an eyewitness to what’s going on. There’s a proud tradition of the role of the witness and the power to shine a light on these abuses … in keeping with what we celebrate here at the museum.”

The video of the images is presented with a relative lack of context about the war at large, and does not stray too far into the political quagmire. Despite a line conceding that the Assad regime has denounced these photos as fake, the presentation is clear: the Syrian government is responsible for these atrocities.

The Holocaust Museum is a living memorial as much as it is an educational experience: a testament to the fact that the horrors of the last century happened, that millions died and that many did nothing to stop it. As the Syrian war continues to drag on with no end in sight, and thousands more die with every passing month, I wonder how this war will be remembered. Will there be a memorial museum to its sins?

In choosing to display these images from Syria, the museum has made a move towards cementing this war in our collective memory. It has honoured the suffering of the Syrian people by framing these atrocities within the context of the Holocaust, and by denouncing them as genocide.

More than 200,000 people have been killed in Syria, most at the hands of the regime. But as the world’s attentions shift towards Isis, Kobani and the US-led coalition’s campaign to eradicate this latest evil; and as the war has moved in the public consciousness from civil war to proxy war, and to existential sectarian battle, many have forgotten the genesis of the Syrian war and the brutalities Bashar al-Assad has committed against his own people.

“Those images really describe the sense of human indignity of the regime,” Hudson said, “that you can’t get by talking of barrel bombs and chemical weapons.”

Having tracked Syria’s war since its inception, I had seen images like these before. I have watched videos of children dying of chemical weapons exposure, of foreign journalists beheaded and of bodies littering ruined Syrian streets. But the Holocaust Museum’s display has a deep impact, rendered all the more profound for being placed after the permanent exhibition.

“In [Caesar’s] estimation, the pictures produced reminded [the museum] of the worst horrors of the Holocaust,” Hudson said. “They felt a connection to this history.”

There is no doubt a visual comparison to be made between the bodies of those starved and tortured by Assad and those murdered in Nazi concentration camps. Caesar, now in hiding in Europe, took a gamble in smuggling these pictures out. The museum has encased them within their walls for the world to see. We have the tools for memory and action – so now how we will remember?