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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Friday, March 02, 2007

entry arrow11:36 AM | Till the Truth Hurts?



A new exhibit called "And I Still See Their Faces: The Vanished World of Polish Jews"t at the Yeshiva University Museum's Center for Jewish History gives us insight about inconvenient truths. The exhibit -- a massive display of ordinary photographs of Jews in Poland before World War II broke out, and with it the horror of the Holocaust -- tells us that sometimes a coming horror is too unbelievable to consider that we can even refuse to believe it, until the full weight of its reality bares its fangs upon us. The New York Times reports:

What can sometimes startle viewers about the banal photographs is the text from an accompanying letter. A photograph of 30 schoolchildren, two of the girls in sailor blouses, with their teachers in Kozowo in June 1939 looks like any posed classroom eager for the coming vacation. But the caption about the class's young Jews says that sometime after the war began that September, "They took them out of town to the quarries and shot them to death."

Indeed, these pictures of ordinary people going about their ordinary lives is all the more horrific given what we know now of what will happen to them in the next few years. Their denial finally becomes deadly in the long run.

Sometimes that's what I feel about those who deny global warming, too.

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