Hi, Marcia. You raise an interesting point.
Stated differently, I meant the list of places in the poem simply to suggest the diversity of the victims. My wife, who is Jewish, didn’t have a problem with the line in the poem, nor with my post that you quoted explaining the line. (Nor with this post, which she read just now before I posted it.) Her family was not affected by the Holocaust, but she had family members--her grandmother and uncle—stabbed and left for dead by Czarist troops in Russia, so she has a pretty keen sensitivity, as all should, to any minimization or trivialization of the Holocaust. When she fills out forms that request racial identification, she checks “white” or “Caucasian.”
Having said that, I see your point (as I understand it) that referring to the victims of Dachau as “white” may be problematic in that their Nazi murderers committed their atrocities in the name of being Aryan/white. My sincere apologies for any insensitivity of phrasing in the explanation you quoted. As I say, my intent was to express the diversity of the victims of mass violence at different times in different places in the world.
The related point, I believe first raised by Michael, is whether Dachau (or any other Holocaust site) should be listed together with sites of other atrocities that clearly were of a much lesser scope. I don’t know the exact figures for Dachau by itself, but over 6,000,000 Jews died in the Holocaust. (I believe at least tens of thousands of the 6,000,000 died at Dachau, though. David, you’re quite wrong about that. My wife has visited Dachau, and seen the ovens.) The death count in Darfur is “only” a fraction of that—I believe over 400,000, with many more displaced. The toll on 9/11 was several thousand. About 500 people died at My Lai. So while all these of these tragic places have immediately recognizable names, there is no question that none of them compare to the Holocaust in terms of the sheer scope of the evil perpetrated there and the number of people killed. (Of course, as I said in another post, any mass murder is an immeasurable tragedy to the lives affected, regardless of how many or how few.)
As I said before, based on the reactions here, the use of any list of such places may be a problem, particularly in a 14-line poem, since it may lead readers to ask whether the places in question are being “ranked” in comparison to each other, or to other places not listed. If one does use such a list of 20th/21st century atrocities, however, my own feeling is that it could be seen as trivializing the Holocaust not to include it.
I would be interested in reading the poem by Julia Alvarez that Alicia mentioned to see how she handled this issue. In any case, this discussion has been valuable, since it underscores the care and thought that should be given in referring to such tragedies, even for a well-meaning purpose.
Best wishes.
--Bruce
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