I'm ready to go to the fishing lake to catch small fish, go to the watermelon field to eat watermelon, walk barefoot in the canal to relieve the heat, chase after the hidden with my classmates, watch cartoons... There are so many fun things waiting for me to do, the only one The headache is summer homework and mother's nagging.
If at that time, I knew that in a country called Rwanda in Africa, a genocide had just ended, the corpses of 1 million people were being eaten by wild animals, the carrion caused a plague, and even spread to neighboring Uganda and Tanzania.
Millions of executioners, once machete-wielding, fled national borders and became refugees, while their children, who were spared murderers because of their youth, starved to death in the wasteland. Will I still complain about my summer homework, about my mother's loving scolding? Of course I won't.
However, at that time, even if I learned about the civil war in Rwanda on the news network, and millions of civilians were brutally killed, what would I know? Even parents who know a little better than me are still turning off the news, continuing to eat dinner, continue watching TV series, and continue to work in the fields the next day?
Well, 24 years later, when I saw a movie called "Hotel Rwanda" and learned about this once horrific tragedy, I'm not going to keep turning on the bread machine and making tomorrow's breakfast; opening a can for the cat; writing After finishing this article, continue to fall asleep in a warm and comfortable heated bedroom, and continue to live as happily as possible the next day?
So, I know this shocking catastrophe, how does it help my life and the world? What's the point of writing this article, other than adding some junk to the Internet?
But I still have to write it down, because we can't forget. Just like the sentence exported from the exhibition at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum: We are not to remember hatred, but not to forget history.
Remembering history will keep us as sane as possible in the collective unconscious, let us not commit the banal sins of Hannah Arendt, let us not be rabble, let us be in dog town with a grain of salt Be kind, don't help the tyrants.
But if, in the 1930s, I was an adult German, if in the 1960s, I was an adult Chinese, if, in 1994, I was a Hutu who could pick up a machete , can I really not drive Jews into gas chambers, spit on innocent people, and kill my neighbors with knives?
I don't know, I really don't know, this question just drives me nuts.
However, there were two people who, in that era when demons danced wildly, raised their flimsy protective umbrella tremblingly to protect those who were not related to them under their wings and save their lives.
They are Oskar Schindler and Paul Lucesabagina, to whom this article of mine is written.
Schindler's list has long been known to all households. After all, Jews are God's chosen people, Israel is a developed country, and the victory of World War II is the most dazzling achievement in the United States. Naturally, there will be many directors shooting and many books about that history. Memories, so there are 1,750,000 Baidu searches for Oskar Schindler.
And 24 years ago, there were only 1,150,000 entries for the massacre in Rwanda, Africa. In this genocide, how many entries did Paul Lucesa Bagina, the protagonist who protected 1,268 innocent lives, have? Guess everyone? 34, yes, you read that right, only 34.
Paul Lucesabagina is known as the Schindler of Africa, but his situation at that time was 10,000 times more difficult than Schindler's. The massacres in the Nazi concentration camps were organized government actions, and Schindler could protect his people as long as he bribed the relevant government officials.
And the genocide in Rwanda is universal, any Hutu, even a 10-year-old child, can pick up a machete and kill the Tutsi, as well as those Hutu who are unwilling to kill the Tutsi.
There is a Chinese saying, husband and wife are birds of the same forest, and they will fly separately when disaster strikes. When the executioner gave Paul Lucesabagina a gun to shoot his own wife, in a later interview, Paul Lucesabagina said he almost did it, was Yes, when everyone is crazy, when their own life is threatened, people will lose the most basic humanity.
Of course, Paul Lucesabagina didn't do that, he protected not only his family, his neighbors, but the orphans in the orphanage. In Kigali, the capital of 76 days of corpses, Paul Lucesabagina, the manager of the Miller Collins Hotel, a speculator as well-rounded as Schindler, has become the most irrational economic man thing.
When the militia leader told him that if he gave up the rest of the people in the hotel, he could protect his family from the disaster, he chose to remain silent. When he could go to Belgium with his wife and children, he chose to stay, because he didn't want to sleep and sleep every day in the future thinking of these more than 1,000 lives.
Fortunately, history did not make us despair. After being besieged for 76 days, under the protection of the United Nations, Paul Luce Sabagina and the people he protected arrived at the refugee camp safely.
You can say that for the more than 1 million innocent people who died tragically, these 1,268 people are really pitiful, just as the more than 1,200 people saved by Schindler are even more rare than the more than 6 million people.
However, the greatness of life is not measured by numbers. As the kid on the beach who returned the little fish to the sea said, my behavior is important to this fish.
Today, as I write these words at my desk, Paul Lucesabagina and his family, surviving nieces, are living an ordinary and happy life in Belgium.
In 1996, he left the hellish hometown that made him completely desperate, and went to Belgium, which once colonized and enslaved the land. However, when he thought that it was the Hutu and Tutsi tribes divided by Belgium during the colonization that led to the subsequent genocide, could he really fall in love with that country?
We will never be able to change history. No matter how the United Nations and other governments repent of their abandonment of Rwanda, they will not be able to bring those more than 1 million lives back to the world.
"One day, this will all end. How will you face history?" Paul Lucesabagina asks the lieutenant in the film.
Yes, everything will pass, how should we face history? At least
, we can still repent and remember, we must sing praises to these ordinary and great heroes, and we must strive to become them.
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