Reminders of human cruelty

What is the point of remembering if we don’t learn to avoid repeating our mistakes?

“Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs.” 

John Keats

I was on holiday in Rome, sitting in the warmth of the morning sun,  sipping chocolate-covered cappuccino, nibbling buttery biscotti. I was doing my best not to think about how we live in a country where young men carry knives and chase each other on the street, not about the threat of armed forces being deployed to ‘out-of-control’ US cities like Chicago, Portland, and Baltimore, or about the museum in the Jewish Quarter I had wandered into the day before where the whirr of a projector lured me to an empty room with trembling images of incarcerated men, women, and children flickering on a blank wall, not about the names etched into the gold-plated plaques in the pavement outside houses whose occupants had been forcibly removed and marched to their death. I wasn’t thinking about any of that.

Music wound its way towards the cafe from a nearby street. The first notes rising gently, as if the city was taking a deep breath, so that all else seemed still and silent. The unmistakable sound of Gabriel’s Oboe. Ennio Morricone’s composition for the film, The Mission, played not on an oboe, but on a violin, cut through the still morning air. I finished my breakfast and followed the sound. Around a corner, in a little piazza, a ‘piazzetta’ in Italian, outside the Palazzo Odescalchi in the Trevi area of Rome, the musician was standing on a temporary stage and already a small crowd had gathered. The music continued, soft, soothing, but gathering momentum. A strange choice, I thought, for a venue that looked like a ‘pop-up’ performance. I moved closer to the platform along with others drawn from narrow side streets and cafes, tourists like me, with no agenda, no place to be, enjoying the novelty and privilege of a sunny morning in this city of ancient ruins, majestic basilicas, and elegant piazzas. A second man appeared on the stage and began to read from a list of names. Slowly, deliberately, pronouncing every word with care. I moved closer, weaving my way through the loose crowd. In front of the platform, large white posters were taped to the ground, stretching from one end of the piazzetta to the other. I hunkered down and began to read. 

‘Mohammed Abu Sukheil, Saher Akram Rayan, Amna Hamid’ and so on, possibly 500 names in total typed across the posters. Each name had a date. The date of death. All of them between 2023 and 2025. All of them in Gaza. These were not military, or armed guards, soldiers in an army, but journalists who had simply wanted to let the world know what was happening. A large notice in English read: “You don’t kill information.”

The music stopped and then began again. This time a more haunting sound, without the uplifting melodies of Gabriel’s Oboe. Slow, hesitant, and aching, I recognised it immediately as the main theme from Schindler’s List by the composer John Williams. The trembling sound brought back images of the film on the wall of the museum, the emaciated bodies, the haunted eyes, the jerking movements and bewildered faces of the children. These were not actors, but real people whose names I may have read on the gold-plated plaques in the pavement while enjoying an aperitivo at a bar in the Jewish Quarter the previous day. That was then, I had told myself, history, never to be repeated and had left and continued to the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, any place that would remind me of the beauty, the creativity, and the resilience of humans. To remind myself that like suffering, beauty also endures.

But the performance in the piazzetta was a reminder that not all atrocities are in the past, highlighting crimes that have not been brought to justice and probably never will be. I cannot imagine being captured, tortured, or killed for sharing words, ideas, or insights and yet this is what is happening to people like me, right now, today. A reminder of the cruelty that humans inflict on each other even now despite the lessons of history. Even with a ceasefire and an end to active violence, there will be no healing for many for generations to come. There will be those who survive who wish that they hadn’t. There will be those who will never recover from the loss of loved ones. There will be those, like the creators of The Mission and Schindler’s List, who will create art or music to help us remember, and those who view the art and listen to the music and wonder at how easy it is to forget. But what is the point of remembering if we don’t learn to avoid repeating our mistakes? And why is ‘never again’, never now? But I am not thinking about all of that.