Psychic Numbing Explained

The purpose of this post is to give the proper context of my musings on Yad Vashem. If you are already familiar with the concept of psychic numbing than please skip this post.

This is a re-posting of a blog post I wrote four years ago during my time at Stand. The original post sadly no longer exists, although it was reproduced on the Sudan: The Passion of the Present blog. Unfortunately the text there is incomplete, so I have taken that re-posting and am re-writing the end to the best of my ability.

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Often times, when I see my fellow advocates trying to convince others about how serious the humanitarian crisis in Darfur is, they focus on the numbers - 400,000 dead, 2.5 million displaced, 4 million relying on aid to survive, etc., but to their bewilderment, the people that they speak to just don't care. I recently read an article about this, and I believe that it has important implications for the work we, as Darfur advocates, carry out.

In the journal Judgement and Decision Making, author Paul Slovic examines this phenomenon in an article entitled "Psychic Numbing and Genocide." It's about how numbers are ineffective at conveying the mass atrocities being committed in Darfur. While we know the value of one human life, we can't comprehend what that value would be multiplied by 400,000. We are, therefore, overwhelmed by the statistics. Studies that Slovic cites show that feelings become less intensive when the victim group goes from being even just one person to two.

This suggests that instead of discussing the enormity of the crisis, we must come up with ways to personalize it. We need to provide something more tangible than numbers alone. As advocates, we must realize that Darfur is not about numbers - it is about people.

For me, the story that captures the essence of Darfur is about a decision that most families have to make on an almost-daily basis: who to send to get supplies. Often, the eldest woman in the family is sent. This seems counter-intuitive, but actually makes sense upon closer examination. If the family sends a man, young or old, he is liable to be murdered. If a young woman is sent, she is liable to be raped. Thus, the oldest woman in the family is sent, as she is least likely to be killed, and least likely to be raped - but keep in mind that she is not immune to either. The comparison is merely relative. No family should ever have to make such a decision. Ever.

Next time you meet someone who doesn't know anything about Darfur, don't bombard them with statistics. Instead, I encourage you to share the above story with them. As well, below are links to two other fantastic tools that will help you tell the stories behind the statistics.

Children's drawings from Human Rights Watch

If you are to send one link to the uninformed, this is it. Nothing does a better job of putting a face on the genocide in Darfur.

Google Earth Images of destroyed villages

Each one of those little round and square dots represents a burnt/destroyed home. Each dot represents a family forced to flee their home with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and whatever they could carry.

*** As an addendum to this, I think it's important to mention the "Stand for the Dead" campaign which was launched in my final year with Stand and led by Aneil Jaswal. The campaign was generously created for us by the global advertising firm J. Walter Thompson. The campaign video, which they created for us can be found below:

How to get past psychic numbing to have a meaningful Yad Vashem experience

While my guide at Yad Vashem was extremely knowledgeable, I sometimes found myself taking off my headset and staying behind or going ahead of the group so that I could have a moment of personal reflection.

The downside of having such a knowledgeable guide is that they sometimes feel obligated to share as much of their knowledge as humanly possible. In my case, this meant that my guide spoke throughout the tour. The result was little time for personal reflection. As someone who has spent innumerable hours grasping with the issue of how to communicate messages related to genocide and mass atrocities, I think there are only two ways to properly experience a place such as Yad Vashem. Ideally, one would have an entire day so that they could really take the time to soak everything in that the museum has to offer. Some might say you need more than a day, and I wouldn't disagree with them. However, in reality most people and tour groups have a precious few hours to go through Yad Vashem. In our case we had about two and a half hours.

In a situation where you have limited time, I am an advocate of the "less is more" approach. The truth of the matter is that when you have such a high volume of information thrown at you in such a short time period, only so much, if any, is going to stick. At the end of the day, I don't think it's important that people know that in Germany Jews had to wear yellow stars to distinguish them because they looked like ordinary Germans, whereas in Poland there was no need for the yellow star because Jewish men had long beards and all dressed the same.

I think it's important for people to realize that being marked for death just because of who you are is one of the worst things in the world. People should come away understanding the sheer magnitude and evil of The Final Solution, and why it is the Holocaust left such a mark on it's survivors and their children. People should also have a grasp for how brutal and dehumanizing the methods of murder often were. In a sentence, people need to come out of Yad Vashem with a burning desire to "Never Forget" and that the words "Never Again" must not become a hollow saying (although you could argue "Never Again" has already lost it's meaning).

When you have no time for personal reflection, and when you focus too much on the macro at the expense of the micro, people won't come away with a deep understanding of these broad themes and ideas. People can't comprehend the enormity of the Holocaust when the focus is on large numbers, general discussions on the inner working of concentration camps, and other macro level concepts. Instead, people should be given a compelling individual story, and time to quietly reflect on that story.

Eight years later I still remember that braid of hair I saw at Auschwitz. In a display of thousands of pounds of human hair that was shaved off of Jewish inmates upon their arrival, I noticed a long braid of hair. I must have sat there looking at it for five minutes. What was her name? Her age? Did she have brothers and sisters? Did she ever have a first kiss? A first love? Did she get the chance to tell her parents she loved them? What was the last time she saw her best friend like? Was she sent straight to her death, or did she toil away labouring for months on end before meeting her fate? Maybe she was one of the lucky few who survived. If so, did she ever see any of her family or friends again, or were they all killed by the Nazi's?

I could go on but you get the point. When you go this deep on a person, and take the time to think about them as an individual, it becomes something entirely different. Once you understand the Holocaust or other genocides on a personal level, you can begin to understand it on the larger scale.

Now back to the topic of how to have the most meaningful Yad Vashem experience possible. In hindsight I kind of wish I went through on my own, or at least spent more time without my headphones on so I could reflect on what I was seeing. I think it is better to only see some of the exhibits and take time for quiet personal reflection than to go through every exhibit but have little or no time to reflect. Since I am already knowledgeable about the Holocaust I may have not benefitted as much from the colour commentary our guide was adding to the exhibits in front of us, but even for the uninitiated I encourage you to create your own time/space for personal reflection if your guide doesn't give it. When something strikes you, take off your headphones and spend a few minutes to really think about it. You can catch up with your group once you're done. Years later you will most likely remember those five minutes you sat reflecting on the courage of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising more than anything else.

My first visit to the new yad vashem - what I learned

On Tuesday I went to the new Yad Vashem, which is Israel's national Holocaust memorial museum. I've been there before, but it was eight years ago and the museum has since been completely re-done. Having been a student of genocide studies for 3-4 years during my time at Stand Canada, I was particularly interested in seeing the new methods Yad Vashem chose to teach about the Holocaust.

Most tour groups use a Yad Vashem guide when they tour the museum, but in our case our regular gave us the tour, as he has studied the Holocaust extensively, even teaching at Yad Vashem for a number of years. His knowledge shined through and I certainly developed a better understanding of certain aspects of the Holocaust as a result. One thing in particular that he talked to us about how the Nazi's engineered their killing machine to make it easier for their rank-and-file to carry out the mass murder. Early on the primary method of the mass murders was lining people up and shooting them. However, not surprisingly German soldiers could not stomach this, and did not like having to do so.

In order to make their atrocious acts more palatable, the Nazi regime removed the human element from the killing as much as possible. For example, they enlisted Jews to help round up people from the ghetto's to send them off to the camp's, and then upon their arrival, another group of Jews shepherded those who weren't fit to work to the gas chambers. Even the use of gas chambers was a way of creating a disconnect between killer and victim. By not actually seeing their victims die in front of them, the Nazi's were better equipped to mentally deal with the horrid acts they carried out. This is also why they had Jews remove the bodies from the gas chambers and bring them out to be burned, or dealt with in whatever way the camp in question disposed of the piles of dead bodies.

Putting people into prison like uniforms and then stripping them naked upon their death was another way of dehumanizing the victims of the Nazi genocide, as Hitler's inner circle discovered that when they were naked the Jews and other victimes were seen as less human by the rank and file German soldiers. Apparently even Himler himself almost threw up at the site of some of the atrocities the Germans carried out.

Another thing I think our guide did an excellent job of was getting us to stop and think about the implications of Wannsee conference. It was a meeting where relatively high ranking Nazi officials planned the logistics of stepping up "The Final Solution" so that they could see Hitler's plan of exterminating the Jews taken to it's fruition. Just like there is probably a group of people in a room somewhere in Bentonville Arkansas discussing how to more efficiently get men's pants from coastal China to their stores in North America, there was a group of Nazi officials discussing how to most efficiently get Jews from even the smallest towns scattered across Eastern Europe into the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka. The level of planning and coordination that went into the Holocaust is almost unthinkable - the only comparison I can think of to better comprehend the scale is the logistics challenges facing global retail stores.

Tuol Sleng Prison Camp - Initial Thoughts

The approach to Tuol Sleng is understated. Unlike the approach to Auschwitz-Birkenau, which takes you down a long road surrounded by empty fields, Tuol Sleng is in the middle of a mixed residential/commercial neighbourhood. We weren't even quite sure we were there until our tuk-tuk driver stopped to announce our arrival. Once we were stopped we noticed that the walled compound we were beside did look a little different than other walled off properties we had seen so far in Pnom Penh.

Before it became Cambodia's most notorious torture centre, Tuol Sleng was a school. Accordingly, when you first walk into the courtyard a small part of you thinks "this isn't such a bad place". There is a large, open space surround by three buildings forming a large "U", with a little bit of greenery strewn about.

This impression does not last long though. Almost immediately upon entering the gates a man with a cruelly deformed face approached us, with his hat in hand outstretched, asking us for money. While he couldn't speak English (as far as I could tell), the implication is that he was tortured in Tuol Sleng, or somewhere similar. He only had one eye, and his face was covered with scars and burn marks. This was an appropriate taste of what was to come.

After walking into the courtyard, you notice that the windows all have bars over them, and that one of the buildings is even covered in barbed wire (except for openings where staircases lead into doorways). Then it hits you - even though this place once was a place of happiness and learning, it will forever be defined by the atrocities that took place during the reign of the Khmer Rouge.

When walking along the outside of the second floor of one of the buildings, I noticed a large sign with the 10 rules of Tuol Sleng. It was in English, French, and Khmer, so I am guessing this was made for the museum, and not during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. However, the rules themselves were in place during those dark years. One can't help but wonder if Pol Pot and his cadre were avid readers of George Orwell. The similarities between the Khmer Rouge's approach to torture and those of Big Brother in 1984 are striking. Here they are (taken from WIKIPEDIA)

1. You must answer accordingly to my question. Don’t turn them away.

2. Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that, you are strictly prohibited to contest me.

3. Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.

4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.

5. Don’t tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.

6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.

7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.

8. Don’t make pretext about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your secret or traitor.

9. If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many many lashes of electric wire.

10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.

I have further thoughts on Tuol Sleng, but unfortunately they will have to wait until later. I've already been up for three hours and all I've had to eat is some Ritz crackers. My bus for Siem Riep leaves in about an hour, so I want to be able to grab lunch before I leave.