I don’t vacation like your everyday tourist.
As a naturally inquisitive person, I set out on trips with the goal of learning more about the places I’m headed, to record things, and to share what I’ve learned. And yes, I’ll admit, that is a lot like being at work.
It also means I have happily sacrificed beach time to visit not just the somewhat-touristy Pearl Harbour site, but also the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, in 2016. The latter is the where Pulitzer-Prize winning war correspondent Ernie Pyle is buried, among many others. Pyle was killed by a sniper in the Battle of Okinawa during the Second World War.
About 69 journalists are reported to have been killed during each of the world wars, and about the same number went missing or were killed during the Vietnam War, which spanned two decades.
As I stood by the large stone dedicated to the work and lives of war correspondents, I remember thinking that this was a problem from another era, another time and space. Surely things have changed. And my safety at work? Well, I’m not even a war correspondent. I jumped back into the rental car with my children and we headed back to the beach.
Then on Remembrance Day in 2019, during a trip to Los Angeles, I subjected myself to the tragic lessons inside the city’s Holocaust Museum. Things were feeling a little less optimistic at the time, and I wanted to pay my annual respects.
Once inside, I found myself weeping at the sight of a child’s tiny shoe and weighing that heavy feeling against the enormity of the numbers of people who were hunted, rounded up and executed by the state. I learned for the first time about the state-inflicted violence of Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass). I saw bedraggled suitcases that people once packed to get onto trains, likely at gunpoint. I pored over exhibits that explained the many categories of people that the Nazis deemed lesser-than, and then physically labelled as such. There was a clear us vs. them mentality at play, and there was a symbol for each “them.”
Jewish people, Roma people, Polish people. Anyone the state deemed a criminal, or following the wrong religion, and those who were thought to be gay or “asocial.” So many people. Everyone that the regime decided were dissidents, communists, socialists, unionists and anarchists. In short, anyone who didn’t identify as a Nazi, or at the very least, a sympathizer.
When I broke back out into the L.A. daylight, I was invited to write a note for an unknown child who died in the Holocaust. There were about 1.5 million children killed, and there is a tiny round hole in a smooth exterior wall at the museum for each and every one of them. It’s a beautiful space, designed to recognize a terrible thing. Hand-written thoughts and prayers are written on paper and rolled up, stuck into the tiny holes, and sent back to a time I’d like to believe would never happen again.
At both the cemetery in Honolulu and the Holocaust museum, I saw survivors and veterans — living reminders of what seemed at the time like faraway wars, unimaginable battles and more importantly, things we swear will not happen again. We have poems about it. How could we forget?
I am old enough to have interviewed Canadian veterans who survived the First World War. Those exchanges, and the research that went into the stories, always gave me an immense feeling of pride in my country, and even in the United States as an ally, and in my work. But the veterans I spoke with were not so sure that it wouldn’t all happen again.
And then, in 2024, I drove myself to Oregon, journalist hat in tow as usual. My last day there was Transgender Day of Visibility, March 31. I went into a second-story seaside shop in Newport. It was flying a pink, blue and white flag, and the clerk was transgender. They were talking about leaving Oregon, finding safety in Washington, maybe, and the very real fear of being rounded up by a militarized state-sanctioned police force, and put into a concentration camp. They were terrified.
It’s a suggestion that would have seemed far-fetched to me just a decade before, but so were a lot of things.
I chatted with the clerk a while longer, wished them well, got into my car, and drove back home to Canada with a fresh lesson that can’t be taught in a textbook, at a memorial or even in a museum. There are still survivors of oppression all around us, fighting to both hide and be heard.
Jessica Peters is the editor of The Chilliwack Progress.