What we can learn from Srebrenica

and the sorrow of a civil war generation

By Matt LaRoche

Those who know death know mourning. Those who know mourning know the meaning of empty spaces that we all wish had stayed filled. But do we, or even can we — the history enthusiasts who habitually reflect upon the tragedies and triumphs of the past — fully understand the immensity of the suffering known on our battlefields?

This summer, I worked at Gettysburg National Military Park, and as I gave my National Cemetery tour almost daily, I quickly realized just how much of a disconnect the ages have put between us and the Civil War generation. I realized how never having known the people in the graves at your feet warps your perception of the events that took their lives.

And I realized how, especially for the majority of the park’s visitors who have never known war, it is imperative that we try to connect to the reality of suffering that the war generation bore in order to understand not just our fragility as humans, but also the long reach and lasting consequences of our actions.

By chance, I also discovered a lens that allowed me to do to this — that lets me reevaluate what the dead of Gettysburg mean, and what their deaths have to teach. This July, as I sat in the break room reading CNN on my phone, I saw a run of articles detailing the twentieth anniversary of the Srebrenica Massacre in Bosnia. I watched videos of crowds of mourners gathering in the cemetery-memorial to the over 8,000 murdered Muslim men and boys of Srebrenica, and I realized that this is not what we see at the Gettysburg National Cemetery.

We see a sense of completeness, of the weight of history. The National Cemetery is lovely and well visited. But we are misled. We no longer see mothers waiting — perhaps forever — to simply bury their sons. From Srebrenica, I heard the voices of people who will be struggling forever to make sense of what happened in July of 1995, their search for answers made infinitely harder because it is torturously emotional, not just intellectual.

The chilling similarities between the photographs of the mass graves in Bosnia, and the pictures of the scattered bones of the dead of Cold Harbor and Gaines’ Mill attest to the same problem — the two are just separated by time and space.

The hundreds of thousands of unknowns of the Civil War were just as raw to the loved ones they left behind as the one thousand-plus unknowns of Srebrenica are to this day.

Little of that reality is readily apparent to most of the visitors who visit the National Cemetery today, and that separation is the driving purpose behind historical interpretation — the answer to the “so what?” of the profession. Never doubt that educating new generations about the mistakes of the old is a crucial service.

When doubt rears its head, remember what former President Bill Clinton told to the mothers and sisters and lovers of the disappeared of Srebrenica this July, as we were commemorating the 152nd anniversary of Gettysburg:

“I am begging you to not to let this monument to innocent boys and men become only the memory of a tragedy. I ask you to make it a sacred trust where all people here can come and claim a future for this country.”

We have been continuing this same human work in our own sphere. We do it every day with tours and books and casual-but-impassioned conversations. And we must continue to fight to make it known that each generation has a duty to remember the common tragedy of rows upon rows of headstones, etched with the names of stolen lives, if we can ever hope to avoid repeating the cycle with new stones and new names that are all too terribly familiar.

At least for me, this is the meaning of Gettysburg. This is the meaning of Srebrenica. This is the purpose of history.