Once there was a life, a family, a community. They loved. They danced. They fought. They floundered. As I leave what I hope will be my first Centropa experience, I remain focused on the concept of memorialization. But this time instead of my conflict with memory through monument from an earlier blog, I am at ease with film as memory. At previous conferences including those I have attended as both participant and as facilitator, we would have many lectures: historians, authors, practitioners, and museum faculty. Some talks were extraordinary and changed how I continue to understand the Shoah. Others were mindless studies in death by PowerPoint. But where a person once stood in front of a room, at the Academy it was these powerful, masterfully-constructed (Shout out to Wolfie, Oueril, and their crew!) that over and over personalized what fearfully has been a forgotten history that teachers tend to teach awash in dates, simulations, or ignored completely. I had to ask Wolfie on the last day if the families had much input into how their stories were told because these are not only tremendous teaching resources of course, but they honor family stories so much... almost as if told by a beloved matriarch. Saying this as someone who has worked with testimony both of the Holocaust and Rwandan genocide survivors for years, I am speaking a bit against two other very important organizations I am involved with. Yet it demonstrates the profound depth of my admiration and scope of my transformed philosophy. In my previous paradigm, I frequently said, "This testimony begins with prewar life. Look! One picture of children playing in the park!" or "Isn't it lovely that it ends in summer 1945 or 1995 with a direct message to your students?" No. No, they each barely mentioned father, mother, siblings, professions; that is not a rich life before. And ending mere moments after genocide does not tell a history. What should it mean to reconstruct memory? Tell a story but how much story? Do I understand the devastation of genocide when I do not build the foundation on which the house of memory lay? Is it ethical then to leave that house in disrepair, never to be rebuilt? This is my love letter to the Centropa cinematic vision, probably convoluted and rambling because of a long travel day. Please understand how much this week has changed me. When I'll speak to others about Centropa (and I will as early as next week at a summit at the Field Museum for Chicago Public Schools), I will say, "Do not teach about genocide. Teach about life that somewhere during saw great devastation. But teach life."