History is a funny thing. It's only a collection of cold facts. It has no sympathy for the pain of the "bad guys", and even its own suffering is explained with numbers instead of emotion.

We don't realize why these events are so important. We study them, memorize when they happened, list who was involved, but we never feel it. We learn about the holocaust and slavery so that we do not callous. But we callous anyway, don't we? How can we understand pain if we haven't felt it? How can we remember the suffering if we didn't suffer ourselves? How can we understand the pained if we aren't one of them?Self-flagellation isn't the solution, but neither is ignorance. Research or even light reading may be too much. But movies, when not too blown up, can be effective. Though they will inevitably be altered, all that matters is that we feel at least a taste of the pain they suffered. From that, we can give them the memory they deserve because feeling is reality and fact is history.