How do you take something most people have never had to deal with - war, devastating natural disaster, genocide - and make it resonate?
You narrow the focus. You pick something small, something someone can relate to, and you show the details that grip the emotions. You make it familiar, you make it local, you make it relatable.
Last year, I applied for a job at KSU's Museum of Holocaust History and Education. As part of the 2nd round of the process, I was asked to make a presentation suitable for 10th graders discussing the book Night by Eli Wiesel. One of the things I included in the notes with the presentation were interactive exercises to be done with the students to help them digest the unfathomable idea of the sheer number of people killed. One of these activities included randomly selecting 3 students from the class (assuming a class of 25) and informing them that of their class, they were the only ones to survive the forced-march evacuation of a concentration camp. I did not get the job. I wasn't given a reason, though I wonder if maybe the presentation was too intense.
Yesterday, I saw a graphic online of Hurricane Harvey's area of destruction as overlaid over other coastal areas. It didn't hit home for me how massive the area of destruction was until they showed the area overlaid over the Georgia/Carolina coast - the entirety of South Carolina was covered, as was a chunk of Georgia as far inland as Macon.
Last night, Jason and I watched The Zookeeper's Wife. This movie really "brought home" some things about Poland in WWII for me - and as someone who spent a large portion of middle school reading everything about the Holocaust that I could get my hands on, that's saying something. I don't know why, but for some reason it never occurred to me that Warsaw was bombed when Germany invaded in September of 1939. I don't know why I thought that Germany just rolled up in trucks and said, "hey, you're part of Germany now" and that was that. And even then, maybe I had known at some point about the bombardment, but forgot, because it was the bombing of nameless, unfamiliar buildings. When a mother walks out onto her back balcony to investigate the sound of airplanes, only for a bomb to land just dozens of feet away in her yard, while her son and pet play in the room behind her, that hits home. Watching the animals that this woman has just greeted, petted, fed, and healed in the previous scenes run in terror, or fall to the violence, becomes very real. Watching the man who we have watched struggle with the dangerous choice of hiding people in his home take up arms and shoot at Nazis from between the bombed-out walls of the city that we have watched be slowly destroyed over the course of the movie makes the utter devastation and nightmare that the people of Warsaw had to deal with approachable. You see pictures of a bombed out city and you think, "well, that sucks." You watch characters you have come to "know" deal with the destruction and the loss, and it becomes real.
There is a phrase "a million is a statistic." I think Eddie Izzard says it better, even though it was said in a joking context - "over 20, we can't deal with it." I think it's true, though. You tell someone that 20 people have died in a fire or a storm, and they think, "Oh, wow, 20 people. That's how many people were at the last party I went to. That's how many people are in my kid's class. That's awful." You say thousands or millions of people have died or been displaced, and we just can't wrap our heads around it.
In an odd way, it's another thing I learned from theatre. One of my theatre professors was always impressing on us to make our acting choices - our choice of an expression, a way of walking, a tone of voice - more specific. "The more specific you are, the more universal it becomes," he would say. You have to do something, find something that is relatable. When you do, you can make the audience or reader understand.