The students of the Duke Coalition for Preserving Memory (CPM) weren’t going to forget its mission, even if the campus was closed and the students themselves were spread around the world.
The organizers of the annual Name Reading Ceremony for Victims of Genocide and Mass Atrocities were faced with a quick pivot when students were told to return home for the semester. Jill Jones, one of the leaders of the Duke CPM, said the team was committed to finding some way to hold the event.
The solution was to have a 24-hour video of members of the Duke community reading names. More than 200 people did five-minute recordings reading names and uploaded videos it to a central site set up by the program organizers. Despite a few technical glitches, the full 24-hours of reading began this weekend.
“We thought it would be powerful to virtualize our ceremony through a 24-hour video of name reading,” Jones said. “This would continue the spirit of the ceremony as a collective effort and allow people from all over the world to get involved.”
Help came from alumnus David Estrin, founder of the Duke CPM, who now runs an organization called Together We Remember, which assists genocide remembrance and activism campaigns. Estrin provided a web app for name reading.
One difference this year is organizers are including people who died from the COVID-19 pandemic. Jones and others went through obituaries and news articles to curate names.
“COVID-19 is certainly a mass atrocity,” Jones said. “It is one of the most somber things I have ever done but it is so, so important that we remember these names.”
“This year, we asked readers to state their name and why they read before they began. This really solidified the sense of community and solidarity that this event fosters every year. And a silver lining in all this was that many people who would have liked to attend the ceremony in person but wouldn’t have been able to (like past CPM presidents) were still able to contribute.”
The event attracts students and others from across the campus, but several of the Duke CPM students have personal connections to the events that are being remembered in the event. Jones said her mother grew up not knowing who her father was. Only in 2011 did the family find a photo of him – and learned that he was a Holocaust survivor.
“Over the next few years, I took German classes at my high school and used this knowledge to translate Nazi documents on my grandfather and his extended family,” Jones said. “I learned that my grandfather survived the Holocaust via the Kindertransport: a rescue effort that granted over 10,000 Jewish children asylum in the UK. I also learned that my grandfather’s parents and grandparents were not as fortunate; they all perished in ghettos and concentration camps before World War II’s end.
“I become acutely aware of why I need to remember – both to acknowledge my own ancestors’ names and stories and to speak up for every other person whose voice has been wrongfully silenced. Now a graduating senior, I know that it’s been the biggest honor of my college career to be involved with both the Name Reading Ceremony and Duke CPM – and I want to assure all victims and survivors of mass atrocity that they will not be forgotten on our watch.”
One of the 24 hour-long videos posted during the reading is below. All 24 videos can be found here.