Edward Berenson

Bearing Witness

Counseling, Grief & Mental Health

“Bearing Witness is a moving meditation on the lives and work of people who conceive of and work in museums and other commemorative sites designed to memorialize the tragic, traumatic events that many of us would like to forget. These terrible, murderous events took place in the killing fields of Cambodia, the Nazi death camps of Poland, the Twin Towers of New York, the neglected neighborhoods of Soweto. Stephanie Arel's sensitive interviews with the guardians of these sites of traumatic memory reveal the importance of their work as mediators between the victims of evil and those who, for various reasons, make pilgrimages to the sites where thousands, or millions, of them suffered and died. She also beautifully shows how these intermediaries transform the emotional toll of their work into forms of healing and cries for justice.”