On my recent visit to Rwanda, I slipped right back into my old high school seat, way over in the left row for AP World History. My redheaded teacher took us to 1994; she laid out how Hutu extremist leaders orchestrated a genocide against the Tutsi. Much of this was rooted in colonial manipulation. I remember being stunned by the scale of it. I remember questioning how a group of people could be manipulated by propaganda into believing it was their moral duty to kill their neighbors.

But at sixteen, it felt distant. This was important history, yes, but it was tucked away in textbook pages and PowerPoint slides. It was tragic but it was over.

At the time, I never imagined I’d one day stand in Kigali, taking a moment of silence over a mass grave holding 250,000 victims of the Rwandan genocide. I didn’t picture tears running down my face, staring at the spot where blood spilled fast over one hundred days in 1994.

I also never imagined I’d stand in Cambodia’s Killing Fields, where the Khmer Rouge executed two million people with the goal of a societal reset. I never thought I’d walk through a gas chamber at Auschwitz, where nearly a million Jews were systematically murdered under Nazi ideology. I was just as overwhelmed when I visited the prison cell where Nelson Mandella was held for eighteen years during apartheid in South Africa – a system designed to legalize racial hierarchy.

Of course, there’s a level of detachment that comes with learning history from a screen as fluorescent lights buzz above you and a classmate dozing off beside you. It feels packaged and archived. It’s history. But it feels so different to stand in the middle of it, next to it, above it.

To have your feet planted on heavy ground, understanding that innocent people died here. To feel dizzy at the grave consequences of extremism left unchecked. To understand that propaganda is quiet at the start, working slowly, over decades. Language is reshaped and social norms are replaced. Neighbors are painted as threats and regular people are convinced that cruelty is justified.

To be there. History demands you to feel it.

I’m often drawn to places that have been marked by political violence. Maybe because I see familiar patterns emerging elsewhere, including my own home in the United States. Too many Americans choose to treat history as something that’s safely locked away behind us. Other countries were capable of this, and no other country will become it.

But genocide doesn’t begin with grenades and machetes. It starts with words that split people in half, stories ingrained in young brains until they ring true, institutions slowly changing, almost unnoticeably.

Many people tend to avoid looking too closely at these darker chapters of history, because doing so requires confronting an uncomfortable truth: that human cruelty is not an anomaly, and it’s not so far in the past. It’s always a possibility. Within systems, politics, people. And to acknowledge that is to acknowledge the painful emotions that come with it.

But the reality is, the grief I feel when I commemorate victims of genocide will never compare to the grief of those who have lived through it. I stand in Rwanda. And Cambodia. And Poland. And South Africa. I cry and I reflect, and then I board a plane.

And the people whose families are buried there do not leave. It’s crucial to understand that it’s a privilege to process history as an experience; for many, it’s an inheritance.

In Rwanda, entire generations carry a burden borne through trauma. In Cambodia, the children and grandchildren of a genocide still navigate the psychological aftermath of forced labor camps and mass executions. In South Africa, apartheid is now illegal but legislative policy doesn’t erase the economic and social consequences. Trauma far outlives the event itself.

I think we can all agree that a child was never meant to witness his parents beaten to death with a club. Or chained together and buried alive. Or set on fire in what was supposed to be a safe haven. A mother was never meant to choose between her life and her children’s. These tragedies aren’t abstract; they’re real and they echo forward.

Visiting a memorial could never help me to fully comprehend that fear. An exhibit can’t replicate the terror of living through it. But standing there narrows the distance, at least a little bit. Hearing survivors’ stories narrows it further. Allowing myself to feel grief matters, even though I understand it’s not even a fraction of what others carry.

History isn’t important because it’s tragic, though. It’s important because we should be instructed through the past.

Every place I’ve visited that bears political violence of this magnitude shares common threads: division is amplified, language is weaponized, and fear is celebrated. Certain groups are labeled as unworthy of protection, or even life. These points gradually escalate, both legally and socially, with enough people looking away.

History is easier to ignore when it feels distant. But once you’ve stood next to it, it’s harder to dismiss. Traveling to these places has taught me that remembrance shouldn’t be a passive experience. It must be preventative. To understand how something happened isn’t to dwell in the past; in fact, it’s such an important way to recognize present warning signs.

I don’t visit these sites because I’m drawn to dark tourism. Rather, it’s because I believe that education and understanding is a form of human responsibility. History stops being only a chapter when you stand on heavy ground.

For those who haven’t traveled to these places, it might be easy to treat Rwanda, Cambodia, Germany, or South Africa as distant warnings, or tragedies left by time and contained by geographic borders. Other societies have allowed this to happen.

But history doesn’t repeat itself because people are innately evil. These events happen because fear is effective, division is politically useful, and propaganda practices patience – and world leaders know this.

This is the idea that lingers with me whenever I return home, and what I find deeply unsettling.

I’m not comparing the United States to Rwanda in 1994 or Germany in 1941. I understand that history is specific and context matters. But I do recognize the early ingredients that, in other times and places, proved dangerous: polarization deepens into hostility, misinformation spreads faster than truth, and entire groups are reduced to talking points. 

Some of my neighbors are far too removed from the events that are unfolding with ICE to feel implicated by it. If you are not the one currently at risk of detention or deportation, it’s easy to disassociate from the issue. This is unnerving. In every country where I’ve stood in the aftermath of political violence, there were people who believed the systems around them were functional. Even normal.

People are minimized to legal status and families become case numbers. While the current system begins to feel self-operating and unstoppable, history shows that systems are always built, maintained, and justified by those who convince themselves they’re participating in something necessary. We should all be weary and concerned by what is happening in the United States right now.

Visiting places marked by recent genocide makes it harder to dismiss certain patterns. If history teaches us anything, it’s that extremism doesn’t announce itself when it’s already fully formed. And attempting to understand this specific type of trauma as best I can has enhanced what I feel towards my own country’s political environment.

The point of standing in history is not just to mourn it. It’s to recognize its early stages and refuse to look away.

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