Have you ever considered the "right" to memory?  Although many people talk about the right to freedom, the right to life, the right to food, health care, and shelter, and more, rarely do we hear about the right to memory.  "The Right to Memory," a film I watched recently, attempts to come to grips with this point.
     It's not an action film!  "The Right to Memory" records the recollection of a Russian man named Arseny Roginsky about his efforts to "retrieve" the memory of the many thousands and millions of people who "disappeared" during the Stalin era.  As most people know, in his fanatically paranoid compulsion to retain his power, Josef Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union from 1927 to 1953, ordered the killing or imprisonment of untold millions of Russians.  It is a story which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recounts in chilling detail in his many books about the gulags, the archipelago of prisons that Stalin created to kill or punish those who had offended him.
     In "The Right to Memory," Roginsky shares of how his work underscored for him, and hundreds of others, the deeply felt human need to remember those whom time and history had forgotten.  He tells of the joy survivors experienced when they, finally, had closure for the fate of their lost loved ones.  Now, he said, these people could remember.
     In his Inhuman Land, Jozef Czapski tells, in a heartbreaking way, a similar story of trying to track down people who had been left behind by the Stalinist machine.  It is a story that, sadly, has been repeated over and over and over to this day.  Witness the aftermath of the Hutu Tutsi conflict in Rwanda, the persecution of the Rohingya of Myanmar, or the "disappearance" of thousands of dissidents under the reign of Augusto Pinochet in Chile.  And too many more to list here.
     Memory is vital to who we are as human beings.  It is also essential to recognizing our place in the cosmos:  if this world is an accident, who, in the big picture, will really remember us?
     No one.