The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

by Samantha Power

I picked up the Sunday New York Times at the bottom of my Somerville stoop. There, in the upper left-hand corner, was a huge headline: SREBRENICA: THE DAYS OF SLAUGHTER.3 A reporting team had spent weeks preparing a special investigation that contained previously unpublished details of the systematic murder of Srebrenica’s men and boys. As I sat reading—clenched in what felt like a full-body grimace—I understood what writers reflecting on the Holocaust meant when they described the human capacity to “know without knowing.” I had covered the fall of Srebrenica and had read all of my friend David Rohde’s articles about it. Laura, who had left journalism to attend graduate school, had spent her summer working for Human Rights Watch, gathering the testimonies of people who had survived the massacres. Yet my reaction to the Times exposé confirmed how wide the chasm can be between holding out hope that something is not true and actually absorbing devastating facts in all of their finality.