Trice’s Reviews > A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Woman Confronts the Legacy of Apartheid > Status Update

I’ve finished with the main body of the book and it lists it as 66%! And wow, does this woman include notes - real notes! Looooong notes like mini essays on supporting and related topics.

“dialogue does create avenues for broadening models of justice + healing deep fractures in a nation by unearthing, acknowledging + recording what has been done. It humanizes the dehumanized + confronts perpetrators w/their inhumanity. Thru dialogue victims + greater society come to recognize perpetrators as human beings who failed morally whether thru coercion, perverted convictions of a warped mind or fear (119)

On trauma, forgiveness, power and self-respect

Thinking of Orwell’s Politics & the Eng Lang + the euphemisms used 4 horrible wrong enacted by 1 person on others
Hard to believe the SA apartheid govt members actly believe own denials of responsibility or knowledge of what the killing squads were doing
When she talked abt the unreality deKock experienced during missions it made me think of Celtic battle awen - trance-like state of some warriors going into battle

Talks some abt how secret the SA apartheid government’s k*lling squads’ ops were + contrasts w/ eg Miloseviç who was very directly/clearly involved by command in the acts his soldiers carried out

A reread. Doing remember how I initially discovered this bk - was nice to discover the receipt still in it, so I can see I bought it at the SU bookstore 3/15/05

I wish I remembered the details of it but an overall sense of how remarkable it is stuck w/me in its compassion, its struggle with identity, and its wrestling with the horrors humans can commit against ea other, what that says abt each of us, + how we go on