Mar. Issue
The Legacy of A Tragedy:
How Will Covid-19 Be Remembered, and Will it Be Enough?
Ella Stern
As the one-year anniversary of Covid-19 shutdowns has come and gone, I, like many people, have begun to look to the future. Although the immediate future still contains masks and social distancing, it also holds vaccines and a slow return to normalcy. But what happens after that? How will the world remember Covid-19? And how will we, survivors of the pandemic, feel about the pandemic’s legacy?
Many past tragedies have been memorialized through fictional stories. I personally have read numerous books set during World War II, and I believe strongly in the importance of remembering a tragic event so as to prevent history from repeating itself. But I started wondering whether fictional stories about these tragedies do the job. Do they correctly paint the picture of the terrible things that transpired? Do they romanticize the event? Are they just salt in the wound to survivors?
There is a psychological component for why we as humans continuously come back to such sad stories. First, as this article puts it, “Art and reading are not solely ‘entertainment’...People both create and consume art for myriad reasons–empathy, understanding, expression, and learning among them.” Consuming stories about other people’s struggles provides a glimpse into other people’s worlds, a more complete understanding of what survivors went through. And, because fictional stories can be about fictional people, they allow a tragic event to be publicly remembered without survivors needing to put themselves and their worst moments out there for the public to devour.
Furthermore, “experiencing” other people’s trauma leads people to care more about everyone, not just about the target of the trauma. After a person experiences a fictional tragedy, their brains release oxytocin, which makes them care more about others. Fictional tragedies also lead people to be more thoughtful; they give them materials to guide reflection on the role they might have played in inflicting trauma on others. This is more prevalent after experiencing a fictional trauma than after hearing a news story; fictional books and movies are more immersive and make the victims seem more human.
However, some psychological effects can start to feel uncomfortable to survivors, as they dull down the horrors of the event. For example, people become happier after consuming a tragic story when the story causes them to think about their own close and positive relationships. Also, the majority of fictional stories that are about sad things add lightness or humor. On one hand, this makes the story easier to consume, allowing a larger variety of people to hear the story and learn about the event it is based around. On the other hand, survivors might not appreciate their trauma being boiled down to entertainment, their suffering being erased. They also might be hurt by the irony of a person reading a fictional account of what they went through, then turning away and not helping when they see the same thing on the news.
The difference between a fictional account and an account written by a survivor can be seen in books about the Holocaust. Two books I have read in the past few months are The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris and Night by Elie Wiesel. The Tattooist of Auschwitz, which is based off the memories of a Holocaust survivor, is set amongst the unspeakable horrors of Auschwitz, but it also focuses on the characters, specifically the main character’s relationship with his love interest. The romantic aspect of the book gives readers a lighter plot to focus on, distancing them from the tragic setting. However, there was no “lighter plot” in Night. Its author, Elie Wiesel, survived the Holocaust and believed strongly in the importance of bearing true witness, as well as in the danger of bearing false witness. In his account of his experiences as a Jew during the Holocaust, he tells things as they were without attempting to make the story easy for readers to consume. While most of The Tattooist of Auschwitz wasn’t overly emotionally difficult to read, I sat numb while reading Night, which contained pages upon pages of death.
In this interview, Elie Wiesel said that some “false” accounts of the Holocaust have become too commerical, vulgar, and trivial. He reinforced the need for true, unsullied accounts of the event, saying that, “the Holocaust is not a cheap soap opera. The Holocaust is not a romantic novel. It is something else.” Right afterwards, he brought up the crisis of people denying that the Holocaust ever happened - as proof of the necessity of bearing true witness. He believes that “faced with the embellishment of the tragedy on one hand and the denial with the tragedy on the other, we who are still here must speak up as forcefully and gently as possible and say, look, this is not the way it was.”
Elie Wiesel has carried out that work. In order to do so, he had to re-engage with his most painful memories, turn them into books and speeches, and make himself vulnerable to derision. These obstacles to bearing witness present a good reason why many survivors (of any tragedy) choose not to tell their story, or at least to wait many years. However, survivors not telling their stories reduces the amount of “true” accounts that are out there. Furthermore, as is true in the case of the Holocaust, the number of remaining survivors is constantly dwindling. While it is important to hear and remember accounts from real-life survivors, fictional accounts can fill in the void and make survivors’ stories more accessible, especially after the survivors are gone. They help the world remember what happened. As Elie Wiesel famously said, it is necessary to bear witness and remember a tragedy because “to forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” After all, “to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman.”
And hearing or reading about a terrible event helps prevent it from happening again. First, by definition, creating an account of an event tells the event’s story. This spreads awareness about what happened, which is a good first step. It keeps the event in our collective memory; people learn and remember how bad it was and why it is important to prevent history from repeating itself. For example, my mom recently told me about a patron of the library where she works. This patron, a woman in her seventies, did not learn about the Holocaust or World War II when she was in school. She has recently taken it upon herself to read everything she can get her hands on about this period in history, and to bear witness.
Even better, some stories are the spark to take action against instances in the real world of the same type of injustice they bear witness to. For the example of the Holocaust, there have been many genocides since the Holocaust, including one that China is currently committing against the Uighur Muslims. Stories about the Holocaust can inspire people to bear witness to other genocides and speak out against ones that are happening today.
So, how does this connect to Covid?
About two months ago, I was in Barnes and Noble with a friend. She stumbled across a book about a quarantine romance, and immediately showed it to me. We both groaned, “Ughhh, it’s starting.” By “it” we meant those books about the coronavirus: cheesy love stories and comings-of-age, things we can’t help but cringe at.
It turns out that the book wasn’t about the coronavirus at all; it was actually written in early 2019 about a different disease. But the situation begs an important question. It is an understatement to say that the coronavirus pandemic has been a history-making tragedy. But will history remember the horrors of the past year in a way that is fair to people that have gotten sick or lost loved ones?
It is a very real concern that the coronavirus pandemic might be viewed by future generations as simply a fun period where we didn’t have to go to school, or as a convenient time to relax. If love stories are written about quarantine, the whole experience may get romanticized. But we know that quarantine wasn’t a vacation; it was months filled with stress, fear, loneliness, isolation, scapegoating, sickness, and death. So will we be frustrated, saddened, or even outright furious if the tragedy we have been living for the past year is overlooked? Possibly.
However, I think it is reasonable to assume that the majority of coronavirus stories - though some people may be annoyed that “coronavirus stories” exist - could not be pulled off without addressing the reality of the situation. Furthermore, keeping the pandemic in public consciousness and memory guarantees that it will not be forgotten. Stories about the coronavirus will remind people of the experience of a pandemic, and they will not be lining up to have it happen to them. The stories will teach about the very real consequences of overlooking suffering and not having an effective government response. And fictional accounts will help make it easier and more accessible for all people in future generations to learn about the tragedy we are living through right now. By teaching and reminding future generations about the coronavirus pandemic, these accounts - fiction and nonfiction - will help the world prevent future diseases from getting this out-of-control and deadly. And if we have to suffer a few frustrating stories in order to prevent millions more people from dying, well, I know which option is the lesser tragedy.