It stood there: eight feet tall, thousands of names long, a monochrome monument to the dead of the last government-imposed horror. 43,678 names, one after the other, running along alphabetically until the last Z.

The people around me bowed their heads or searched for the names of relatives, hovering in thick silence, remembering.

But how can they remember? The names here mean nothing to them. All we know of war is the images relayed back to us. We don’t know what these people looked like; what their dreams were; how many buttons they left undone at the top of their shirt.

I placed my hand on the stone and tried to pray, but nothing came. I can not pray for the men, women and children who lost their lives. We remember only their names. There’s a reason we remember them: if we think of these people and bow our heads in silence and pretend to pray once a year, we forget the reason they died. It hit me then that we are not silent to remember. This monument is here to help us forget.