ABSTRACT
Archives are the places where we both retain and discard. There is a drive to store just as there is a drive to cull. Sometimes this drive results in counting in order to discount. The families and friends of those who drowned, of course, know their names. However, in Australia, the country to which they were travelling in order to seek asylum, they remain unnamed and unrecovered. The archival evidence that the graves offer was evident when Noam Chomsky questioned whether or not the murders that took place in Srebrenica were genocide. The graves often come to be the dominant site of archival evidence that genocide took place. While such 'evidential' uses of the graves are necessary for establishing what occurred and for the pursuit of justice, the reliance and focus on such definitions blinds us to the human aspect. Wiesel goes on to tell the story of a man in Europe at the end of the Second World War.
