Hightower, Lara Jo (April 14, 2019). Samuel Totten – Words led to action. Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette,  
Retrieved from https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2019/apr/14/samuel-totten-20190414/

Professor Samuel Totten is a Distinguished Fellow of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem. We are proud to reprint the following tribute to him.

On the wall outside internationally known genocide scholar Sam Totten’s home office in Springdale hangs a watercolor painting of a group of five young men standing on a beach. Next to them are their surfboards, which have been planted in the sand. The men are tan and fit and wearing swim trunks. They have long-neck beer bottles in their hands, and some tilt the bottles up to their mouths.

The story of this painting is rather fantastic, and Totten is animated as he tells it. His vast range of knowledge on a grim subject that many of us do our best to block from our minds might make him intimidating, if he weren’t so gregarious, wasn’t such a good storyteller. He explains that a close friend found the painting in an art gallery in California and realized the artist had used a photograph of Totten and his buddies from Laguna Beach as models. Amazed, he purchased the painting and gave it to Totten as a gift.

Self-Portrait Sam Totten Something most people do not know about me: I aspire to becoming an accomplished author of fiction. Currently, I am preparing to submit my first book of short stories about genocide to City Lights Publishers in San Francisco. Most fascinating places I’ve been on earth: The holy city of Benares/Varanarsi in India; the ancient suq in Hebron, on the West Bank; Kathmandu in the late 1970s; and the Kalahari Desert, where I camped, along with a group of anthropologists, with nomadic Bushmen. Qualities that best describe me: Tenacious and resilient Qualities I wish I had: Brilliance, patience and more kindness Greatest accomplishments: Marrying my wife, Kathleen Barta, and one more still to come! What you fear most: That there actually may be a hell, seeing my loved ones and friends suffer as they approach death, and not doing enough for those in desperate need. That which motivates me: The desire to constantly strive to become a better person, and my scorn for becoming/being a bystander. Guests I would most like to have for dinner: My wife, Kathleen Barta; novelist Nikos Kazantazkis; Jesus; Buddha; the Berrigan Brothers; Dorothy Day; Reverend William Sloane Coffin, my pastor while I was a graduate student at Columbia University in New York City; Dr. Israel W. Charny, who was my mentor in the field of genocide studies; M. Gandhi; Professor Ervin Staub, a survivor of the Holocaust and now a renowned scholar of genocide studies; Professor Robert Jay Lifton; Reverend Lowell Grisham; Professor Cornell West; Professor Dick Bennett; Professors Charlene and Michael Carter; novelist Kurt Vonnegut; Muhammad; and William F. Buckley (I guess I’ll need to have it catered, and to purchase a much larger dining room table.)

For someone who has just made his acquaintance, it’s difficult to reconcile the painting — a depiction of late 1960s relaxed insouciance — with the man standing in the hallway today. Consider the contents of his office, just steps away from the painting, to understand the contrast: The 26 books that he’s either edited or written about genocide are displayed on tables. When writing about the atrocities of genocide was no longer enough, Totten started making aid trips on his own to try and help survivors, and mementos from his missions to war-torn areas of the world line his walls and bookshelves. Among them are two or three hunks of dangerously sharp shrapnel, the kind he had to dive into trenches to avoid as war planes flew above him.

“I was so impressed with someone who came out of the Ivory Tower — and I respect the Ivory Tower — bringing facts, research, scientific rigor to complex human and political problems, but then moving with sacrifice and courage to try and make a difference in one of the most difficult situations in the world,” says the Rev. Lowell Grisham of Fayetteville.

Into The Darkness

What could have turned a young man, who once spent his days “surfing, partying and chasing girls,” into someone whose entire existence has become about fighting genocide? It’s a fascinating question. Totten, luckily, is introspective enough to help trace the path.

For one, he says, the “brutality of his father at home” — the elder Totten was a police officer, abusive to his two sons and wife — instilled an early hatred of bullies and dictators. Later, in junior high, Totten would be struck by the idea that he could use his own skill set — including an innate talent for writing that revealed itself early — to make big changes in the world.

“I read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle,” remembers Totten. “As I read the preface to the book, I was very taken by the notion that a writer could have a profound impact on the policy of a government, the work lives of people, etc. It was at that point in time, after reading the novel and reflecting on the preface, that I knew that someday I would be an author who wrote with the intention of impact, change, for the betterment of humanity.”

And then, nearly a decade later, it was the discovery of an essay written by Amnesty International activist Rose Styron that would help the young Totten narrow his focus.

“This was about six months after I had graduated with a degree in English,” remembers Totten. “And I thought I was well-read, and I was absolutely astonished that I had virtually no knowledge about how pervasive the use of torture was across the globe. And that was what she had written on — torture in Chile, actually. And I was so astonished that the very next day, I went to the Amnesty International office and volunteered.”

Totten charts that experience as “the beginning of my real concern that continues through today about international human rights and the protection of human rights.”

While teaching at the American School in Israel, he made an acquaintance that would shift his path for a final time.

“I happened to meet an individual who was working on, really, one of the first books on a genocide theory,” says Totten. Totten and his new friend, psychologist Israel Charny, would eventually create several books together. “We got to know one another. Slowly but surely, I started thinking: ‘There are so many people in the United States and across the globe who are vitally concerned about international human rights and the protection of international human rights. But you don’t hear that many people talking about genocide.’ And so I thought, ‘Maybe I should go in that direction.'”

Totten had become interested in creating curriculum that would meld the teaching of international human rights issues with history and English and, armed with Doctor of Education and Master of Education degrees from Columbia University in New York, he was hired by the University of Arkansas College of Education and Health Professions in 1987. There were already signs, however, that Totten’s recognition as a genocide scholar on the national level was rising.

“I was invited to work with the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, which was the predecessor to the museum,” he says. “This group basically conducted studies about, “Well, how are we going to develop programs?'” Totten’s curriculum would eventually be used in the classroom of every teacher who sought guidance from the museum when he served as the lead author for the “Teacher Guidelines for Teaching About the Holocaust.”

While genocide was increasingly taking focus in Totten’s work, genocide studies was not what he was hired at the University of Arkansas to teach. His work with the university included teaching guides, curricular resources and instructional processes for teaching. The way Totten scrupulously took great pains to make sure that he delineated his university work from his genocide studies is a testament to his stamina and work ethic.

“I was really fired up about genocide,” he says. “There’s no doubt about it. And so what I started to do — I mean, it sounds crazy in retrospect — but I basically ended up having two separate careers. I would go into my office, some days as early as 2:30 in the morning, but mostly about 3:30 a.m. or 4 a.m. And I would work until 8 or 9 a.m., because that’s when the secretary showed up. And I thought, ‘All right, well I’m on the clock to do education,’ and the rest of the day I dedicated to doing what I was hired to do.”

This worked fine for a time: Totten had several deans over the years who were supportive of his dual focus, and, as he continued to publish in both areas, his career certainly shined a positive light on the university. But then an incoming chairman took issue with his extracurricular activity and asked him to focus solely on education.

“I said, ‘What you’re asking me to do is to gut the core of who I am, and it’s not going to happen,'” remembers Totten.

Into The War Zones

Totten says he loved teaching, but at 62, he ended over two decades of work at the university by retiring to focus on field research. He had felt the pull toward that as far back as 1994, when he was asked to serve as an investigator on the U.S. State Department’s Darfur Atrocities Documentation Project. Long-simmering conflicts there had peaked in 2003; mass murders and rampant torture would eventually lead the United Nations to call the situation “one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world.” Totten and the group with which he traveled to Chad were responsible for gathering information that would inform the United States whether the government of Sudan was committing crimes against humanity or genocide. In teams of two, eight-page questionnaires in hand, they would interview refugees who had, in some instances, fled the violence of their country just days before. Some were missing family members. Some had seen their family members brutally murdered in front of them.

“The very first person I interviewed, I thought, if this is the way it’s going to go, I’m going to have a hard time,” says Totten. “It was a woman who was living by herself. She fled her village. She didn’t know where her husband was. She didn’t know if he was alive. She didn’t know if he was still up in the mountains in Sudan or in another refugee camp. Her son and she were sitting there, and, maybe a half hour, 45 minutes into this interview, she went quiet, absolutely quiet. She had just started telling us that she had been attacked, and the way she put it was that she was forced to dance in lewd ways. And the interpreter figured out that she was talking about being raped, but she didn’t want to put it that way. So here we are, and she’s gone silent, and, you know, I know what my job is — to get the interviews — but, hey, this is a human being. And I told her, ‘Look, if you don’t want to talk anymore, we can end it, no problem.’ And she would say, ‘No, no, no, wait.’ And we would sit there 15 minutes. It was agonizing, because you could see it was agonizing for her.”

It was far from the worst story that Totten would hear. For over a month, he listened to the stories of people who had experienced the worst possible atrocities you could imagine. Many times, he says, bearing witness to their trauma was excruciating.

“Sometimes, the people would start to emote, crying, not being able to talk,” he remembers. “And as an interviewer, I mean, generally, you don’t want to emote because if you do, the whole thing will shut down. So what I literally did was bite down as hard as I could on my lip, and I would just listen. And that’s the way I got through it.”

Totten would use what he learned through this experience to publish several books and was ultimately asked to give expert testimony about the Darfur genocide for the International Criminal Court. His work and the work of his fellow researchers was used in Colin Powell’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2004, when Powell officially classified what was happening in Darfur as genocide.

This wasn’t Totten’s first experience with field interviews, but it was the first time he had spoken with survivors for whom the horror was so immediate, so fresh. And, suddenly, it was personal for him in a more intense way than it had been before. Galvanized by the fact that very little international aid was being given to this area of enormous need, he started doing what he could, all on his own, returning to the Chad/Darfur border again and again and, later, to the Nuba Mountains, located in South Sudan. His goal was to continue recording the stories of survivors, as well as to deliver whatever food and other supplies he had been able to bring with him through fundraising.

Traveling under his own auspices — no protection from a large aid organization or government entity — requires feats of nimbleness the average person would find impossible. Totten must find his own funding, interpreters, hosts, drivers and transportation. And many times, he’s traveling in areas that are under siege.

“The way that people were getting killed, initially, was that the shrapnel would fly, and they would be running, and it would shear off an arm, shear off a leg, or gut them like hamburger,” he says matter-of-factly. “If you’re traveling, what you do is, you jump out of the vehicle and you make a run for it out in the desert. You try to find a trench or something to jump into.

“One day I’ll never forget, because five times we did that within about an hour and a half. Each and every time I thought, ‘Well, this could be it.'”

“I know him, I know that he has a heart for other people who are suffering from war,” says George Tutu, a native of the Nuba Mountains who now lives in the United States. Tutu and Totten helped form the End Nuba Genocide (ENG) organization that has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in supplies and donations. “He tries to help, and he does a lot to help other people. In the Nuba Mountains, where I come from, he helps some of the students who were kicked out of their school because they didn’t pay. He took over [supporting] them and [helping] them finish their education. Sam travels a lot to West Africa, especially Uganda, finding some families with kids that have stayed at home because they don’t have funds that support schools. Sam has given them money to continue their schooling.”

Totten has funded these missions with a combination of his own money and donations from other activists and scholars but, he says, Arkansans, in particular, have been incredibly generous. Totten says former students, the Omni Center for Peace, Justice and Equality and St. Paul’s Episcopal Church have all been big supporters of his work.

Into The Future

If Totten is a hero — and given his life’s work, it’s difficult to argue the point — then that title must also extend to his wife, Kathleen Barta. An artist and a retired nursing professor — the two met at a computer lab on the UA campus during Totten’s first years at the university — Barta is wholeheartedly supportive of Totten’s dangerous work, even though, he says, she dreads each time he leaves.

“Sam is my greatest teacher,” says Barta. “I’ve learned to live in the mystery of holding two opposing desires in loving tension and not need to reconcile them. My brother recently asked me if I have a red line when it comes to Sam’s trips. I’ve thought about it, and I do not want to throw a tantrum and say, ‘Stop caring about other people, and stay home with me.’ Some people are afraid of dying. Sam is afraid of not truly living. The trips are not easy for him. I try to support him to live what Maxine Greene calls a ‘wide-awake’ life and do what he can as long as he can. While he’s gone, I try to keep a regular schedule of sleep, exercise and creative activity so I can be ready to support him from a distance if necessary. I also try to use my concern for his safety to empathize with the many young families of our deployed military personnel coping with the absence of their loved ones who are in so many dangerous situations.”

Totten will be leaving soon for a visit to a refugee camp in Uganda. Nearing 70 , he claims he’s slowing down, although there’s no evidence of that — he’s still taking trips, delivering aid and recording the painful stories of displaced people. He’s got several books in the works. Age, however, has brought multiplying health problems, exacerbated by the difficult travel conditions to which he submits himself.

“[Kathleen] has also literally been my lifeline, arranging to have me med-evaced out of a Doctors Without Borders hospital (i.e. an open airplane hangar along the Sudan/South Sudan border) to the Nairobi Hospital in Kenya, where I remained another week due to passing out and hitting my head in a makeshift cement block shower in a refugee camp,” says Totten of one frightening incident.

But listening to him talk about the evolution of his career and mission, it seems unlikely he’ll stop any time soon.

“What bothered me immensely is that, over the years, I’ve read over and over again criticism of so-called bystanders that are living in the society where the crimes are being perpetrated,” says Totten. “And I started thinking, “It’s easy to point a finger at those people, but I would like to see the rest of us, say, in a Rwanda — where if anybody were caught helping a Tutsi, they would be hacked to death with a machete — how many people would not be a bystander in that situation?

“The real bystanders are those of us on the outside who live in a nation where you can say anything you want, attempt to raise money, attempt to get help. And so I have this special disdain for bystanders, and I’m pointing my finger at myself, because I’m thinking, ‘hey, is it enough to write about this? Is it enough to educate?’ And I came to the conclusion that, no, it’s not.”

Totten says he’s working on several fiction projects right now, an attempt to escape the darkness the last three decades of his career have brought him. But it’s clear that it’s not that easy: Two of those fiction projects are still centered around that familiar subject. He shares a short story from a collection he’s working on; it’s a first person narrative about a survivor of the Rwanda genocide. It’s full of haunting, heartbreaking details — some, no doubt, that Totten heard first hand — of a Tutsi who survived the violence, though his family did not. These are stories that are always present with Totten, they are stories that, once heard, cannot be dismissed, and there is little doubt that Totten is haunted by them.

“Before I die, I want to be just immersed in fiction and move away from this darkness, because it does start to engulf you,” he admits. “I do it seven days a week, and I have for years. No matter how much work I do, how much research I do, you never get inured to the horrors.”

One moment, he suggests there is an eventual end to his mission, but, later, his words make it clear that, while some who study and write about genocide can find a way to detach from their subject, Totten cannot. In fact, he constantly wonders if he should be helping in other areas of the word where genocide survivors need support.

For Totten, even his enormous contributions — unimaginable to the average person — are never enough.

“If I don’t do it, who will?” he asks, rhetorically. “I am always told — by family members and dear friends — ‘Let somebody else do it.’ Not going to happen. If everybody had such a mentality then this world would be a much, much poorer place.”