What should memorials of mass murder or genocide accomplish? Are they intended to honor the dead, even if, all too often, there are too many to name? Are they meant to provide a place for people to gather, mourn, and find solace? Or is their role to document the events and perpetrators of the crime and contextualize the crime in history? Is their ultimate goal to shift the focus from mass murder to future peace? For many faced with the grim task of building such memorials and monuments, the answer seems to be some or all of the above. And it is often the case that what is omitted from the memorial may be more telling than what is included.

Naming the dead is a time-honored way of acknowledging their sacrifice, because in a sense any mass memorial is also, in part, a cemetery. An important precedent was set by Sir Edwin Lutyens's World War I memorial, Thiepval Arch in the Somme, which contains the engraved names of soldiers lost...