I was seventeen when I first read Sophie’s Choice, William Styron’s novel about a survivor of Auschwitz.
I read it in one sitting, and then returned to it again and again.
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I spent weeks thinking about it.
I knew the facts of the Holocaust. But Sophie’s story made it real for me:
gave faces to victims, and emotion to the past.
Stories always seem to have more power than statistics. That is why the testimony of survivors is so important.
They tell us about mankind at its worst – but in their very presence offer hope and affirm humanity’s resilience.
As the memory of the Holocaust recedes further into the past, the task of keeping testimony alive, of telling stories, becomes all the more important.
The Holocaust should not just be a piece of history, but a constant rebuke.
It is not enough to know what happened: to remember – truly remember, not just passingly acknowledge – we must act.
That means challenging anti-Semitism, racism and hatred.
It means looking for signs of atrocities around the world, and acting to prevent them before they take place.
And it means giving space to survivors to tell their stories, as much as possible – for it is their words which are our most powerful weapon against apathy and ill-intent.
Holocaust Memorial Day offers a chance to hear those stories.
It is a crucial opportunity to magnify survivors’ voices – and in doing so to challenge genocide denial, the insidious force which is so often the precursor or gateway to greater discrimination.
It is a crucial opportunity to magnify survivors’ voices – and in doing so to challenge genocide denial, the insidious force which is so often the precursor or gateway to greater discrimination.
I have seen how this works. When I read Sophie’s Choice, I sought to understand the evil it described.
I was desperate to make sense of how such atrocities could happen. I did not
expect that, within a few years, the country of my birth, Bosnia and Herzegovina, would itself witness genocide.
The mass killings of Bosniaks were not on the same scale as the Holocaust,
but the intent and approach was the same: to destroy an entire group of people, in pursuit of corrupted ideas of ethnic purity and a land free of the vilified ‘other’.
The architects of the genocide are dead or in prison, convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
But many of their acolytes and fellow travellers remain active in politics in the Balkans. Genocide denial is rife.
War criminals are regularly celebrated.
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The Mayor of Srebrenica – the town where 8,000 men and boys were killed by
Bosnian Serb and Serbian forces, solely because they were Muslim – is himself a denier of the massacre that happened in his town, less than thirty years ago.
Government officials in Republika Srpska – one of the two entities which together comprise the state of Bosnia-Herzegovina – have refused to acknowledge or comply with a new law, introduced last summer, banning genocide denial and the glorification of war criminals.
Genocide denial is not academic. Just as Holocaust denial is usually rooted in deep anti-Semitism, so those who seek to downplay the events in Bosnia of the 1990s do so with malicious intent.
Ultra-nationalists aim not just to redeem the memory of the perpetrators of genocide, but to cast them as the victims of an anti-Serb conspiracy – and to suggest that Bosnians Serbs continue to be discriminated against, and need their nationalist political leaders to protect them.
The Auschwitz concentration camp was in occupied Poland[/caption]
Their rhetoric is deliberately designed to foster resentment, exacerbate tensions, and bolster their own political positions.
Talking about historical injustice and inventing anti-Serb conspiracies, claiming a stab in the back, distracts from the corruption and stagnation over which they preside – and prepares the ground for a renewal of the same policies of ethnic cleansing which their predecessors pursued.
Bosnia is not the only country to have experienced genocide in the years since the Holocaust.
Cambodia, Rwanda and Darfur have all been scene to terrible crimes. In the last decade the Rohingya in Myanmar and the Yazidis in Iraq have been the victims of genocide.
This is why survivors’ testimony matters. Not just to remember the past, but to shape the future.
The ongoing treatment of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, where crimes against humanity are being perpetrated on an industrial scale, almost certainly amounts to genocide.
In all these cases, dehumanisation is at the heart of genocide. The victims are cast as lesser, worthless, backwards, at once barely worth consideration yet also a deadly threat.
Those who incite genocide deal in emotions, not facts: fear, anger, hatred. It takes empathy to counter them.
This is why survivors’ testimony matters. Not just to remember the past, but to shape the future.
Survivors remind us of our shared humanity. Their stories are a bulwark against
hate.
They show the individual, the person like us, not the enemy that perpetrators seek to depict.
And in reaching our hearts, their stories call us to act: to counter denial, to break down divisions, and always to seek tolerance, equality and respect.
As we remember the Holocaust, let us remember that honouring the memory of victims also requires us to ensure that the horrors they encountered must never be suffered again.
