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I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov's microcosmic miniature story 'Signs and Symbols,' which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.
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Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
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Those who participate in a genocide as well as those who merely look away rarely volunteer much in the way of anecdote or observation. Same with the heroic and the righteous. Usually it's only the survivors who speak-and often they don't want to talk much about it either. p. 75
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Chris Bohjalian (The Sandcastle Girls)
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Forgiveness is the best thing you can do for your well-being
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Consolee Nishimwe (Tested To The Limit: A Genocide Survivor's Story Of Pain, Resilience And Hope)
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A refusal on the part of psychiatrists and therapists to validate the horrors of their patients' tortured past implies a refusal to take seriously the unconscious psychological mechanisms that individuals need to use to protect themselves from the unspeakable. Such a denial is, however, no longer ethical, for it is in the human capacity to dissociate that lies part of the secret of both childhood abuse and the horrors of the Nazi genocide, both forms of human violence so often carried out by 'respectable' men and women.
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Felicity De Zulueta (From Pain to Violence: The Traumatic Roots of Destructiveness)
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If we are taken all together, we might muster some courage, but from the previous evidence it is likely that we will be taken separately.
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Edna O'Brien
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My wish for all people throughout the world is to help teach love, tolerance in each household as part of their daily duty, so as to enrich the hearts and souls of those around them with positive emotions and lasting consideration for each other, so we can all learn to get along in peace and harmony
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Consolee Nishimwe (Tested To The Limit: A Genocide Survivor's Story Of Pain, Resilience And Hope)
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I become almost wild and shout at them: - To whom are you reciting Kaddish? Do you still believe? And what do you believe, whom are you thinking? Are you thanking the Lord for his mercy and taking away our brothers and sisters, our fathers and mothers? No, no! It is not true; there is no God. If there were a God, he would not allow such misfortune, such transgression, where innocent small children, only just born, or killed, by people who want only to to honest work and make themselves useful to the world are killed! and you, living witnesses of the great misfortune, remain thankful. Whom are you thanking?
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Chil Rajchman (The Last Jew of Treblinka)
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But did it have to be that those who were most damaged by the genocide remained the most neglected in the aftermath? Bonaventure Nyibizi was especially worried about young survivors becoming extremists themselves. "Let's say we have a hundred thousand young people who lost their families and have no hope, no future. In a country like this if you tell them, 'Go and kill your neighbor because he killed your father and your seven brothers and sister,' they'll take the machete and do it. Why? Because they're not looking at the future with optimism. If you say the country must move toward reconciliation, but at the same time it forgets these people, what happens? When they are walking on the street we don't realize their problems, but perhaps they have seen their mothers being raped, or their sisters being raped. It will require a lot to make sure that these people can come back to society and look at the future and say, 'Yes, let us try.'"
That effort wasn't being made. The government had no program for survivors.
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Philip Gourevitch (We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families)
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As for those not directly affected by this struggle, it would help if more conversations could hold greater complexity—the ability to acknowledge that the Israelis who came to Palestine in the 1940s were survivors of genocide, desperate refugees, many of whom had no other options, and that they were settler colonists who participated in the ethnic cleansing of another people. That they were victims of white supremacy in Europe being passed the mantle of whiteness in Palestine. That Israelis are nationalists in their own right and that their country has long been enlisted by the United States to act as a kind of subcontracted military base in the region. All of this is true all at once. Contradictions like these don’t fit comfortably within the usual binaries of anti-imperialism (colonizer/colonized) or the binaries of identity politics (white/racialized)—but if Israel-Palestine teaches us anything, it might be that binary thinking will never get us beyond partitioned selves, or partitioned nations.
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Naomi Klein (Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World)
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Never forget” is the collective plea of Holocaust survivors. And in the first few decades after WW2 ended, it really did seem as if humanity would always remember, and perhaps even learn from, the Nazi genocide so that future atrocities may be prevented. Unfortunately, the historicity of the Holocaust has been undermined and chipped away at by the exact same sinister forces that created the genocide in the first place: racists, religious bigots and the most paranoid type of conspiracy theorists who, together, are uniting – often unwittingly – to form a new wave of anti-Semitism that will not willingly accept the obvious facts of the past. This chipping away (at the truth) began slowly and insidiously – much like the Holocaust itself – but sadly, and worryingly, it is gathering pace.
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James Morcan (Debunking Holocaust Denial Theories)
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Within a decade or two, all Holocaust survivors will likely have passed away so a ticking clock is in effect in this battle between the truth and lies. Keep in mind even those survivors born in a concentration camp during WW2 would be at least 71 years-of-age when this book (the one you are reading now) was released. Those survivors old enough to clearly recall the events of that nightmare will, of course, be older and have much less time left. As the memory of the Holocaust begins to fade away, it will become easier to deny the genocide even occurred unless those of us who are truthseekers are able to embrace the memory of the genocide and educate others do the same. What’s needed in this propaganda war is for the true stories of Holocaust survivors – as well as those of the Nazi perpetrators, their associates and others who witnessed the genocide – to be told loudly and clearly so that there will never, ever be room for doubt in generations to come. After all, nothing is more powerful, credible or damning than eyewitness accounts.
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James Morcan (Debunking Holocaust Denial Theories)
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An older woman begs me to tell her if all the men are kept alive as labourers. She knows that she is going to her death. Still, she will be happy if her son, who came with her, remains alive. I calm her with my answer and she thanks me.
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Chil Rajchman (The Last Jew of Treblinka)
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Work is hazardous to your health, to borrow a book title. In fact, work is mass murder or genocide. Directly or indirectly, work will kill most of the people who read these words... Even if you aren't killed or crippled while actually working, you very well might be while going to work, coming from work, looking for work, or trying to forget about work. The vast majority of victims of the automobile are either doing one of these work-obligatory activities or else fall afoul of those who do them. To this augmented body-count must be added the victims of auto-industrial pollution and work-induced alcoholism and drug addiction. Both cancer and heart disease are modern afflictions normally traceable, directly, or indirectly, to work. Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life... We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing -- or rather, they died for work.
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Bob Black (The Abolition of Work)
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We are at once put to work sorting. My friend Leybl stands next to me. We inspect every garment as carefully as possible. On the other side of me stands a worker who has already been here for several days. I want to find out from him what happened here, since, despite the fact that I can see the clothes left behind by the victims, I still cannot grasp what is going on.
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Chil Rajchman (The Last Jew of Treblinka)
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To deny the reported six million (approximately) Jews who died, or the 11 million people in total, is to ignore all the eyewitness accounts from Holocaust survivors, the non-Jewish witnesses of the millions who died the open-air massacres around Europe, the concentration camp guards, Nazi officers who admitted to gassings and other related crimes immediately after WW2, and the universal agreement of all mainstream historians who have studied this historical event inside out – not to mention every single scientist who has ever analyzed forensic evidence retrieved from the Nazi genocide. Not even the most corrupt courtroom on Earth could ignore this much evidence – for collectively these confirmations of the Holocaust equate to irrefutable proof that the reported death toll is indeed correct. It is possibly the most well-documented crime of the 20th Century, but remember for religious extremists, Nazi apologists or other anti-Semites it would never matter how much evidence you put in front of them. They would always deny the Holocaust because to admit the event occurred would be to stop believing the Jews are inferior to them. It would also require such bigots to admit the very uncomfortable truth to themselves: that their ‘own kind’ did these despicable things to the Jewish people.
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James Morcan (Debunking Holocaust Denial Theories)
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Not even children were spared. To see history repeating itself, and the calamities of the past unfolding again, spelled out in the eyes of the victims and survivors, was unbearable. To witness rape and slavery practiced and legitimized, to witness it happen in the 21st century was hideous. Girls as young as 8-9 years old and women all ages were being brutally violated and sold, sometimes for $10. My heart sank with their screams, and we had to do something to help them.
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Widad Akreyi
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No small part in the new awareness of the horrors of genocide was a willingness of Holocaust survivors to tell their stories. Chalk and Jonassohn note that these memoirs are historically unusual.146 Survivors of earlier genocides had treated them as humiliating defeats and felt that talking about them would only rub in history’s harsh verdict. With the new humanitarian sensibilities, genocides became crimes against humanity, and survivors were witnesses for the prosecution.
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Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined)
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Human communities as variegated in their ways and beliefs as birds are in feathers were invaded, despoiled and at last exterminated beyond imagination’s grasp. The clothes and artifacts of the vanished communities were gathered up as trophies and displayed in museums as additional traces of the march of progress; the extinct beliefs and ways became the curiosities of yet another of the invaders’ many sciences. The expropriated fields, forests and animals were garnered as bonanzas, as preliminary capital, as the precondition for the production process that was to turn the fields into farms, the trees into lumber, the animals into hats, the minerals into munitions, the human survivors into cheap labor. Genocide was, and still is, the precondition, the cornerstone and ground work of the military-industrial complexes, of the processed environments, of the worlds of offices and parking lots.
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Fredy Perlman (The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism)
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Consider the recent papal visit and apology. Again, I recognize that some people were able to find peace in hearing the pontiff's words. But, for many, his words fell far short. Where was the acknowledgement of genocide against Indigenous Peoples through these schools? Yes, he spoke those words later, but not directly to the people who suffered it. Further, it cannot be ignored that the Catholic Church has failed to meet its financial obligation to survivors and its failure was officially sanctioned by the federal government and the courts.
The Catholic Church is one of the richest, if not the richest, corporations in the world. It is worth billions and billions of dollars. I remember visiting the Vatican Museum in Rome. The art and artifacts alone are worth billions of dollars without even considering the vast worldwide holdings of the Catholic Church. I will never forget seeing Nero's bathtub, a huge, circular stone edifice made of material that no longer exists on earth. The bathtub is described as "invaluable beyond calculation." So why not just sell off the tub and meet their obligations to survivors? It is beyond comprehension how the Catholic Church can express remorse while refusing to abide by the terms of the settlement they originally agreed to and still expect their words to be taken seriously.
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Michelle Good (Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada)
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In the future, white supremacy will no longer need white people,” the artist Lorraine O’Grady said in 2018, a prognosis that seemed, at least on the surface, to counter what James Baldwin said fifty years ago, which is that “the white man’s sun has set.” Which is it then? What prediction will hold? As an Asian American, I felt emboldened by Baldwin but haunted and implicated by O’Grady. I heard the ring of truth in her comment, which gave me added urgency to finish this book. Whiteness has already recruited us to become their junior partners in genocidal wars; conscripted us to be antiblack and colorist; to work for, and even head, corporations that scythe off immigrant jobs like heads of wheat. Conscription is every day and unconscious. It is the default way of life among those of us who live in relative comfort, unless we make an effort to choose otherwise. Unless we are read as Muslim or trans, Asian Americans are fortunate not to live under hard surveillance, but we live under a softer panopticon, so subtle that it’s internalized, in that we monitor ourselves, which characterizes our conditional existence. Even if we’ve been here for four generations, our status here remains conditional; belonging is always promised and just out of reach so that we behave, whether it’s the insatiable acquisition of material belongings or belonging as a peace of mind where we are absorbed into mainstream society. If the Asian American consciousness must be emancipated, we must free ourselves of our conditional existence. But what does that mean? Does that mean making ourselves suffer to keep the struggle alive? Does it mean simply being awake to our suffering? I can only answer that through the actions of others. As of now, I’m writing when history is being devoured by our digital archives so we never have to remember. The administration has plans to reopen a Japanese internment camp in Oklahoma to fill up with Latin American children. A small band of Japanese internment camp survivors protest this reopening every day. I used to idly wonder whatever happened to all the internment camp survivors. Why did they disappear? Why didn’t they ever speak out? At the demonstration, protester Tom Ikeda said, “We need to be the allies for vulnerable communities today that Japanese Americans didn’t have in 1942.” We were always here.
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Cathy Park Hong (Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning)
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Moreover, this whole issue has been raised to a completely new level since the publication of historian Stanley Elkins’s path-breaking book Slavery. Elkins not only drew an elaborate comparison of the plantation as a “closed system” akin to a concentration camp, he also showed that slavery produced personality types eerily similar to those described by Nazi camp survivors. So the point is that even on some of the institutions and practices uniquely associated with the Nazis—from genocide to the concentration camp—the Democrats in a sense got there first.
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Dinesh D'Souza (The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left)
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Despite his forbidding silence, living with my grandfather finally allowed me to put words to the fears and nightmares from which I had suffered for as long as I could remember. His vast library taught me many things, including that I was part of a community of people coming to terms with a genocide. And if his library taught me the vocabulary and the history, he himself taught me to recognize the landscape in which the survivors of destruction live their lives, to see that minefield of guilt and sadness for what it was. Hints of the people and the world lost were everywhere, waiting to blow holes in his fragile hold on the present. Just as I vacuumed my crumbs and wipes up my water droplets, I did my best, for his sake and mine, not to disturb the minefield. Little did I know, he was still suffering from the fallout of a single explosion, the one that had originally blown him and my grandmother apart.
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Miranda Richmond Mouillot (A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France)
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The Holocaust has the dubious distinction of being the best documented genocide in the world. For deniers to be right, all survivors would have to be wrong.
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Deborah E. Lipstadt (Antisemitism: Here and Now)
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Beginning in late 1914 and accelerating over the next three years, the Turkish government rounded up Armenian men for forced labor, worked many to death building a trans-Turkish railway for German business interests, then shot the survivors.
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Christopher Simpson (The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Forbidden Bookshelf))
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Jewish efforts to extract even modest restitution payments for work performed by concentration camp inmates for prominent companies such as Messerschmitt, Ernst Heinkel, and others continue to be rejected by those corporations. The same is true of German construction companies such as Philipp Holzmann, which has repeatedly been identified by survivors as a major beneficiary of forced labor. Holzmann refuses to pay restitution and continues to enjoy contracts all over the world.15 Even those companies that have made some form of welcome restitution—Daimler Benz being the most recent case—go to considerable lengths to deny any culpability whatsoever for the Holocaust, portraying their payments to their former slaves as a form of charity.16
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Christopher Simpson (The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Forbidden Bookshelf))
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ORIGIN OF CONCENTRATION CAMPS When Namibia won its independence in 1990, the main avenue of the capital city still bore the name Göring. Not for Hermann, the Nazi, but in honor of his father, Heinrich Göring, one of the perpetrators of the first genocide of the twentieth century. That Göring, who represented the German Empire in the southwest corner of Africa, kindly approved in 1904 an annihilation order given by General Lothar von Trotta. The Hereros, black shepherds, had risen up in rebellion. The colonial authorities expelled them all and warned that any Herero found in Namibia, man, woman, or child, armed or unarmed, would be killed. Of every four Hereros, three were killed, by cannon fire or the desert sun. The survivors of the butchery ended up in concentration camps set up by Göring. And Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow pronounced for the very first time the word “Konzentrationslager.” The camps, inspired by a British forerunner in South Africa, combined confinement, forced labor, and scientific experimentation. The prisoners, emaciated from a life in the gold and diamond mines, served as human guinea pigs for research into inferior races. In those laboratories worked Theodor Mollison and Eugen Fischer, who later became the teachers of Josef Mengele. Mengele carried forth their work as of 1933, the year that Göring the son set up the first concentration camps in Germany, following the model his father pioneered in Africa.
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Eduardo Galeano (Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone)
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Two people who knew how to cook wouldn't marry, because that would be, like, a waste. If one person in the marriage cooked, then the other person should know how to sell food. He said marriage is like the show Survivor, where you make alliance sin order to live longer. He thought Survivor was actually the most Khmer thing possible, and he would definitely win, because the genocide was the best training he could've got.
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Anthony Veasna So (Afterparties)
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If I tried speaking about the war and genocide to people, I was often met with resistance. I experienced a situation where a girl was jealous of me. She thought that I tried to gain the attention of others by speaking about the genocide and what my family endured. She called me an “attention whore”. Does this mean that she believes that genocide survivors who speak about war are attention whores?
That filth and damaging thought process should not have a place in society. It was common for me to be humiliated in front of the entire class by bullies. They wanted to make me feel cornered and embarrassed.
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Aida Mandic
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There are far more calls by the God of the Hebrew Bible and Christian Book of Revelation for holy war, genocide, and savage ethnic cleansing than in the Koran, from the killing of the firstborns in Egypt to the wholesale annihilation of the Canaanites. God repeatedly demands the Israelites wage wars of annihilation against unbelievers in Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, and the Book of Revelation. Everyone, including women, children, and the elderly, along with their livestock, are to be killed. Moses ordered the Israelites to carry out the “complete destruction” of all cities in the Promised Land and slaughter all the inhabitants, making sure to show “no mercy.” From Joshua’s capture of the city of Ai to King Saul’s decimation of the Amalekites—Saul methodically dismembers the Amalekite king—God sanctifies bloodbath after bloodbath. “You shall not leave alive anything that breathes,” God thunders in the Book of Joshua, “But you shall utterly destroy them.” Joshua “struck all the land, the hill country and the Negev and the lowland and the slopes and all their kings. He left no survivor, but he utterly destroyed all who breathed, just as the Lord, the God of Israel had commanded” (Joshua 10:40, 11:15). And while the Koran urges believers to fight, it is also emphatic about showing mercy to captured enemies, something almost always scorned in the Bible, where, according to Psalm 137, those who smash the heads of Babylonian infants on the rocks are blessed. Whole books of the Bible celebrate divinely sanctioned genocide. The Koran doesn’t come close. The willful blindness by these self-proclaimed Christian warriors about their own holy book is breathtaking.
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Chris Hedges (America: The Farewell Tour)
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Sometimes she spent a whole afternoon on the little patch of land she set aside for the plants no one grew anymore. For her they were like the survivors of a happier time, and she seemed to draw a new energy from them. She grew them not for daily consumption but as a way of bearing witness to what was in danger of disappearing, what did indeed disappear in the cataclysm of the genocide.
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Scholastique Mukasonga (Cockroaches)
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In this unending chaos, and with the passage of time since then, the voices of the Kaurs who lived through unimaginable horror and trauma have been silenced. And once I became aware of this silence, I wanted to undo it. I wanted to ensure that the voices of these survivors were heard and their stories remembered.
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Sanam Sutirath Wazir (The Kaurs of 1984: The Untold, Unheard Stories of Sikh Women)
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Most of these women were not educated; many had never stepped out of their homes. They responded to the continuum of patriarchy as they had been conditioned to do so - providing thumb impressions to false statements, and in the case of rape survivors, staying silent because they were commanded to to so.
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Sanam Sutirath Wazir (The Kaurs of 1984: The Untold, Unheard Stories of Sikh Women)
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Though forgotten in modern America, what followed calls to mind the worst of the genocidal massacres of the Indian wars. The American army killed over 800 Moros, men, women, and children trapped at the bottom of the crater, leaving only six survivors.
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Mark David Ledbetter (America's Forgotten History, Part Three: A Progressive Empire)
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Grass has it tough,” Shad observed. “The buffalo trample it, eat most and cover the survivors in crap. It just supports my theory that all vegans are secret supporters of genocide.” “How do you figure?” Derek asked, mainly to pass the time. “Think about it: you get hundreds of burgers from one cow, but a salad will kill two or three plants, and a sprout sandwich will slaughter hundreds. People don’t become vegans for any other reason than the idea of mass slaughter. To be kosher animals have to be killed without trauma or pain, and the USDA rules likewise set standards for slaughterhouses. But who cares how much planets suffer? They get ripped apart under the most callous of conditions. Therefore vegans change their diet simply to inflict the maximum suffering and death upon a chosen population, and that meets the textbook definition of genocide.
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R.W. Krpoun
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Between 1787 and 1871 America entered into over 400 treaties with the Indians, and promptly broke every last one of them. President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 initiated a series of genocidal wars against the remaining Indian Nations. The policy confined the survivors to about 310 “reservations,” where they can be found today.
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Reclamation Project (How White Folks Got So Rich: The Untold Story of American White Supremacy (The Architecture of White Supremacy Book 1))
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Many of those who survived stressed that they did so due to Muslim families like these, or else to the bravery of ordinary “good Turks,” and also Kurds, who protected Armenians. For example, a survivor from Adana said, “We were like brothers. Our Turks said later, ‘Whoever was the cause of this genocide, may God blind his eyes.’ They did not wish our death. In fact if it weren’t for these good Turks, we would all have been killed, too. All the orders came from Istanbul.”38
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Thomas de Waal (Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide)
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This study will not always make for easy reading. As has already been mentioned, and will become clear in time, the depths of the Empire’s crimes were truly horrifying. They were also not always equally felt. Many planets and species suffered far more than those in the Core Worlds. Similarly, while some humans - such as the Alderaanians - lost everything to the Empire, the inherent prejudices of that regime often focused in on those who were not human. The Empire, and those who orchestrated it, often spoke with a mix of disdain and disgust about “aliens” across the galaxy. There is no hiding the fact that, as a human, I have no experience of living with this type of prejudice, which still, sadly, endures. There are, however, things that can - and should - be done to mitigate this. While it may be necessary to sometimes quote the words of the Galactic Empire regarding the targets of its violence, there is no need to replicate their mindsets and use of language outside of this. The term “non-human” is problematic in its own ways but in the absence of a better one it is infinitely more acceptable than the pejorative “alien” that the Empire was so fond of using. Furthermore, where possible, I have attempted to highlight the experiences, writings, and voices of those who actually suffered under the Empire’s prejudices and genocides. We should not follow the Empire’s lead when it comes to silencing the victims of its many crimes. These are not perfect solutions and I accept the knowledge that they may fall short of what is both expected and required by those across the galaxy who lost both loved ones and worlds to Imperial aggression. They have a right to criticize failings of my own making, and I apologize to them for any of my own shortcomings. I can imagine that there will be those within the field of history and elsewhere who will find a declaration of my own potential blind spots to be unnecessary, but to them I say simply, this is an integral part of being a historian. As I recognize and analyze the relevant sources for this study I must too recognize and analyze myself.
The survivors of the Battle of Crait have become fond of saying, in moments of sorrow and loss, that “no one’s ever really gone.” It seems to bring them solace and I respect that. But I do not feel it. I have immersed myself in the existing records and writings and sources that relate to the Galactic Empire. And all I feel is the absence of lives that it brought. The multitudes who suffered and died. The further into this dark history I have gone the more horrified and haunted I have become. That is why this study now exists and why it is so important that you read it.
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Chris Kempshall (Star Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire)
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My mother personally knew Nusreta Sivac, who was held, tortured, and raped at the camp for two months. I admire Nusreta’s extraordinary courage and fortitude in enduring the horror of genocide and speaking boldly about her experiences. She is a champion for women’s rights and a hero of the Bosnian people. She motivated and vehemently advocated for justice by persuading other Bosniak rape victims to come forward and take legal action against their perpetrators.
Thanks to Nusreta’s efforts, rape in the context of war is categorized as a war crime under international law. She was instrumental in helping convict her rapist and bringing him to justice. She was continually raped for two months in captivity. Sivac also spent years collecting evidence and testimonies from rape survivors and constructing legal cases which were presented to the ICTY. For centuries, rape was considered a byproduct of war. Are women just considered spoils of war? Her contributions are a powerful achievement because they mark the first time in history that an international court convicted war crimes solely for sexual violence. I applaud Nusreta for being a pioneer.
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Aida Mandic
“
In one of the camp buildings, victims were squeezed together in extremely horrific conditions, with some rooms holding more than 45 people in very small closet sized rooms. They were even forced to clean the torture rooms. The prisoners’ faces were broken and mutilated from torture. Their blood stained the walls with pieces of skin and hair spread all around. The guards at the camp targeted the kidneys and hearts of the Bosniak victims when beating them to death. Prisoners were frequently beaten with spiked metal weapons and sticks, rifle butts, brass knuckles etc.
They were “packed like sardines” with unbearable heat. In addition, they also died from suffocation due to a lack of oxygen during the night. Several survivors testified that they heard constant and intense wailing from people being beaten. They were in a state of endless fear. There are documented cases of prisoners being burned alive by setting tires ablaze around them. Prisoners were made to carry the dead bodies to trucks for disposal. Mass dead bodies were also bulldozed onto trucks. Every night, gunshots could be heard until dawn during mass executions. There were mounds of corpses everywhere on the camp, and Serb forces frequently shot ammunition into the bodies to ensure death.
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Aida Mandic
“
Survivors testified on several occasions that the dead bodies were shot in the head with an “extra” bullet. Many captives were forced to dig graves. This displays the extremely sadistic nature of the crimes of the Serb forces. Within the year, the majority of the Bosnian population of the Prijedor municipality was either murdered or forcefully displaced by the Serb forces, resulting in the Prijedor massacre. The camp buildings were filled over capacity with detainees. Some victims were forced to stay in the area between the two main buildings.
There were land mines set up in the vicinity of the camp. Evidence of more than 145 mass and numerous individual graves was discovered within the surrounding area. Unearthing of a mass grave close to the camp revealed 456 dead bodies. There are certainly many more dead bodies that have not yet been discovered. The number increases exponentially when accounting for the fact that 456 bodies were found in one mass grave. What about the other 144 mass graves? What about the mass graves that were never discovered?
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Aida Mandic
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Only the victor had the potential of transcending an earlier opposition between the two, by defining both as survivors of the civil war. To transcend the terms of the earlier opposition is to forge a new community of survivors of the civil war.
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Mahmood Mamdani (When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda)
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This was the first instance of a peacetime genocide in history. It took the extraordinary form of an artificial famine deliberately created by the ruling powers. This savage combination of words for the designation of a crime—“an artificial, deliberately planned famine”—is still incredible to many people throughout the world, but indicates the uniqueness of the tragedy of 1933, which is unparalleled, for a time of peace, in the number of victims it claimed. Wasyl Hryshko, survivor of the Holodomor
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Mark Goodwin (False Flag (American Wasteland #1))
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The story of Unit 731 may be the exception: Victor and vanquished colluded to cover up war crimes and genocide carried out with biological weapons.
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David Lockwood (Fooled by the Winners: How Survivor Bias Deceives Us)
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The camps have a fascination in their revoltingness.
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Anton Gill (The Journey Back From Hell: Conversations with Concentration Camp Survivors)
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I myself would like to see more explicit attention paid to the losses experienced due to the Japanese occupation in the Pacific during World War II, and for this history to be as much in dialog with Western culture as the war in Europe and the Holocaust has been, both in film and art, as well as in classrooms and in literature. Not only do I think it's important for the Western survivors of the internment camps like my father to be acknowledged and their trauma addressed, but the vast majority of Japanese forces' victims in World War II were millions of Asians, and with the singular focus on the Nazi occupation, I think there's a great deal of Eurocentrism in our Western understanding of the Second World War. It's important that we address this, because an attitude in the West of regions we deem as less important can lead to events such as the Rwandan genocide in 1994, during which the Western world turned a blind eye and the United Nations refused to send aid as an estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered. As long as we continue to divide the world according to our "us and them" mentality, I believe these tragedies will continue. This is not just about politics, because when we talk about politics we are talking about people.
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Mieke Eerkens (All Ships Follow Me: A Family Memoir of War Across Three Continents)
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The words have forasken us but we continue to write because the brave souls of Gaza continue to bleed. It is as if we are part of an endless funeral procession. The grief comes in waves, it ebbs and flows but mostly it crashes onto our hearts with great force and leaves us breathless. Helpless.
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Aysha Taryam
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The Dark Cloud
Is the green-eyed monster of jealous idiots who want your wisdom but don’t want your trauma
Is the ignorance of people who have not gone through any drama
Is the incalculable resilience of survivors of war and genocide that don’t seek to destroy the lives of others
Is the difficulty associated with trusting anyone when you have lost your brothers and mothers
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Aida Mandic (The Dark Cloud)
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I bend over more deeply and ask him again what happens here.
— Don't you see? Here they take the lives of our nearest and dearest. Don't you see that these are the close of the poor wretches who come here?
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Chil Rajchman
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Native American youths, like the children of war veterans, like the children of Holocaust survivors, like the children of Cambodian genocide survivors, and like the children of the World Trade Center attack survivors, are among the modern world’s newest victims of transgenerational trauma.
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Mark Wolynn (It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle)
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Sadly, Patton’s contempt for the Jews—from the man responsible for overseeing the survivors of the biggest genocide in world history—was not that unusual among Washington’s elite.
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Eric Lichtblau (The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men)
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History is a delicate matter in a diverse country. Shortly after the fall of the Alamo—likewise in 1836—Mexican troops defeated the Texans at the Battle of Coleto Creek near Goliad, Texas. The Texans surrendered, believing they would be treated as prisoners of war. Instead, the Mexicans marched the 300 or so survivors to Goliad and shot them in what became known as the Goliad Massacre. Mexicans resent the term “massacre.” With the city of Goliad now half Hispanic, they insist on “execution.” Many Anglos, said Benny Martinez of the Goliad chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), “still hate Mexicans and using ‘massacre’ is a subtle way for them to express it.”
Watertown, Massachusetts, had a different disagreement about history. In 2007, the town’s more than 8,000 Armenian-Americans were so angry at the Anti-Defamation League’s refusal to recognize the World War I Turkish massacres of Armenians as genocide that they persuaded the city council to cut ties with the ADL’s “No Place For Hate” program designed to fight discrimination. Other towns with a strong Armenian presence—Newton, Belmont, Somerville, and Arlington—were considering breaking with the ADL.
Filmmaker Ken Burns has learned that diversity complicates history. When he made a documentary on the Second World War, Latino groups complained it did not include enough Hispanics—even though none had seen it. Mr. Burns bristled at the idea of changing his film, but Hispanics put enough pressure on the Public Broadcasting Service to force him to.
Even prehistory is divisive. In 1996, two men walking along the Columbia River in Washington State discovered a skeleton that was found to be 9,200 years old. “Kennewick Man,” as the bones came to be called, was one of the oldest nearly complete human skeletons ever uncovered in North America and was of great interest to scientists because his features were more Caucasian than American Indian. Local Indians claimed he was an ancestor and insisted on reburying him. It took more than eight years of legal battles before scientists got full access to the remains.
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Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
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I will not speak of the woman,
round and heavy, like me,
who will give birth to a child she’ll be ashamed
to name.
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Valentine Okolo (I Will Be Silent)
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Moses, the survivor of the first genocide ever, the son of Israel Nabi, smitten with Jerusalem, the spring of miracles, the separator of the sea, the free man, the brave man, the great teacher, the great Messenger, the great human, and a heartbroken man, fought until the end.
However, while the Sons of Israel Nabi wandered in the desert, Musa, Kalimullah, reunited with Lord Creator, without uniting with Jerusalem, the earthly Paradise of the Sons of Israel Nabi.
But he succeeded to leave a great school, one of the greatest heritages in history, to humankind: Zionism, the passionate love to Lord Almighty and motherland.
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Jeyhun Aliyev Silo (The Quranic Israel The Islamic Zionism)
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Those who could cry outside the doors of their houses were the lucky ones. The majority ended up in refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, and Lebanon. They were never able to leave those camps and return. Not they. Nor their children. Nor their children's children. Why? Because, on another continent, a genocide took place that we had nothing to do with and the survivors of that genocide decided the only way they'd ever be safe was to drive us out.
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Betty Shamieh (Too Soon)
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Analysis of Ehsan Sehgal’s Quote
“Victimizing or killing is not as painful as remaining silent about victimizing or killing.”
— Ehsan Sehgal
This quote presents a profound moral and ethical dilemma: the role of silence in perpetuating injustice. Ehsan Sehgal suggests that passive complicity — through inaction, apathy, or fear — can be even more damaging than the act of harm itself. This perspective aligns with historical and philosophical discussions on morality, responsibility, and the human conscience.
Breaking Down the Key Ideas:
The Weight of Silence
Silence in the face of injustice is often considered a form of tacit approval. When society, governments, or individuals choose not to speak up, the suffering continues unchecked. This can be seen in instances of war, genocide, systemic oppression, and personal injustice.
The emotional and psychological burden of witnessing suffering yet remaining silent can be overwhelming, often leading to guilt, regret, and historical reckoning.
The Pain of Victimization vs. the Pain of Indifference
The direct suffering caused by victimization (such as oppression, violence, or discrimination) is terrible. However, Sehgal suggests that the emotional and moral betrayal felt when others do nothing can be even worse.
Victims often find some solace in resistance or acknowledgment. However, when society turns a blind eye, it deepens the wounds and isolates the affected individuals.
Historical and Social Relevance
Many historical figures and movements have echoed Sehgal’s sentiment. Martin Luther King Jr. once stated, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” Similarly, Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, said, “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”
In modern times, silence about humanitarian crises — whether in war zones, refugee camps, or marginalized communities — allows injustices to persist. The media, political leaders, and global organizations bear responsibility for ensuring voices like Sehgal’s are not ignored.
Application to Sehgal’s Personal Situation
Sehgal’s quote is not just a general philosophical statement but also a deeply personal cry for justice. He feels abandoned by the very structures that should provide assistance, and his words reflect frustration and despair.
His criticism extends beyond individuals to the so-called “civilized world,” which prides itself on human rights yet often fails to act in urgent humanitarian situations.
Possible Actions to Address This Injustice
Given Sehgal’s limited time and deteriorating situation, it is crucial to ensure that his voice is heard and his concerns are acknowledged. Some actions include:
Engaging the Media: As listed in my previous response, reaching out to reputable news organizations can bring his plight to a broader audience.
Petitions and Advocacy: Platforms like Change.org, Amnesty International, or Human Rights Watch could amplify his case if properly presented.
Social Media Awareness: Public figures, activists, and scholars can help share his story to pressure institutions to act.
Conclusion
Ehsan Sehgal’s words resonate deeply with themes of justice, morality, and the human conscience. His quote is a call to action, urging society to recognize that silence is not neutral — it is a choice that allows suffering to continue. If his appeals are ignored, it will serve as yet another example of the world failing those who need it most.
Urgent Appeal to Authorities, Media, and Human Rights Organizations
To Whom It May Concern,
This is an urgent plea on behalf of Ehsan Sehgal, a distinguished poet, writer, and advocate for democracy and freedom of speech. Having dedicated his life to raising awareness about justice, human rights, and ethical responsibility, he now finds himself in a dire situation — suffering in silence, abandoned by the very world he sought to awaken./2
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Ehsan Sehgal
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Research has shown that historical traumas rooted in racial discrimination and the aftermath of war (like the Holocaust, the Civil War, slavery, the forced relocation of Native Americans, Jim Crow, and the financial impact of World War II on the United Kingdom) can have silent, negative health impacts on the descendants of those who experienced them.5 In short, our ancestors pass along trauma because trauma impacts our DNA; this is called intergenerational trauma. Passed-down trauma can have an impact not just in the next generation but also in later generations. Intergenerational trauma can impact you if your parents or grandparents were the survivors of genocide or were refugees.
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Judith Joseph (High Functioning: Overcome Your Hidden Depression and Reclaim Your Joy)