Genocide: past genesis and future danger
Next Monday, October 7th, is the first anniversary of the genocidal Hamas attack on Israel. Since that day, the word “genocide” has blasted itself into our everyday conversation. When I began to write my new book, Genocide: Personal Stories, Big Questions (published on the anniversary), genocide seemed like a horror story from a distant past. Since that ominous day, both Israeli and Hamas leaders have been accused of genocide.
While it’s a subject that has fascinated me since childhood, I didn’t expect a chance meeting at the start of the Covid pandemic to take over my life for the following four years. That conversation led me to a woman called Paulette Volgyesi. In 1945, the British liberated Bergen-Belsen and then burned the camp down to stop the spread of disease that was rampant. The former inmates of the Nazi concentration camp in northern Germany were rehoused one mile down the road in a displaced persons’ camp. There Paulette was born in 1948. In 1950, she and her family moved to Toronto.
Fast-forward seven decades. Paulette, the daughter of survivors, had become a teacher and, after retiring, was helping Yazidi ISIS survivors to learn English and navigate life in Canada. I met several of the Iraqi women and asked Daniel Johnson, the editor of TheArticle , if I could write a story, which I did here . At a Christmas party, I met a publisher who asked me to expand on my article. By the time I had finished, I had a book on 20th and 21st-century genocide.
Writing about the Holocaust and the ISIS-perpetrated Yazidi genocide led to the exploration of many other genocides, not least the 1915 Armenian genocide. The Ottoman mass murder of almost two million Orthodox Christians was the high water mark of 20th-century barbarity until the Nazis. In the 1920s, Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin couldn’t understand why one person could be held accountable for murder but that countries could annihilate entire peoples with impunity. As far as such massacres were concerned, there was no international law to stop them. Having lost 49 members of his family, Lemkin devoted his life to campaigning for a global convention “to prevent future Hitlers”. On 9 December 1948, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Lemkin also spent decades trying to define the crime of “genocide”, a term he coined and first used in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.
As my book started to take shape, Paulette introduced me to another Bergen-Belsen baby. In total, some 2000 babies were born in the DP camp that closed in 1950. (I wrote about this here .) Professor Menachem Rosensaft helped me enormously in understanding the law of genocide, contributing to the book and introducing me to the youngest prosecutor at Nuremberg. A 27-year-old American immigrant, Ben Ferencz, barely able to see over the stand, prosecuted the Nazi death squads. The Einsatzgruppen Trial was the ninth of twelve held by the US government in occupied Germany. He was among the first to use Lemkin’s newly coined word at the trials of Nazi war criminals. TheArticle published my interview with the 101-year-old Ferencz ( here ).
Despite, as he said, “peering into hell”, he never gave up hope for the human race. “You live by understanding the position of those who are the perpetrators of such crimes. Many perpetrators believed that it was necessary to protect their vital interests — their religion or their country or patriotism, or the economic conditions. They needed to get rid of the enemy. The enemy is characterised as somebody you don’t like and want to go out and kill. That has been a prevailing position in many countries for many years and is still there. So, we have to change the hearts and minds of people. Because until you change the heart, you’re never going to change the mind. They have to realise that they have to treat other humans like human beings, not like animals.”
Ferencz died at 103 years old, but his words resonate today, as the world balances on a precipice and the American elections are only a few weeks away. Donald Trump may be a politician running for president in a great democracy, but he shares with Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Saddam Hussein and other dictators a mesmeric appeal and Narcissistic Personality Disorder. This not only makes my book relevant but should shake us awake. Empathy, which none of those evil dictators possessed, is part of what we need to find a solution because what is apparent in all genocides is the “othering” of a group — be it Jews, Yazidis or Tutsis. Paulette had empathy with what had happened to the Yazidis because of what her parents had gone through.
Genocide, war crimes, mass murder, and famine are all on our doorsteps in Sudan, Nagorno-Karabakh ( here ), Israel and Ukraine. The threat of ISIS has not gone away, nor has the need to learn and teach. This was the real genesis of my book, trying to understand the unfathomable horror that turns ordinary people into mass killers and collaborators because there is no genocide without neighbours and tacit and complicit help. My journey began as a teenager when I took a trip to Dachau and Theresienstadt. It culminated as a journalist reporting on human rights and conflict and putting it all together in my book, which tells the stories of survivors and the histories of 20th and 21st-century genocide that I hope will act as a lesson that humanity will heed. None too soon.
Genocide: Personal Stories, Big Questions is published by Yellow Press and available on Amazon – https://a.co/d/gQahofr
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