To mark Holocaust Memorial Day, WBGS Looking Glass is publishing a duo of essays from the school's HMD competition this year, on the theme of 'One Day'. You can find the winner Theo Adam's essay here.
CALEB HUANG
“One day...”
A throw-away phrase that often marks the beginning of stories - everything begins on a day, after all. Historians can point out key events that happened on key dates; analyse them, attempt to explain them, explore all the things that happened on a single day - but no event happens in isolation. Every single day adds threads to the tapestry of historical events. Therefore, one single day is simply not enough to tell a story. January 27th is Holocaust Memorial Day - a day for remembrance, to pause and to think. This year’s theme is One Day : a call to reflect on how the persecuted lived day-by-day and their sheer necessity for survival; a reminder and a warning that genocide does not start overnight without dangerous signs, signs which we as bystanders must be wary of; and a hope, a hope against all odds that one day, nobody shall be targeted nor persecuted.
When learning about the Holocaust, many come across the figure of around 6 million Jews losing their lives. On top of this, nearly 3 million Soviet prisoners of war, 1.8 million Polish civilians, up to 500,000 Roma people, around 312,000 Serbian civilians, over 200,000 people with disabilities, up to 15,000 men accused of homosexuality, and thousands of Jehovah’s witnesses were also systematically exterminated. These are mind-numbing numbers - it is almost impossible for the human mind to fully comprehend the scale of these atrocities - but by no means can cold, detached statistics, a quantitative representation, truly depict evil. Every victim’s experience of genocide is different, as is every single day of survival for them.
You didn’t think about yesterday, and tomorrow may not happen; it was only today that you had to cope with and you got through it as best you could.
Iby Knill, survivor of the Holocaust
Hatidža Mehmedović lived a simple life with her husband and two sons. One summer day in 1995, her town of Srebrenica was overtaken by Bosnian Serb forces and she was separated from her husband and sons, who marched to a different UN safe zone.
…My youngest’s hands were wrapped around me whilst he said 'Mother, please go, I beg of you!' Whilst he said this he clutched me tighter to him with his hands and that is something that I cannot forget.
Hatidža Mehmedović
For days, she travelled from one “safe zone” to the next, fleeing the Serbian forces wherever they went. She eventually made it to somewhere safe. Meanwhile, Bosnian Serb forces disguised themselves as UN soldiers and murdered thousands of husbands, sons, and fathers who were marching to another safe zone. Hatidža never found more than a few remains of her husband and sons in a mass grave.
It is solemnly sobering to think that this did not happen in the distant past. There was a 100 day genocide in Rwanda just the year before in 1994, and another genocide in Darfur just 8 years afterwards in 2003 - all well within living memory.
After the Holocaust, the world said “never again”. You would think that with our modern technology and education, the wider public would be aware of the genocides that have taken place since, but recent research (EachOther, 2018) has revealed that 80% of young people cannot name a genocide that occurred after the Holocaust. More worrying still is the growing trend of genocide deniers - from the Holocaust to the modern-day genocide of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang. Such ignorance doesn’t exist despite social media spreading information rapidly - ignorance thrives because social media allows for disinformation to spread quickly, creating echo-chambers inundating victims who fall down rabbit-holes of conspiracies. A shocking survey three years ago found that 1 in every 20 British adults do not believe the Holocaust took place, and denial of the Bosnian genocide was getting so “out of hand” that officials had to criminalise genocide denial just last year. It has further been revealed that the ongoing massacre of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar was exacerbated by hateful, inflammatory Facebook posts filled with lies.
Genocides are caused by more than just disinformation: it is often the case that regimes systematically turn people against a minority, pitting neighbour against neighbour, through means of laws and decrees, media and lies. As many survivors of genocide will tell you, genocides begin with the vilification of an “internal threat” - drawing in on a group’s differences and mischaracterising them, ostracising and 'other-ing' them. Whether the divisions begin top-down or bottom-up, all it takes is a voice of hatred to echo and amplify - and the results can be catastrophic. Therefore, it is vital that while hostility develops around us, we take a stand against discrimination and xenophobia, putting out the fires of “us-vs-them”. Only then can we start on the path to a day where nobody shall be targeted nor persecuted.
“One day…”
Two words that can mark hopes for the future: a future free of genocide, a future as yet unfulfilled. But we can do our best to try and help the persecuted ‘see the day of liberation’ - if we try to make that one day our tomorrow.
Bibliography
Nytimes.com. 2018. A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military (Published 2018). [online] Available at: <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html> [Accessed 21 January 2022].
Wiesel, E., 1960. Night. English translation, London: MacGibbon & Kee.