From Auschwitz, to Bosnia, to Gaza: Silence price Genocide

When we prevent or put an end to genocide, we honor the victims of the previous genocide, and thus keep their memory alive. We draw a clear line between the reasonable human behavior and our ability to inflict violence on others. When doing this, we help ensure that the past suffering is not repeated.

This is why it is a painful matter for the survivors of genocide, and those who inherited the shock from their fathers and grandparents, to see the atrocities that the State of Israel is currently committed against the Palestinian population. Of course, one sadness of tens of thousands of innocent people, including children, was slaughtered in Gaza. But one also feels betrayal, because the repetition of the Apple violence again mixes the memories of their loved ones for a long time.

We write this column together because the horrors of genocide are still hesitating within us every day: the father of a generation, a gene, a prisoner in Auschwitz in 1944 at the age of 16, and Damir was a child in Bosnia during genocide and ethnic cleansing in the nineties. We have lost dozens of family members, who disappeared in gas rooms or through multiple mass graves.

How passers -by that the atrocities have changed over generations. For Jin, it was the people in his hometown in Hungary who walked as they were subjected to mistreatment of the Jews, and that the teachers who stood up when the Nazi Al -Mujari called for speaking in his high school, that the Jews were the cause of all the problems of Europe. One of these teachers themselves helped the Hungarian police to identify the Jews in the city so that they can be deported. The town’s residents watched the other through their curtains while the Jews walked.

In Bosnia in 1992, the villagers saw the mechanism of death at work where the mass graves were dug, the smell of the scent of decomposing bodies, and they said nothing. The neighbors looked among the curtains of their windows, but they remained silent. Europe watched the siege of Damir’s birthplace, Sarajevo, on direct TV for 1425 days, respectively. Fifteen hundred children were killed. Fifteen thousand children were injured. In 1995, in Srebrenica, which was declared a “safe area” under the protection of the United Nations, the world saw that 8,000 men and children were separated from their families in front of the United Nations soldiers and systematically killed during the weekend.

The absolute betrayal of the genocide is not only committed by those who are killed, but by those who avoid their eyes. Genuine not only requires the perpetrators but also passers -by. Bosnian genocide played in the evening news, and thus passers -by became global witnesses in millions.

Today, social media allows us to hear from victims and communicate with genocide. Imagine if Jin could publish any person listening to slaves’ work, hunger, and daily choices, where anyone can be chosen to send to the gas rooms. Or if 10 -year -old Damir can publish his fear of death on the bottom of his apartment’s block in Sarajevo, the terrifying sound affected by the mortar shell is effective, and the ease of tearing human flesh and bones.

Perhaps we can also imagine that Damir republish a video clip made by his 12 -year -old cousin from his parents and his 10 -year -old brother as they escaped from their burning village, to be intercepted by the Serbs in the southern Bosnian Mountains. The video will suddenly end while they are arrested. Abraham was killed and ordered with their family, and their bones are still spread through separate, unlimited mass graves.

Two years ago, we believed that such personal contacts, which were received by millions, would have ended the suffering. We believed that the lack of vision, the lack of personal communication, and the lack of details about the human suffering that allowed the occurrence of genocide – which made it possible to stand.

Do we have a lot of belief in humanity? The test is now. During the Holocaust, there were people who intervened to save lives. When the Jin family walked through the city, he saw a different teacher standing in sadness on his front balcony, and he tended to his hat in respect. After several months of hunger in the slave employment camp, Jin was appointed to work with a German civilian engineer who was fed by stolen food from the SS dining room. Bosnia was not different. Good people did courageous things. Some have not been able to bring themselves to carry out their victims; They lower their weapons and walk away. Damir’s girlfriend was rescued by the neighbor of the Serb who risked his life to smuggle her family from the notorious detention camp in the east of Bosnia, where they were tortured for 17 months. After decades, this friend called her child after saving the Serbs.

In 2000, shortly after his arrival in Australia as a refugee, Damir was walking on the campus of the La Trope University, where he was studying. He caught his attention from the layers of stickers attached to a column. Through slow excavation, he discovered the phrase “silence is approval” and discovered a poster in 1993, and called for a protest of Burke Street to kill in Bosnia. The remnants of activity and resistance, Damir, showed that while he and his family were struggling to survive, people on the other side of the world were trying to help.

Perhaps the weekly protests in Melbourne and around the world to support Gaza will send a similar message from solidarity. Now Somoud Potla is on his way to Gaza to do more than protest, but to intervene. They may not succeed in getting help for the needy, but will others take their place? Will we constitute an endless line of ordinary people ready to sacrifice to end the genocide – not passers -by?

There are no curtains to hide behind it. Victims on our screens, in our homes, and we care for us to act. And the choice of behavior, or non -behavior, lies with us all.

The opinions expressed in this article are the authors ’king and do not necessarily reflect the position of the editorial island.