Nazi genocide is not just a piece of distant history

THERE are not that many left who survived the Nazi genocide. Some remain, still telling their story, as 89-year-old Harry Spiro did in a webcast for schools this week, in advance of today’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day and National Holocaust Memorial Day. But he is one of fewer and fewer living, breathing reminders of the horrors. Each year sees more of them pass away.

One of the sadnesses of marking this day is that it, in many ways, is not just a piece of distant history. Even once all these Nazi genocide survivors have died, the day will not lose its living voice. For genocide still pulses across the world.

The living voice of International Holocaust Remembrance Day is there in the survivors of the many genocides that have happened in recent decades. No other recent genocide may have taken so many lives, but all have been as horrifying and bewildering in their atrocity.

Many of these voices are still young. Among them, for instance, visiting Scotland this weekend is 22-year-old Fareeda Abbas, a Yazidi woman who, like Nadia Murad, last year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, is a survivor from Kojo, a village massacred by Islamic State.

On August 15, 2014, Islamic State soldiers gathered all of the people from her village in the school building and asked them to convert to Islam – then, when they rejected that, they began killing the men, 450 over the course of one day, including her father and two of her brothers.

For four months, Abbas was held in captivity, raped, beaten, forced to watch an eight-year-old girl being raped. At one point her injuries were so bad she could hardly move or see. After several attempts at escape, on the third she succeeded.

Abbas is one of the key driving forces in Yazda, a charity that aims to prevent future genocides against the Yazidi community and other minorities, and to assist them in recovery. Recently it held a fundraiser in Edinburgh, organised by a Scot who had been affected by their story. It was a reminder that the Yazidi plight must not be forgotten.

Thousands of Yazidi women are still imprisoned by Isis. Around 10,000 Yazidi were killed, and many more fled to refugee camps. It is a community so broken its survival depends on international support. Meanwhile, there are the voices of the Rohingya, around 10,000 of whom were killed in Myanmar in 2017, and 900,000 are currently living across camps in Cox’s Bazar.

There is also Sudan, where hundreds of thousands of Darfuris have been killed under Omar al-Bashir’s genocidal regime, and the many other countries, where according to Genocide Watch, there is a genocide emergency.

But genocide doesn’t pop up from nowhere. We can see it coming. The Genocide Watch site lists around 15 countries which are already at what it describes as the “extermination” stage of genocide, and many more that are involved in polarisation or other processes which it outlines as leading up to mass murder.

Never again, we say. But then we look around the word and see that here it is again, and again. If we want to know what we’ve learned in the 70 years since AuschwitzBirkenau was liberated, we need only look at how we have reacted to these recent genocides and what the international community has failed to do. These are the people we should think about most on International Holocaust Memorial Day – the people still in the grip of horror, or aftermath, the people who need support.

Above all, though, this day should provide fuel to a fight against the hatred, polarisation and dehumanisation that, according to Genocide Watch, are preconditions for genocide. These are as present as ever across the world, perhaps on the rise.

In this climate, it seems that more than ever we need to listen to the words of Nazi death march survivor Harry Spiro: “I came to the conclusion a long time ago that hating people doesn’t achieve anything. People are capable of doing horrendous things to each other, but that isn’t overcome by yet more hate.”