Best of 2025 - Genocide betrays the living and the dead |
Genocide scholars Damir Mitric and Jill Klein have deep personal and professional experience in genocide and repercussions across generations. As the world watches in horror as the genocide in Gaza continues, they bring us their story.
A repost from 20 September 2025.
When we prevent or put an end to a genocide, we honour the victims of the past and, in doing so, we keep their memory alive. We draw a clear line between reasonable human behaviour and our ability to inflict unimaginable violence on others, and we do this to prevent the suffering of the past from happening again.
This is why it is painful for survivors of genocide, and those who inherited the trauma from their parents and grandparents, to witness the atrocities currently committed by Israel against the Palestinian population. Naturally, one grieves for the tens of thousands of innocent children and civilians slaughtered in Gaza. But one also feels betrayed, because the repetition of genocidal violence once again dishonours the memories of loved ones lost long ago.
We write this column together because the horrors of genocide still reverberate within us every day: Jill’s father, Gene, was a prisoner of Auschwitz in 1944 at the age of 16, and Damir was a child in Bosnia during the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the 1990s. We have both lost dozens of family members, vanished in gas chambers or across multiple mass graves.
How bystanders witness atrocity has changed over the generations. For Gene, it was the people in his hometown in Hungary who walked by........