Learning lessons from the past

The audience were in complete silence for 64 minutes. Everyone was hanging onto every single word that Lilly Ebert, a Holocaust survivor, spoke. Her story is another one of the countless testimonies we have all been listening to since the survivors vouched to share their stories again and again so that we could prevent something so tragic, so monstrous, so inhumane from ever happening again. Have we learned our lesson though?

What one might see in Mrs Ebert is a woman who shall not be silenced – we admire her bravery and courage to speak through her tears about the horrors of Auschwitz and concentration camps alike. She stands as living proof of what Europe and the rest of the world allowed happen in the 1940s. One might argue that there was nothing that could have been done, that Hitler could not have been stopped. I disagree, and wish to share with you why.

War has been a constant theme in my life. I was born in Sarajevo in 1989 and when the war started in 1992, I was fortunate enough to escape with my mother and two siblings to Split in Croatia and then to New York. My father stayed and fought in the war and was wounded three times. I remember going back a year after the war ended and seeing bullet and grenade holes in every building in my home town, I remember the story of my first cousin being shot on the battlefront, my best friend’s recollection of her elder brother and aunt being hit by a grenade, children being warned not to enter abandoned homes or to go into mine fields (this is still a major problem in Bosnia today). Now that I think of it, my grandfather was sent off to a concentration camp in the Balkans – Jasenovac – during WWII. I never met him. You get the idea.

Now, that paragraph was not written to ask for pity, but rather for your empathy and compassion for today’s victims. I’d like to evoke your understanding and recognition of what had happened and what is happening now. I cannot even begin to imagine the horrors that Lilly Ebert went through, but I realize that we have not quite learned our lesson.

Lilly Ebert left the packed lecture theatre with the following:

“It was an upside-down world where good was bad and bad was good – what do I mean by this? Killing someone was accepted and helping someone was punished. When you came out of this world [Auschwitz], you had no money, no education, no anything, and you had to begin a new life. Not a lot of books were written about that. Not that many people stayed normal. That is my story…it makes no difference what religion you are, what colour your skin happens to be, because tolerance is important…You should know what has happened, what can happen and you need to look out so that it never happens again.”

Some of you might remember the Bosnian Genocide in July 1995. One of the reasons that it wasn’t worse was because the world had learned part of the lesson from the Holocaust, however morbid that might sound. Unfortunately, this lesson didn’t help the Srebrenica victims. “Da se ne zaboravi (May it [the genocide] never be forgotten)” – the message of the Srebrenica survivors echoes in my mind. Rwanda, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Tibet, Czeczenia, Armenia (please do forgive me if I have unintentionally left out some)... All those names speak for themselves.

Still, I cannot help but see the irony in Mrs Ebert’s recount – “I hope we stick to that promise,” she said. What has happened in the past 66 years? It is extremely important that each and every one of us know these stories, repeat them and pledge to ourselves to never allow for them to be forgotten. How many more times does history have to repeat itself?