Written by young people for young people

Genocide: Know more

Foreword by Dan Snow

History is a warning.

We study it because it tells us about what we humans are capable of and allows us to absorb lessons without having to experience the horrors of violence, famine or economic upheaval first hand. If we understand these things, we perhaps have a slightly greater chance of avoid-ing the mistakes of our forebears. There is no bigger lesson from history than genocide.

The young authors have created something remarkable. Their energy and commitment is an inspiration. They do not want to let the memory of genocide fade because they know that awareness is part of prevention. They have run workshops for young people from diverse backgrounds, they have recorded the memories of some of the people who now live in the UK but who were caught up in genocidal spasms from Europe to Africa and Asia, and now they have written this book. It is a huge achievement.

These young people have reminded the rest of us of the true purpose of history.

We must remember, because when we forget, we repeat.

Dan Snow

Historian

About our book

Thanks very much for taking a look at our book.

We hope that it helps you understand a bit more about what genocide is and how it happens. We’ve tried to tell a historically accurate story of the genocides that we cover and also to focus on the experiences of individuals who were actually there at the time and survived to pass on their story to another generation.

One thing that we’re not trying to do is to compare genocides in order to create a ‘hierarchy of horror’. We are not trying to work out which one was ‘worst’ or the most terrible. Every experience in every genocide is indescribably awful.

Instead what we are trying to do in our book is to raise awareness about genocide and to try to identify certain patterns in the causes and course of genocides. If we can spot these patterns then genocide will be easier to stop in the future.

We hope that you find out book useful.

Thank you.

The Authors.

Who you will meet in this book...

Kemal

Kemal was born in Bosnia

(which was, at the time, part

of Yugoslavia in Europe) into

a close family.

Sophie

Sophie was born in Rwanda, a

country in Africa, into a large

and loving family.

Sokphal

Sokphal was born in Cambo-

dia to a wonderful family.

He lived in the capital city of

Cambodia which was called

Phnom Penh.

Ruth

Ruth was born in Germany

into a loving and vibrant

family in the 1930s. She

came to Britain at an early

age.

1 Naming the ‘crime without a name’

On 24th

August 1941, during the Second World War, Winston Churchill made a speech that was broadcast on

the radio. The British Prime Minister made the speech nine weeks after Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union.

Churchill stated that ‘German police troops’ were exterminating ‘literally scores of thousands’. He said that

‘We are in the presence of a crime without a name’.

Churchill’s speech was heard across the world. One man, who heard the broadcast in the USA, had been thinking about the unnamed crime that Churchill talked about. He was Polish lawyer called Raphael Lemkin.

Lemkin would give that crime a name: ‘genocide’.

As a young man Raphael Lemkin had been shocked by the

mass killing of Armenians by the Ottomans. Lemkin was par-

ticularly disturbed by the fact that those who had organised

the murders could not be prosecuted because there wasn’t a

law to do so. They had not committed a crime. As a lawyer in

Poland in 1933 Lemkin tried to solve the problem by propos-

ing two new crimes: ‘barbarity’ (the crime of exterminating a

whole group of people) and ‘vandalism’ (the attempt to de-

stroy the culture of a group). No one listened and he wasn't

even allowed to travel to Spain to present his ideas to a con-

ference. Nevertheless, Lemkin didn’t give up. When Nazi Ger-

many invaded and began to unleash their murderous cam-

paign against Jews in Poland Lemkin understood what they

were attempting to do. As he fled to fist Sweden and then to

the USA via the USSR and Japan Lemkin collected evidence of

what would be known as the Holocaust.

In America Lemkin began writing a book about what the Na-

zis were doing. He searched for a name for the crime that

they were committing and decided on ‘genocide’: a combi-

nation of ‘genos’ Greek for group and ‘caedere’ which means

‘to kill’ in Latin. Lemkin now tried to persuade governments

and officials around the world to recognise the new crime he

had identified. He spoke to everyone he could think of..and

made himself quite unpopular such was his persistence. At

the Nuremberg Trials in 1946 the term ’genocide’ was used

but not in the final judgements. Lemkin was dismayed but

didn’t give up. Finally the new United Nations passed the

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime

of Genocide. Lemkin’s dream had been realised. However,

the USA did not sign up to the Convention...and hadn’t by

the time Lemkin died, penniless, in 1959. Only seven people

attended his funeral.

Lemkin is born

in a part of

Europe that is

now Belarus.

1900

1.5m Armenians

are murdered. 1915-17

Lemkin tries

to present

his ideas on

crimes of ‘barbarity’ &

‘vandalism’

1933 Lemkin uses

the word

‘genocide’

in a book he writes.

1944

Germany

invades

Poland

1939 Leading

Nazis are

put on trial

in Nuremberg

1946 The United

Nations

recognises

genocide as a crime

1948

Lemkin flees

Poland. Many of

his family are

murdered in the Holocaust.

1939

Hitler is

defeated 1945

Lemkin’s Journey

What is ‘genocide’?

The Genocide Convention, 1948: Key points

Article I

Stated that every country that signed the Convention agreed that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime which they would to prevent and to punish.

Article II

Defined genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

Article IV

Said that anyone committing genocide shall be punished, whether they are rulers, public officials or private individuals.

Article VI

Declared that anyone charged with genocide should be put on trial in the country where they committed the crime.

‘A great crime had been

recognised!’

‘How do you prove what some-

one intended to do? It will be

really hard to prosecute

someone’

‘Why aren’t political groups

included?’

‘How many people need to

be killed for it to be geno-

cide? 50? 500? 5,000?’

‘How will someone accused

of genocide get a fair trial in

their own country?’

‘At last, the planners of genocide

will be put on trial’

‘They might punish us for what

we’ve done in the past. We’re

not going to sign!’

‘The destruction of a group’s

culture isn’t included!’

Was the Genocide Convention popular with everyone?

When the Genocide Convention was adopted by the United Nations in December 1948 Lemkin was overjoyed. His lifetime ambition of seeing the planners of genocide face the threat of prosecution had been realised. However, not everyone was happy...and people have since criticised the Convention. Lemkin himself was upset that his original ideas to include the destruction of culture wasn’t included. Lawyers thoughts that it may be diffi-cult to prove ‘intent’ to commit genocide - what was in someone’s mind. Furthermore, politicians were worried that political groups weren’t included in the list and, in particu-lar, some politicians from the USA were worried that they may be prosecuted for their actions towards black Americans and Native Americans. They didn’t sign the convention.

The Holocaust (1933—1945) Under the

cover of the Second World War Nazi Ger-

many murdered six million men, women

and children because they were Jewish.

Bosnia (1992—1995) During a war in Bosnia

Serb forces sought to destroy the Muslim popu-

lation in land they wanted for themselves.

Cambodia (1975—1979) After winning power in a

civil war Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge murdered approxi-

mately 1.5m people.

Rwanda (1994) A Hutu Power regime murdered ap-

proximately 1m men, women and children because

they were Tutsi.

After the Holocaust: Never again?

Each genocide is unique and happens for reasons that are particular to the time and place that they

occur in. They are all complex and complicated. However, whilst there are very many differences

about why genocides happen when they do there are also some similarities too.

The next few pages give short summaries of the events that led up to the Holocaust and genocides in

Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda. You will also read about the experiences of Ruth, Sokphal, Kemal

and Sophie who all witnessed the causes of genocide in their own countries.

2 Why does genocide happen?

Kemal Sophie Sokphal Ruth

Like most African countries, Rwanda

was claimed by a European nation as

part of their Empire. First, Germany

ruled Rwanda and then, as a conse-

quence of the First World War, Bel-

gium took over. To more easily control

the country Belgium decided to for-

mally divide the people of Rwanda into

groups: Hutu, Tutsi & Twa. These had

existed before to reflect the economic

status of different people. However,

the Belgians issued ID cards to all

Rwandan and permanently divided

the country. They also decided to use

the Tutsi minority to rule the country

on their behalf—a move that alienated

the Hutu majority. When the Belgians

left Rwanda the majority Hutus took

over and massacres against Tutsi be-

gan, forcing many Tutsi to leave the

country. These Tutsi refugees formed

an army, the Rwanda Patriotic Front,

and invaded Rwanda in 1990. Tutsi

people were discriminated against and

killings were common.

Magazines , like Kangura , and radio

stations like RTLM spread extreme

propaganda that instructed Hutus to

hate Tutsi.

Speeches by politicians such as

Mugesera told Hutus that all Tutsis

were ‘cockroaches’ who should be

killed. As the RPF invasion continued a

secrete organisation called the Zero

Network began to plan a genocide.

Young Hutu men were recruited into

groups like the Interahamwe (‘Those

who fight together’) who were trained,

armed with machetes that had been

imported and told to hate the Tutsi.

Lists of people who should be killed

were drawn up.

On April 6th 1994 the President of

Rwanda, Juvenal Habyarimana, was

returning to the country from a peace

summit when his plane was shot down

by a missile. This was signal to the Hu-

tu extremists to start the genocide.

1931 ID Cards

issued

1990 Tutsi rebels

(RPF) invade

1994 President is

murdered

1959 Massacres

of Tutsi

Sophie

I was the seventh child in a family of ten children. I enjoyed singing in our church choir. I remember my dad, when I was young, would come home in the evening, he would call my name before he called anyone else.

During holidays, when living in the village, my dad would take us to the garden to dig or to harvest. He did this so he prepared us for our future lives as he did not know what we will become.

Discrimination against Tutsis had been going on long be-fore the genocide began in 1994. Most of the Tutsi chil-dren came from poor families so were not able to afford private schools, while many received no education at all; those in public schools were prevented by the govern-ment from completing their education due to their eth-nicity. I remember passing my exams on the average of 95% a year! But when the national results came out my name and other Tutsi children did not appear on the list. I remember while travelling on buses, we were stopped many times at the roadblocks to have our ID checked. When we were found to be Tutsi, boys were sometimes beaten or taken to be killed or taken to prison because they were 'Inkotanyi' - ‘rebels’ or ‘collaborators’. Girls were mistreated, sometimes spat at, and verbally abused. I then decided to throw away my ID, convinced that there was no point in carrying it. These things happened be-tween 1990 and 1994 before the mass killing begun.

1992 Interahamwe

set up

End of

WW1

Belgium

controls

Rwanda

1961 Belgians

leave

Rwanda

1961-

93

Discrimina-

tion against

Tutsi

Why was there a genocide in Rwanda?

Pol Pot wanted to destroy the people who he saw were the enemies of the people. The groups that he considered to be his enemies included those peo-ple who lived in cities and were edu-cated. He also hated members of mi-norities within Cambodia like ethnic Vietnamese, Chinese and the Muslim Cham. Besides these groups Pol Pots wanted to destroy the Buddhist reli-gion in Cambodia.

The Khmer Rouge divided people into two groups: the ‘Base’ people who were peasants who worked on the land and ‘New’ people who they saw as being corrupt and parasites and living in cities. They forbade families from calling each other by their names – instead everyone had to call each other ‘Comrade’. In the eastern part of the country Pol Pot’s men made every man, woman and child wear a blue scarf to mark them as being from that area.

1970 Lon Nol coup

1953 Independence

1969 US bombing

begins

1975 Phnom Penh

is emptied

1975 Pol Pot takes

over

Sokphal

Sokphal was only seventeen when the Khmer

Rouge took over. He was forced to leave Phnom

Penh like all the other inhabitants. Because his

family came from the city they were treated as

second class citizens and called ‘newcomer’. Sok-

phal was set to work but the ‘newcomers’ were

criticised for being lazy and weak and not having

experience of working in fields or building flood

defences or collecting crops. The places where

Sokphal and his family were expected to live out-

side of the city were very basic. Instead of cars

there were ox carts and they had to find their

own water to drink. It was all part of Pol Pot’s

idea of completely changing Cambodia and turn-

ing it into an agricultural country. He didn’t care

about the impact such changes would have on the

ordinary people that he inflicted them on. As

some Khmer Rouge soldiers said to Sokphal ‘there

is no benefit in keeping you, no loss in losing you’.

The genocide in Cambodia was perpetrat-ed by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge fol-lowers. They came to power at the time of the Vietnam War which was being fought in the neighbouring country to Cambodia. Undoubtedly the instability caused by the war enabled Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to gain power and im-plement their genocidal ideas.

Cambodia became an independent coun-try in 1953; under King Sihanouk it was named the Kingdom of Cambodia. In 1965, with the war waging in neighbour-ing Vietnam, Sihanouk allowed the Com-munists from North Vietnam to set up bases in his country from which to attack the capitalist government in South Vi-etnam. The US retaliated by secretly bombing Cambodia to try to kill the North Vietnamese there. In 1970 Prime Minister Lon Nol overthrew Sihanouk. Sihanoul set up a guerrilla force to try to win back power.

Why was there a genocide in Cambodia?

Antisemitism had existed in Germany and around Europe for hundreds of years

before Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933. Nevertheless, after

the Nazis came to power it became the policy of the government in Germany to

isolate, discriminate against and persecute those Germans who they decided were

not worthy of being a part of their country. On April 1st 1933 the Nazis stage-

managed a boycott of Jewish owned shops. Menacing ‘Stormtroopers’ stood out-

side shops to dissuade people from going in to buy goods and they also painted

slogans such as ‘The Jews Are Our Misfortune!’ on the windows of Jewish business-

es. The Nazis claimed that they were simply defending the German people from the

Jews.

The Nazis also used newspapers, films and the radio to spread racist propaganda

against Jewish people. ‘Der Sturmer’, a racist Nazi newspaper that sold 486,000 cop-

ies very week in 1937, portrayed Jews as sub-human caricatures and the film, The

Eternal Jew, wrongly depicted Jews as parasites.

The Nazis then began to exclude Jewish people from German life with new laws.

Jews were forced out of their jobs as lawyers, doctors and other professions and

children were excluded from school. The Nuremberg Laws said that Germans who

the Nazis decided were Jews could not be German citizens. Jews were also forced to

have a ’J’ stamped in their passports and, in August 1938, had to alter their names

to make it easier for others to know that they were Jews.

Nazi persecution of Jewish people became murderous in November 1938. In a

dreadful night of violence the Nazis unleashed the antisemitic ‘Stormtroopers’ who

smashed up Jewish shops, set fire to synagogues and viciously attacked Jewish peo-

ple. Scores were murdered and thousands put into concentration camps. The Nazis

themselves came up with the name ‘Kristallnacht’ to make it sound less serious than

it was. A year later the Nazis ordered all Jewish people to wear a Yellow Star to

mark them out.

Ruth was born in a Berlin on January 23rd, 1935 – almost two years after Hitler was appointed as Chancellor in Germany. She was born into a close and loving family which included her brother, Martin, her mum and dad, two grandmothers, Oma

Clara and Oma Emma an aunt, Tante Ella and an uncle, Onkel Erich.

Even though Ruth was very young she remembers that bad things were happening in Berlin. Her mum and dad didn’t tell her exactly what was going on but Ruth recalls frighten-ing feelings and events. One time Ruth’s father, Robert, took her to Oma Emma’s house because, she later found out, the Gestapo (the Nazi secret police), were looking for him. Ruth’s papa had to hide in a broom cupboard and Ruth remembers seeing him shaking with fear. Ruth also remembers her father losing his job as a lawyer because the Nazis decided that Jews should not be in such profes-sions. Similarly, the Nazis decreed that Jews could not be German citizens. As Ruth and her brother had two Jewish grandparents the Nazis said that they were Jews and there-fore were not German citizens.

On November 9th 1938 the Nazis unleashed a wave of vio-lence against Jewish people in Germany: Kristallnacht. Ruth’s father and, possibly her brother (who was six years old), would have been targets had they been at home that night. Instead, her dad took her brother out and they walked the streets, on the edge of the violent crowds, until the trouble had passed.

Nevertheless, Ruth’s parents sheltered her from all the discrimination, persecution and violence that the Nazis aimed at Jews. She remembers happy times with her fami-ly.

.

Nov

1938

November

pogrom

1933 Anti-Jewish

Boycott

Sept

1935

Nuremberg

Race Laws

Nov

1937

Antisemitic

exhibition

Ruth

1933

April

Limit on Jew-

ish students

in school

Aug

1938

Alteration of

names

Nov

1939

Yellow Star

ordered to

be worn

Why did the Holocaust happen?

Yugoslavia as a country was formed as a result of the First World War. After the Second World War Yugoslavia came to be ruled by the Communist regime of Josip Tito. The regime was dictatorial but did not allow any one ethnic group to dominate. Tito worked hard to make his people feel that they were Yugoslav. However, after Tito died in May 1980 politicians who sought to di-vide Yugoslavs into old ethnic groups took control. In May 1987 Slobodan Mi-losevic, a leader from Serbia, was sent to Kosovo to try to calm Serbs there who were protesting because they felt they were being persecuted. Instead he praised them and stirred up more trouble. Milosevic took over the leader-ship of Serbia and declared that he wanted to see a ‘Greater Serbia’. In 1989 he started to throw people from other groups out of their jobs. No group could feel safe under his leadership.

In 1991 Croatia and Slovenia declared themselves to be independent coun-tries and no longer part of Yugoslavia. In early 1992 Bosnia declared itself to be independent and no longer part of Yugoslavia. Serbs who lived in Bosnia then said that they did not want to be a part of Bosnia and formed their own

territory of Republika Srpska. Bosnian Serbs began to takeover areas and discriminate against and persecute others. For instance, Muslims in Prijedor (in north west Bosnia) was forced to wear white arm bands and put white flags outside their houses to mark them out as non-Serb. A leading Bosnian Serb politician, Biljana Plavšić, made hate speeches in which she said that Bos-nian Muslims were ‘genetically deformed material’. She claimed that Bosnian Serbs were superior to Bosnian Muslims. Republika Srpska also brought in groups of paramilitaries such as Arkan’s ‘Tigers’, and the ‘White Eagles’. Some of these men were criminals and football hooligans. One of the leaders of the White Eagles, Mirko Jovic called for "a Christian...Serbia with no Muslims and no unbelievers".

In the Spring and early Summer of 1992 Serb forces begun to attack Muslims in areas that they wanted to ‘cleanse’ of ‘non-believers’.

Kemal

Kemal and his family were Muslims who lived in

Kevljani in Bosnia. Kemal went to a school which

had both Muslim and Serb students...but that

didn’t matter to start with. However, in 1992,

when Kemal was 24, Kemal began to notice that

political groups began to make an issue of who

was Muslim and who was Serb. When the new

authorities came into power they began targeting

the Muslim population. Serbian extremists took

control of Kevljani on May 26th 1992. Serbian

soldiers told everyone to leave because they

needed to ‘search the village for weapons.’ The

men of the village were separated from the wom-

en and were sent to the Omarska Concentration

Camp.

1918 Yugoslavia

created

May

1992

Attacks

begin

1945Tito rules

Yugoslavia

April

1987

Milosevic’s

speech

1991-2Yugoslavia

breaks-up

1990 Militia

formed

Why was there a genocide in Bosnia?

An account of every single event of the Holocaust and more modern genocides would rightly

consist of thousands and thousands of pages. Yet it is important to know what happened.

One approach, pioneered by renowned historian Professor Tim Cole, is to look at the types of

places that perpetrators, victims, survivors, bystanders and rescuers used during the course

of genocides. That is the approach that you’ll see in the next few pages.

3 Where does genocide happen?

Roads Rivers Camps Towns &

buildings

Mountains &

seas Forests

As the German army was being pushed back

by the Soviets the Nazis ordered that all con-

centration camp prisoners should be forced

to march back towards Germany. The

marches took place in freezing cold winter of

early 1945 and many prisoners died of ex-

haustion, illness or were murdered by their

Nazi guards. Some German civilians secretly

photographed the Death Marches as the

prisoners went through their villages.

Even towards the end of the war the suffering

of the Jewish people and other victims of the

Nazis did not relent.

After the Serb forces under Ratko Mladic took the town of Srebrenica they used buses to remove women & children from the area which the Serbs wanted for themselves. Most of the buses took the Muslims to friendly territory. Buses were also used by the Serbs to take the men (who they had sep-arated from the women) to execution sites.

Buses were used by Bosian Serb forces to deport Muslims from their towns and also to take some to their deaths.

In April 1975 the Khmer Rouge surged into

Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh. They im-

mediately forced the entire population of the

city to leave their homes and to walk along

roads out into the countryside. Even patients

from the hospital were forced to make this

horrible journey in the scorching heat. Hun-

dreds died and were left by the side of the

road.

The entire population of Phnom Penh were

forced out onto the country’s roads without

any of their possessions.

As soon as the killing started the perpetra-

tors set up roadblocks. Men armed with

weapons from rifles down to machetes and

clubs would check the ID cards of anyone

who tried to pass. Hutus were allowed to go

on their way but anyone with a Tutsi ID card

would be killed.

For Tutsi trying to escape the Interhamwe and

other killing gangs travelling on roads was very

dangerous.

At one point in the genocide in Rwanda Sophie found herself at a road-block. Before she could escape the killers spotted her. She was picked out by the Interahamwe at the roadblock to be killed immediately. At the time, there were only three men guarding the checkpoint. One checked people's ID, another one was seated on a chair tired & was sleepy but had a gun on his lap while the other was just standing, he did not say a word. The one who checked the ID came toward Sophie in a rage shouting to have his gun. Sophie considered herself lucky that she was going to be shot rather than killed with a machete or club. The killer who was dozing stood up, and made Sophie stand by the roadside away from him. The soldier cocked his gun, aimed to shoot but when he pulled the trig-ger, the bullet misfired and fell out. The killers were convinced that Sophie possessed magical powers and so let her walk through the road-block. Sophie thinks it was a miracle that she survived.

The geography of genocide: Roads

On November 30th and December 8th 1941 around 26,000 Jews were mur-dered in the Rumbula forest near Riga in Latvia. Jews often fled from the Nazis or escaped from ghettoes into the forest. Here they hid and some-times attacked Nazi soldiers. From 1942 – 1944 the ‘Bielski Partisans’ ac-tively fought against the Nazis from their base in the forests of Western Belorussia (modern day Belarus). More than 1,200 Jews hid in the forest. The group created a mill, bakery, primitive hospital, school and synagogue for their community.

After the invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 the Nazis

often used forests as place to execute entire Jewish communities and hide

evidence of their crimes.

Images from American satellites were used

as evidence to show what Mladic’s men did

with the Bosniak men they had captured

after they had taken Srebrenica. Several im-

ages in particular, taken in July 1995 show a

crowd of prisoners on a football field at the

small town of Nova Kasaba. The satellite

took another picture a little while lat-

er—the prisoners were gone and what

looked like mass graves were now

present in fields just a half a mile

away.

After the capture of Srebrenica by Mladic’s

troops the Muslim men of the town were taken

to various places.

Typical of these sites is Choeung Ek which

had been an orchard. People who were to be

executed were brought to the field on a

truck, having been told that they were simply

being transferred somewhere else. They

were then murdered with tools in the most

brutal fashion as the executioners had been

told that bullets were too expensive. On

average around dozens of people were killed

everyday at Choeung Ek.

Around 20,000 mass graves have been found in

Cambodia since the genocide. So many people

were executed by the Khmer Rouge that the

area became know as the Killing Fields.

Many fled to forests that existed all around the country and hid there. The Hutu officials who were instructed to find and kill their Tutsi neighbours sent groups of men into the forests to hunt down the fugitives.

The mayor of Runyinya worried about the hiding places offered by the forests and caves in the high hills of his territory and by

the extensive tea plantations in the valleys. Apparently the survivors of attacks on large groups of Tutsi had retreated into these are-as just as Tutsi had sought refuge on the hilltops of Bisesero in Kibuye.

After President Habyarimana’s plane was shot

down and the killing began thousands of Tutsis

tried to hide.

After Sokphal’s family had been expelled from

their house in Phnom Penh he ended up at a

work camp in rural Cambodia. He had to work

out in the fields with very little food and water, in

the scorching heat for twelve hours every day.

Many people died from exhaustion, illness, dis-

ease or from the brutal treatment that the

Khmer Rouge guards delivered.

The geography of genocide: Forests & fields

The Kindertransport allowed 10,000 children to travel to Britain but their parents were not permitted to go with them. Others struggled to find a country to take them in. The ship MS St Louis left Hamburg in May 1939 with 900 Jewish passengers on board. However, Cuba, Canada and the USA did not allow the passen-gers to enter their countries and the ship had to re-turn to Europe. Once the Second World War started it became close to impossible for Jews to escape across mountains or seas to neutral countries. Those left behind had to try to hide in towns, forests and other places.

Thousands of Germany attempted to escape from

Nazi Germany across the sea & mountains to safety.

On Christmas Day 1978 Vietnamese forces invaded

Cambodia. They quickly captured the capital city,

Phnom Penh from the Khmer Rouge and

pushed Pol Pot’s army back into mountain

are- as near the border with Thailand. The

genocide in Cambodia was over.

Due to Pol Pot’s genocidal policies and the number of

refugees they created he made an enemy out of Vietnam.

One of the most significant areas of resistance was at

Bisesero. Here Tutsi men held off attacks for weeks

using spears, stones and other home made weapons.

The Tutsi were able to thwart attacks from the Inte-

rahamwe and were only finally defeated when more

heavily armed police and soldiers arrived to help the

killers.

Rwanda is a beautiful country full of hills. In the geno-

cide in 1994 Tutsi often congregated on top of the hills

to defend themselves

As the men tried to escape from Srebrenica the Serbs hunted them.

They used some captured Mus- lim men to call to their friends in

the mountains. Those who came down were murdered by

the Serbs. Others were able to continue on their escape

march & reach friendly ter- ritory in

Tuzla.

After the Serb soldiers captured Srebrenica many Muslim men decided to

escape through hills and mountains to safety.

The Nazis couldn’t hide what the called ‘Kristallnacht’. They claimed that they were just defending themselves from Jews and even made the Jews pay for all the damage that had been caused. Afterwards the British government gave permission for Jewish children to enter the country…without their par-ents. Between November 1938 and September 1939 10,000 children fled from Nazi Germany and Austria to Britain. Ruth and her brother, Martin, were amongst them.

Ruth and Martin left Berlin on February 21st 1939. Ruth can remember setting off in a car the station in Berlin and then a train ride that seemed to last forever. Eventually she fell asleep and was woken, feeling frightened and disoriented be-side a gigantic boat. She saw huge piles of suitcases and lots of people getting on the boat and began to think that the boat would surely sink. Ruth, her brother and her mum eventually found their way to a room with four bunks in it. After a voyage filled with seasickness the boat reached England.

The geography of genocide: Seas & mountains

Eleven year old Charlene Schiff hid from their

tormentors in a river in eastern Poland, up to

her neck in cold water for days with her

mother. Rivers could also be places of execu-

tion. In Budapest, the capital city of Hungary

men from the fascist and antisemitic Arrow

Cross Party shot Jews into the river Danube

that flowed through the city. Today pairs of

women’s, men’s and children’s shoes form a

memorial to those murders.

For Jews desperate to escape from the Nazis

and their collaborators rivers often formed

dreadful obstacles or could be useful as hiding

places.

At the time of the genocidal attacks on non-

Serbs in Bosnia the valley of the River Drina

was an area of land the Serbs wanted. After

Serb forces had taken Srebrenica in July 1995

Bosniak men attempted to escape. They

were forced to ford rivers to avoid Serb sol-

diers. Some of those who were captured

were executed on the banks of the River

Jadar.

The planners of the genocide in Bosnia aimed

to extend the territory of the Serbs...and to

expel any other groups who lived in the land

they wanted.

As the Khmer Rouge herded people out of Phnom Penh they executed hundreds and threw their bodies into the Tonle Sap and Mekong rivers. The perpetrators of the geno-cide in Cambodia were also hypocrites. Whilst they forced the population of Phnom Penh to leave their homes in the city and face terrible conditions and death in the countryside the leaders of the Khmer Rouge had new houses built for themselves along the river in the city.

The Khmer Rouge used rivers to dispose of the

bodies of their victims...and also to build them-

selves houses

On April 13th Tutsi who were trying to cross the river to the neighbouring country of Bu-rundi were caught at Nyakizu and murdered. The same day a group of Tutsi who had made it across a river to Burundi were caught by Burundians and sent back to Rwanda where they were killed and their bodies thrown into the river. The killers promised the Burundi-ans some cows in return for catching and sending Tutsi back to their deaths.

For Tutsis trying to flee from the Interahamwe

rivers formed dreadful obstacles to their es-

cape.

The geography of genocide: Rivers

The ghettos isolated the Jews from the rest of society behind walls and fences. Too many people were crowded into tiny spaces and too little food was provided for the pop-ulation of the ghetto. After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 the ghettos began to be ‘liquidated’ – the population steadily taken by train to death camps and murdered. The Warsaw ghetto house more than 400,000 Jews who made up 30% of the city’s population. The Nazis crammed this 30% into an area just 1.3 square miles. In War-saw the Jewish people were sent to the gas chambers at Treblinka. It is estimated that 20,000 Jews es-caped from the ghetto in Warsaw and hid in the city beyond the walls of the ghetto.

Ghettoes were first set up in Poland

by the Nazi occupiers in 1939

ghettoes brought together whole

communities of Jews in terrible con-

ditions.

In May 1992 Bosnian Serb forces seized the town

of Doboj and its surrounding area. Before the

Serb actions the town had a mixed population of

Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats. As soon as

the Serb forces tookover all the non-Serbs were

arrested. Many women were taken to a school in

Grapska and a former jam factory. Here they

were attacked in terrible ways by

local Serb militia, Serb soldiers and

members of the White Eagles.

Attacks on Muslims in Bosnia often followed a

similar pattern. Serb military forces would take-

over in quick actions and a town would then be

ruled by racist Serb politicians.

Tuol Sleng was officially called Se-

curity Prison 21 by the Khmer

Rouge perpetrators. It was just one

of one hundred and fifty places

where people were murdered in

the genocide. When people arrived

at Tuol Sleng they were photo-

graphed and interrogated. The

guards treated the prisoners

dreadfully with beatings and awful

torture common. Most people

who went into the prison were

soon executed. Out of approxi-

mately 17,000 people who entered

Tuol Sleng only seven sur-

vived.

One of the most infamous buildings

in the Cambodian genocide was a

former school. Its name was Tuol

Sleng.

Often these were places like churches where, encouraged by priests and nuns they as-sumed that they would be safe from the kill-ers. Instead the Tutsi were unwittingly mak-ing it easier for the perpetrators by congre-gating and confining themselves. Some priests even helped the Interhamwe. Atha-nase Seromba, a priest in Nyange was in charge of a church where around 2,000 Tutsi had fled, fearing for their lives. Seromba was found guilty of ordering a bulldozer to de-

molish the church with the Tutsis inside it. Seromba then ordered the Interaham-we to kill anyone who had survived, the court found.

Tutsis sought to stay together during the killing

and seek out places of refuge.

After Sophie had survived her ordeal at the roadblock she made her way to a Cathedral in Kigali. There were already about 1,500 Tutsi there, trying to hide from the Interahamwe and other killers. Every night the murderers would come and take people out of the Cathe-dral to be killed. One day Sophie heard that she would be killed by the perpetrators with hand grenades. She took the risk to leave the Cathedral. Fortunately for Sophie she came across a group of soldiers and discovered that they were Tutsi troops from the RPF. The RPF defeated the Hutu power forces and ended the genocide.

The geography of genocide: Towns & buildings

Kemal was taken to Omarska concentration camp

along with his brother Kasim. Kemal’s mother was sent

to another camp. The guards in the camp were Serbs

from around the local area which meant that Kemal

knew many of them from his school. Kemal’s favourite

teacher was his interrogator in the camp.

1959

Starting with Chelmno the network of camps spread to Belzec, Sorbibor and Treblinka where millions of Polish Jews were murdered. Auschwitz-Birkenau became the main centre for the gassing of Jews in 1944 when Hungarian Jews were murdered by gas and then cremated. Besides camps set up simply to murder people others were created to make the cap-

tive Jews work. Conditions within these camps were terrible and thousands died.

By 1942 the Nazi leadership had decided that it would be

more efficient to murder Jews with gas than bullets. To do

so they built a series of camps.

Bosnian Serb forces took control of towns

and villages in northern Bosnia in 1992. They

attempted to get rid of all non-Serb people

from these areas so they could take the terri-

tory for themselves. Thousands of Muslim &

Croat men and a few women were herded

into camps such as Omarska, Manjaca and

Trnopolje. At Omarska men were held in ter-

rible conditions: torture and killings occurred

every night. The few women at the camp

suffered terribly too.

As part of their campaign of ethnic cleansing &

genocide the Serbs set up a series of camps .

According to the warped thinking of Pol Pot and the

Khmer Rouge a new Cambodia would be built in the

countryside. The people who had been forced from

their homes in towns were forced to live in work

camps and work twelve hours a day with very little

food. Those who were unable to work or fell ill were

taken away and never seen again.

The Khmer Rouge set up dreadful work camps

which held prisoner those who had been forced

from the cities and towns.

It was in camps that young Hutu men were recruited into the Interaham-

we. The moderate Hutu Prime Minister Uwilingiyimana visited these

camps to make the training stop but she was ignored. Once the genocide

had started it was in an army camp that Belgian peacekeepers were killed.

Tutsis gathered together in makeshift camps to try and escape the killers:

most were murdered but some were rescued by the approaching RPF like

the 24,000 Tutsi at Kabgayi.

Camps were important in the genocide in Rwanda.

The geography of genocide: Camps

The history of genocide is the history of people.

Some are perpetrators and kill their fellow human beings, some watch from the

sidelines, others resist and some decide to rescue.

In the next few pages we will introduce you to some stories of people involved in

the Holocaust and genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda.

4 Perpetrators, bystanders, rescuers & resisters

Perpetrators, bystanders and rescuers

The Interahamwe

The ‘Interahamwe’ were a group of mainly young men recruited by Hutu extremists to car-ry out their genocidal orders. When the geno-cide began they were instructed to hunt out Tutsi and kill them. The radio station, RTLM, even broadcast messages to them, telling them where they could find specific Tutsi so that the Interhamwe could find and murder them.

Ratko Mladic

Ratko Mladic was the commander of the Bosni-an Serb forces which took Srebrenica. He or-dered the deportation of Bosnian Muslim wom-en & children and the execution of thousands of Muslim men. Afterwards he managed to evade capture for sixteen years. He is often referred to as the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’. On November 22nd 2017 Mladic was convicted of genocide.

Oskar Gröning

Oskar Groning was a member of the SS at Auschwitz. His duties included counting and sorting the money taken from the prisoners. Groning saw murders being committed and knew what happened at Auschwitz but did not take part in any killing. In 2015 he was convict-ed of being an accessory to 300,000 murders and sentenced to four years in prison.

UN troops

The UN commander in Rwanda, Romeo Dallaire, warned his superiors that killings were about to happen. He was told to do nothing. After the genocide started the UN reduced the number of troops in Rwanda. They tried to help protect Tutsis but were powerless.

Pol Pot

Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge and, from 1975-79, leader of Cambodia. Pol Pot commanded a government that murdered mil-lions of Cambodians. He died in 1998 under house arrest but without standing trial.

Reserve Police Battalion 101

Police Battalion 101 were a group of men from Hamburg. They followed the German army dur-ing their invasions of Poland & Russia, which carried out tasks such as rounding up “undesirables”, guarding & destroying ghettos, deporting Jews to extermination camps, and carrying out mass shootings of Jews.

Perpetrators, bystanders and rescuers

Carl Wilkens

When western countries began to evacuate their citizens from Rwanda when the genocide started, Carl Wilkens, an American, stayed. He sheltered Tutsis in his house and took food and water to an orphanage in Kigali. He had to ne-gotiate with Hutu power leaders to save the lives of the Tutsi orphans.

Dzajo Krstic

Dzajo Krstic was a Serb living in the town of Bijeljina when Arkan’s Tigers attacked and be-gan to massacre Muslims. Dzajo had many friends who were Muslims and was ashamed of the actions of the Serbs. He sheltered Muslims, who were trying to escape the Bosnian Serb militia, in his house. He also helped eleven other Muslims to his brother’s house to hide.

Ho Feng-Shan

In 1938 Hitler annexed (took over) Austria. Aus-trian Jews were persecuted and immense pres-sure was placed on them to leave. However, most nations refused to allow Jews into their countries. Nevertheless, Ho, the Chinese repre-sentative in Vienna, issued visas that allowed people to escape to Shanghai.

Mbaye Diagne

Captain Diagne was a soldier from Senegal who was working for the UN as part of the peace-keeping mission in Rwanda. He regularly ig-nored orders to go out and rescue Tutsis and is thought to have saved countless lives. He was killed by a mortar bomb whilst in Rwanda.

Leopold Socha

Leopold Socha was a Polish council worker who looked after sewers in the town of Lwow. He, his wife Magdalena, and a colleague began to hide twenty Jews in the sewers from the Nazis in 1943. They continued to do so until Lwow was liberated by the Soviets in 1944.

USA

The US government was able to intercept mes-sages being sent between Khmer Rouge com-manders therefore they knew what was hap-pening in Cambodia. However, after the night-mare of war in Vietnam the USA simply didn’t want to get involved in Cambodia. The genocide continued.

Perpetrators, bystanders and rescuers

Pauline Nyiramasuhuko

In the province of Butare in Rwanda, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko helped to organise the geno-cide against the Tutsi. As an important politician she sacked and had killed local officials who didn’t organise killings and asked for the Inte-rahamwe to visit her region to murder Tutsi. She was put on trial and convicted of genocide.

UN troops

The people of Srebrenica were supposed to be protected by the United Nations which had de-clared the area to be a ‘safe haven’. However, when the Serbs attacked in 1995 the Dutch UN soldiers made no attempt to resist the Serb forces. The Dutch were hopelessly outnum-bered and outgunned and NATO aircraft were not given the order to attack Mladic’s men.

Train drivers

The vast majority of victims who were mur-dered in the Nazi death camps were taken to their deaths by train. The trains were organised and driven by employees of the Deutsche Reichsbahn. It has been argued that without the rail network it would have been very hard for the Nazis to carry out the huge number of mur-ders committed during the Holocaust.

Duch

Kang Kek Iew (aka ‘Comrade Duch’) was in charge of Tuol Sleng prison camp where thou-sands of people were tortured and executed. Duch ordered the executions after the prisoners had been interrogated. In 2010, Duch was con-victed & sentenced to 35 years in prison.

Reinhard Heydrich

Heydrich was second in command to Himmler within the SS. In January 1942, he organized the Wannsee Conference to co-ordinate the ‘Final Solution’, the name that the Nazis used to describe their attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe.

Janusz Korczak

Korczak was in charge of an orphanage for Jew-ish children within the Warsaw Ghetto. His friends made plans to help him escape. Howev-er, Korczak refused to abandon them. In August 1942, the Nazis took Korczak and some 200 children to Treblinka and murdered.

Perpetrators, bystanders and rescuers

Jan and Antonina Zabinski

Jan and Antonina Zabinski were a married Polish couple from Warsaw. At the peak of the German occupation, Jan was director of War-saw Zoo. The couple hid around 300 Jews who they smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto. They hid the escapees in their house and other hiding places all around the zoo.

A bus driver

For the forced removal of Bosnian Muslims from their villages and towns to work and for the execution of men and boys to happen buses were needed. The drivers of those buses made it possible for commanders like Mladic to carry out their genocidal actions.

Theoneste Bagosora

Bagosora was a senior member of Rwanda’s army. He recruited the Interahamwe and pre-pared plans for the genocide – calling it ‘self-defense’. When the President’s plane was shot down Bagosora played a major part in unleash-ing the wave of killings. .

Resistance

In Bisesero, Tutsis used spears, stones and oth-er weapons to hold off attacks from the Inte-rahamwe

Bisesero Kemal

Kemal survived interrogation and terrible treat-ment at the hands of people he knew in Bosnia.

In Treblinka, Auschwitz & Sobibor camps Jewish prisoners rose up and attacked the Nazi guards, destroyed parts of the camps and tried to es-cape.

Death Camps

Emanuel Ringelblum and others collected docu-ments about life in the Warsaw Ghetto. He hid the archive in milk churns and buried them so that the Nazis wouldn’t discover them.

Emanuel Ringelblum Ruth

Ruth and her family successfully escaped the Nazis’ desire to exterminate every single Jewish man, woman and child.

Sokphal kept the memory of his family mem-bers alive throughout his terrible time in the work camp

Sokphal

The survivors we spoke to are remarkable people. Despite their horrific experiences they all have the bravery and kind heartedness

to be prepared to tell others about what happened to them. They are all dedicated to educating young people about what they

endured so that it doesn’t happen again.

4 Afterwards

Kemal

After his traumatic ex-

periences Kemal arrived

in Britain in the early

1990s with his family.

Today, he runs a charity

and speaks around the

country about his life.

Sophie

Sophie came to this country

in the 1990s and works as a

nurse. She now has a won-

derful family of her own.

Sophie speaks about her

experiences in Rwanda.

Sokphal

Sokphal came to the UK

in the 1980s and estab-

lished himself as a spe-

cialist translator. Today,

Sokphal also visits

schools to talk about his

experiences.

Ruth

Ruth became a teacher

and psychotherapist.

Today Ruth talks in

schools about her expe-

riences as well as

writing books and plays.

Denial...

The historian Deborah Lipstadt called a British writer, David

Irving, a Holocaust denier. Irving took Professor Lipstadt to

court, suing her for libel (publishing a false statement that

damages someone’s reputation). In a court case that made

headlines all round the world Irving lost.

After the genocidal killings in Srebrenica the Bosnian Serb

forces tried to conceal their crimes by burying bodies.

Several months after the genocide Bosnian Serbs reburied

bodies in dozens of sites to make them more difficult to

find and identify.

The Nazis deliberately burned, and buried the bodies of

their victims to conceal their crimes. They also tried to hide

the existence of the death camps by dismantling them and

blowing up the gas chambers.

In Rwanda the Interahamwe and others attempted to mask

their crimes by throwing bodies into latrines and rivers.

Many of the killers also fled so as not to be held to ac-

count for their deeds.

Milorad Dodik, the president of

Republika Srpska, said that there

would never be any mention of

the genocide in school textbooks.

At their trial in 2013 Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan

denied that they knew anything about the killings that

took place in Cambodia. Both were found guilty.

With every genocide comes genocide denial.

Perpetrators and their allies try to deny that a

genocide took place or try to twist the truth.

Darfur

Darfur is an area of Sudan which has historically been populated by diverse groups of people who see themselves as either Arab or non-Arab Sudanese. Competition for resources and land between groups in Darfur were usually settled. However, since the late 1980s when General Omar Al-Bashir took control of Sudan, the government has discriminated against the non-Arab Sudanese and driven communities apart. In 2003 the non-Arab Darfur Libera-tion Front attacked government forces. In response the government recruited and unleashed a militia called the Janjaweed which has destroyed more than 400 villages of non-Arab peoples in Darfur. Since 2003-05 2.5m people have been driven from their homes and more than 200,000 killed. In 2009 and again in 2010 the International Criminal Court called for Bashir to be arrested for crimes against humanity and genocide. He is the only current head of state who is now wanted for the crime of genocide. Even though Bashir has travelled outside his country (he visited South Africa in 2015) he has yet to be arrested and the genocide continues.

Rohingya The Rohingya people have been persecuted in Myanmar for a long time. Many in Myanmar incorrectly say that the Rohingya are not from Myanmar, they have stripped the Rohingya of their citizenship and call them ‘Bengali’ as a term of abuse. In response to attacks on Myanmar’s police by Rohingya militants in 2016 the Myanmar army launched a brutal attack on defenceless Rohinyga civilians. Rohingya villages have been burned and torture, rape and murder have been used to drive Rohingya out of Myanmar. So far more than half a million Rohinyga have fled Myanmar.

Yazidi

In 2014 the so-called Islamic State begun a genocidal cam-paign against the Yazidi minority in northern Iraq. In IS’ twisted view the Yazidi follow the ‘wrong’ religion and must therefore be converted or wiped out. With IS ap-proaching their towns and villages about 50,000 Yazidi people fled to the Sinjar Mountains in early August 2014. IS fighters captured the town of Sinjar and surrounding villag-es and then began executing hundreds of Yazidi men and kidnapping Yazidi women to be married against their will to IS fighters. Yazidi children were also taken to be indoctri-nated and use as soldiers for IS. Meanwhile the thousands of Yazidis on Mount Sinjar were soon without food and water and were being attacked by IS fighters. Foreign coun-tries began to drop food to them, launch airstrikes against IS and Kurds fought to clear a path along which the Yazidi could escape. Thousands of Yazidi remain missing and the genocide continues.

Never again? Genocide today

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Listen...

We’ve made a few podcasts to enhance some of the aspects

of our book. Please click on the ‘Podcast’ icon below to have

a listen.

The authors:

From Hampton School Freddie Hawkins Haris Williams Egor Kaygorodov Louis Strickland Sweeney Ben Martis-Jones Maxi Grindley Fergus McWilliams Oliver Casale Chris Gilmour Chris Austin Sam Axford Mr Lawrence

Thank you..

The survivors:

Ruth Barnett Kemal Pervanic Sokphal Din Sophie Masereka A huge thank you to Dan Snow for kindly writing a foreword for our book. And also: Professor Tim Cole Sareta Ashraph Thank you to Hampton School Parents Association for supporting our project

From Newport Girls High School Leoni Bagnall Maisie Ingram Elizabeth Harrison Rosie Pritchard Rachel Naylor Isabel Nugent Beatrice Wilkinson Grace Formby Ashton Prinold Caitlin Hose Ella Doody Amy Harrison …with a big thank you to Ms Seys