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Opinion | How Lives Become 'Expendable': What We Have Learned From a Century of Genocides
From first-person accounts of the Armenian and Yazidi genocides, to Anne Frank's diary and the Nuremberg prosecutor who 'peered into hell', we need to listen to those who experienced genocide, to seek accountability – and take heed of the early warning signs.
Before October 7th, 2023, the word 'genocide' was not particularly topical in the wider world. It was a term relegated to the past or perhaps associated with human rights abuses in distant lands. But Holocaust Memorial Day, and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, is an opportunity to remember its always salient lesson – that all genocides share one feature: 'othering.'
It is always the other – the Jew, the Armenian, the Yazidi, the Uighur – who are scapegoated. The belief that they are so different, so alien, eventually leads them to be dehumanized and, therefore, perceived as expendable.
My book, "Genocide: Personal Stories, Big Questions," on 20th and 21st-century genocide, took root in Toronto when I talked to activists with Project Abraham, a charity, primarily but not exclusively Jewish, that helped Yazidi survivors of ISIS to navigate their new lives in Ontario.
A throwaway comment about creating an oral history archive led me to Paulette Volgyesi, whose parents had survived the Holocaust, and who was teaching those new refugees how to speak English. Her empathy for others came from her parents' experience of being 'othered' themselves.
During my research, and thanks to an indirect introduction by Paulette, I was fortunate to speak to Ben Ferencz. Ferencz was 101 years old when we spoke over the phone from his home in Florida. He had been the youngest prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, and since then, his message has never changed: never give up. He felt his role was to educate the world.
Ferencz had arrived in the United States from Transylvania as a 10-month-old, an ocean trip he says he was lucky to have survived. He cried so much his father had wanted to throw him overboard. Saved by his uncle, he grew up in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen, then a rough part of New York, and didn't learn to speak English until he was eight.
Unsure of his future, he was told to join a gang or become a lawyer. He wasn't interested in gang life and didn't know what a lawyer did. When he found out, it turned out that he was so brilliant that Harvard gave him a scholarship to study law.
After World War II, at the behest of the chief United States prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson, Ferencz prosecuted members of the Einsatzgruppen, paramilitary death squads who had slaughtered upwards of a million people, most of them Jews, across occupied Europe.
He had "peered into hell" while visiting the concentration camps on their liberation and the horrific image was seared into his soul. At a time before advances in human rights laws, he believed that we had to treat everyone as a human being. Ferencz, who died at 103 on April 7th, 2023, was one of the first people to use Raphael Lemkin's new word, genocide, coined in 1944.
Long before, a seed had been planted in Polish Jewish lawyer Lemkin's mind when he read about the 1915 Armenian genocide. For decades after, he tried to find a term to describe a state's intent to annihilate a group of people. Until the Holocaust, the Ottoman slaughter was the high watermark of human barbarity. And until Anne Frank's diary, perhaps the most famous first-person account of living through genocide was written by a young Armenian woman, Arshaluys Mardiganian.
Mardiganian, a 17-year-old Armenian survivor, became an early 20th century media sensation when she recounted the experiences of the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian Christian communities during what scholars consider to be one of the first genocides of the 20th century, in which the Ottomans killed an estimated 1.5 million people.
Her own nightmare began when a Kurdish friend warned her family that the Ottomans were coming, and on April 4, 1915, her world changed.
Arshaluys, which means "light of the morning," witnessed her two aunts being murdered and found her mother's body. She walked through the desert, seeing the corpses of her fellow Armenians baked black by the sun; she never forgot the stench of death. She was beaten with horsewhips, abducted by Kurdish bandits, stripped, made to walk naked, sold into harems, and taken by a slave dealer. The death march of 1915 lasted for weeks.
She eventually escaped and found a Kurdish couple in the mountains who took her in. They allowed her to stay, but in 1916, with the direction of the world war changing, she crossed the Ottoman border. By the time she got to the United States, she had walked 1,400 miles in two years.
The U.S.-based Hearst Newspapers serialized her story in 1918, and her memoir, "Ravished Armenia," was published that same year. The following year, Hollywood produced a silent film, Ravished Armenia/Auction of Souls, which premiered in New York at the Plaza Hotel ballroom.
Two prominent American socialites, Mrs Oliver Harriman, with whom Arshaluys remained lifelong friends, and Mrs George W. Vanderbilt, on behalf of the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, hosted the event. The film was an important public relations boost to foster American aid to the starving refugees in the Middle East.
The personal accounts of the victims of genocide can resonate in important ways. The first-person voice is not only unmediated and profoundly affecting, but it also serves to individualize the unfathomable numbers of those targeted by genocide. That also helps explain the enormous impact of both Mardiganian's writing, Nadia Murad's 2017 account about being a Yazidi victim of ISIS's sex slavery, and Anne Frank's diary amidst World War II.
Even before Anne's father Otto Frank found a publisher, Dr Jan Romein, a Dutch historian who read the manuscript, wrote in his article "Children's Voice on Het Parool April 3, 1946:
"This apparently inconsequential diary by a child, this "de profundis" stammered out in a child's voice, embodies all the hideousness of fascism, more so than all the evidence of Nuremberg put together."
80 years since the atrocities of the Holocaust, and with the end of the war in the Middle East hopefully in sight, we need to remember, to fight against the lethality of 'othering,' to listen to those who experienced genocide, to seek accountability. And we need to take heed of the early signs. We look the other way at our peril.
(c) 2025, Haaretz
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