GENOCIDE. WHAT’S THAT?
Foreword ____________________ By Stephen Fry
H
ello there. Gosh. there’s a question. Why remember the Holocaust? Why be reminded of genocide?
Well let’s have a thought experiment, which is to say, let’s close our eyes and imagine a scene. Picture it in our minds. It’s like being the writer and director of your own movie inside your head. This is your movie, try and see the pictures and hear the noises and special effects as clearly as you can. Right. Ready? Imagine that tonight, this very night, at four in the morning you are suddenly woken up by a loud knocking at the front door downstairs. Before your parents have a chance to answer it, the door is broken down and six armed soldiers burst in. They are dressed in dark uniforms, belts and black leather boots, they have machine guns in their hands. They grab your parents, roughly pull you and your brothers and sisters down the stairs by the hair. Without explanation you are pushed into the back of a lorry, where there are other families, all as shocked and bewildered as you are. You ask your parents what’s going on, but they aren’t quite sure. It might be because you are black. Or because you are white. Or because you are Asian. Or Arabic. Or Jewish. Or because one of your family has political opinions that the people who sent the soldiers don’t like. It might be because one of your grandparents was a gypsy. Or because you have Spanish blood in you. Or because you’re part Swedish. Or because you’re Scottish. Or Welsh. Or because you have ginger hair. Or because you have blue eyes. Or because your father is shorter than 5’ 9” tall. The reasons seem ridiculous. Absurd. Laughable. But there you are being transported through the night. It’s really happening and you can’t make it stop. I won’t go into too much detail about what happens to you, because it’s frightening and upsetting. But without any appeal, any mercy, the soldiers – most of them uninterested or even openly laughing at your unhappiness and fear – take you to a camp where there are thousands of others like you, all huddled around as full of fear and dread and panic as a human being can be. Thousands and thousands of families. Your father and older brother are taken away. They aren’t even allowed time to say goodbye to you. You don’t know this, but the fact is they are being separated because they are considered strong enough to work. You and your mother and younger brothers and sisters are … there is no other way of putting this … you are stripped of all your possession and all your clothing and killed. Shot perhaps. Or crowded into a gas chamber and choked to death by poisonous gas. Your bodies are burned. It is the end of you. In one horrible and incomprehensible nightmare you and thousands like you have had your lives snuffed out without mercy, appeal or hope. After you’re gone your father and brother are worked until they are thin, weak and unable to work any more and therefore no longer of any use to those in charge. Then they too are killed and burned as you were. Every day for years this happens until the thousands of dead number hundreds of thousands and then millions. So many that the human mind can’t picture it. Which is why it is easier to picture just you and your family in the film you are playing inside your head. Your family and maybe three or four families like you that you know well. But you know what? It’s worse than you have already imagined. Worse than your violent, terrible, undeserved and helpless murder. it’s worse because … You will be forgotten. Completely forgotten. No one will care or remember. No stone will mark where you died. 5
