Holocaust, genocide, atrocity? Don't stand by Holocaust Memorial Day 2016

It’s hard to imagine holocaust or genocide. Even civil or international war seems so remote. It couldn’t happen here could it?

Sarajevo Winter Olympics

When most of the adults in this room were younger, we watched Torvill and Dean’s Bolero ice dance in the Winter Olympics of 1984, filmed in a far off place called Sarajevo. Then, the country called Yugoslavia was behind the Iron Curtain, unimaginably foreign but a meeting place for cultures: European, Slavic, ottoman, Balkan, and of religions; Orthodox Christianity, Catholic Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and those of no religion at all, communist and democrat.

Torvill and Dean dancing the Bolero ice dance in Sarajevo

But soon after the fall of the soviet union, the divisions in that region split into open warfare between ethnicities, raging across the whole of the region. The winter Olympics city of Sarajevo endured 1,452 days of siege whilst the international powers stood by and watched.

Children playing Sarajevo

Children listened to pop songs from England as they played in burnt out ruins of tanks.

Children playing in Sarajevo

As criminals and thugs got the upper hand in the conflict, atrocities began to occur across the whole of the region, on all sides, culminating in the herding of tens of thousands of muslim refugees into the remote town of Srebrenica.

UN troops look on as Muslims are herded into Srebrenica

Under the supposed protection of inexperienced dutch soldiers, a UN safe zone (and unsafe zone, as it was called) was established but then destroyed as thousands of young and old men were taken into the forest, as UN troops stood by, and were killed. Their remains, after the war, could only be identified by the clothes and jewellery that they were wearing.

Clothes dug up from mass graves to identify victims
Victims were identified by the jewelry

Eventually, the use of DNA testing on the bones in the mass graves identified 8,372 people killed in ten days of genocidal violence. They are now buried in the Potocari memorial centre.

DNA testing of bones of victims

Back in Sarajevo, the places where the snipers in the hilltops killed so many civilians are marked with red paint to form the Sarajevo Roses, and red chairs filled the city centre to mark those killed in Srebrenica.

Painting Sarajevo Roses
A chair for every person known to be killed in Srebrenica

When we see hatred and division occurring in our streets, playgrounds and workplaces, it is easy, simple, to stand by and let it happen, but that is how society descends rapidly into atrocity. Don’t stand by…….

The names mark the dead
The coffins in the sheds in Srebrenica were people were once crowded

Priest Timothy Curtis,

St Anne’s Orthodox Church, Northampton

Holocaust Memorial day. January 2016

Created By
Timothy Curtis
Appreciate
Thanks to all those who images have been used here.

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