Warning: Discussion of genocide below.
On April 3, over 30 UConn students, staff and faculty gathered at the Konover Auditorium in the Dodd Center for Human Rights to hear four panelists of different ages, backgrounds and cultures, recount their tales as genocide survivors as part of an event titled “With My Own Eyes: A Conversation with Survivors of Genocide.”
The Christopher J. Dodd Chair in Human Rights Practice and the Director of the Dodd Human Rights Impact Programs James Waller opened the event by explaining the meaning behind “never again” — a phrase which has been echoed for decades since it first appeared in April 1945 on a sign in a liberated German concentration camp.
But Waller said that in just the last century alone, there have been over 60 million victims of genocidal violence. Waller said “With My Own Eyes” is “a call to action, a remembrance, a reflection. But more importantly, a call to action to make ‘never again’ a reality.”
Waller posed three questions to each of the panelists by asking them what their lives were like before, during and after the genocides that each of them experienced.
Aida Gradascevic, an alumnus who holds a master’s degree in human rights from UConn, was the first panelist to speak. She is a survivor of the Bosnian Genocide, which took place from 1992 to 1995 in the Eastern European nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and left over 8,000 innocent people dead.
During the early stages of the genocide, Aida’s mother, a lawyer, was pushed out of her job for being Muslim, as anyone who had Bosnian surnames and who identified as Muslim were let go from their occupations.
Although Aida said that she was only three years old when she and her family fled her birth nation, she says she remembers things that “most three-year-olds wouldn’t remember and should never have to experience,” such as passing through dozens of checkpoints throughout the country and seeing a gun held to her father’s head.
The second panelist, Jeanine Ntihirageza, the director of the center for human rights at Northeastern Illinois University, is from Burundi, a nation located in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa. The daughter of a Hutu father and a Tutsi mother, she enjoyed a normal life until the day of April 29, 1972, Jeanine says, when her father traveled into the city nearby their small village and never returned.
She later learned from a friend at school that her father had been killed because he was Hutu. Jeanine explained that unlike in Rwanda, where the Tutsi people were the main victims, the Hutus were the primary targets of the Ikiza mass killings, which took place in Burundi over a period of four months during 1972.
Cambodian-American Theanvy Kuoch is a survivor of Democratic Kampuchea, whose government is more commonly known as the Khmer Rouge, which perpetrated a genocide in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 that left millions of people dead. Kuoch lost many family members to starvation and disease, and because of the immense trauma, she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
She immigrated to the U.S. with her young son in the early ‘80s and has turned her grief into action through her organization, Khmer Health Advocates, a West Hartford-based nonprofit dedicated to providing treatment to survivors of trauma. She says she has found America to be a haven for her and is supported greatly by the people in her community.
“Even though I take care of the community, the community takes care of me,” Kuoch said.
Rabbi Philip Lazowski was born in 1930 in a town near the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, which was then part of Poland. The oldest of five children, he says he had a loving and typical childhood.
“I had a good upbringing,” the 95-year-old Lazowski recalls. “The town’s atmosphere was very welcoming. It was 40% Jews and 60% Christian and other religions. There was no antisemitism felt whatsoever and a lot of people cared for each other.”
In September 1939, when Nazi Germany’s dictator Adolf Hitler launched a full-scale invasion of Poland, the Lazowski’s family town was handed over to Russia. Lazowski said he was forced to read and write in Russian at school. In 1941, he and his six other family members were forced into a ghetto and were confined to one small room.
As tensions in the ghetto grew, Lazowski recalls how his mother threw him out of a second-floor window in a desperate attempt to save his life. “She told me three things,” Lazowski said. “I want you to survive, I want you to tell the world what is going on here and I want you to study and be somebody, if you can.”
Lazowski did manage to survive and immigrated to the U.S. with his father and two brothers in 1947, where he graduated from Yeshiva University with a degree in Rabbinical Studies and currently serves as Rabbi Emeritus of The Emanuel Synagogue in West Hartford. Although it can be difficult to listen to the stories of genocide survivors, these four brave and resilient individuals demonstrated that storytelling is the most powerful ways in which we can preserve the memories of those who died and the horrors that took place during these terrible events.
It is vital that coming generations can gain access to first-hand accounts of genocide and the atrocities that were committed. In the words of Rabbi Lazowski: “Memory is of utmost importance; if we remember, we will never forget.”