The stories of genocides: our darkest episodes

So much in life is down to serendipity, not least my career in journalism and my latest book, Genocide: Personal Stories, Big Questions. But part of serendipity is also knowing when to seize the opportunity.

I fell into journalism when an editor I had gone to see about something entirely different asked me to write a story, and I knew I had found my vocation. Many years later, just before Covid-19 struck in 2020, I was back in my native Toronto. There, I met Paulette Volgyesi, who was born in Bergen-Belsen, the concentration camp liberated by the British in 1945 and then burned down to stop the spread of the many rampant diseases. The former survivors were rehoused a mile down the road in a displaced persons camp, where Paulette was born in 1948. 

Seven decades after she moved to Canada in 1950, Paulette was teaching English to Yazidi survivors of ISIS who had also found refuge in Ontario. I liked that arc and wrote a story. It’s what I’ve always loved about journalism: you start a story but you never know where it is going to take you. In this case, it was 20th and 21st-century genocide.

For most people, I expect (including me), genocide meant the Holocaust – until Rwanda, anyway. But well before the Nazis took power, the Ottomans in 1915 carried out their genocide against the Armenians – until the Second World War, the high-water mark of mass murder. I came to understand this and write about it with the enormous goodwill of two outstanding scholars, Dr Umit Kurt and Prof Alan Whitehorn.

The slaughter of Armenians, the second most written about genocide, fascinated Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin. As a university student in the 1920s, he became absorbed by the subject, and couldn’t understand why a person could be held accountable for the murder of one person, while no law held a country responsible for the mass murder of its citizens.

There was no word to describe what we now know as genocide. It took Lemkin decades to coin the term: from the Greek word ‘genos’, meaning race or clan, and the Latin word caedere, meaning ‘to kill’. When 27-year-old Ben Ferencz prosecuted the men of the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi death squads, at Nuremberg after the war, he was one of the first people to use the term. I interviewed this remarkable man over the phone before he died at age 103. I felt as if I had a direct link to history.

If Covid hadn’t intervened, I wouldn’t have met Paulette and perhaps not written the book. She introduced me to her fellow Bergen-Belsen baby, adjunct professor of genocide law at Columbia Menachem Rosensaft, who introduced me to Ben Ferencz and took me to Bergen-Belsen. While walking the grounds of the northern German killing field, we began talking to a young British man. His grandfather had arrived as part of the liberating forces in 1945. Prof Rosensaft was overcome. “I owe my life to your grandfather,” he said. All good fodder for the book.

I never really understood that other people weren’t as interested in genocide as I was. This was apparent when I went to a literary event, and an ex-BBC producer asked me what I was working on. I said: “A book on genocide.” Her response was to say she wasn’t interested in genocide as she wasn’t Jewish.

The Tutsi, the Cambodians, the Uyghurs, the Bosniaks, the Yazidis, the Namo and Herero, and the Armenians weren’t Jewish either. But they shared the label of ‘other’ within their societies. Somehow the perpetrators – Nazis, Ottomans, Hutu extremists, ISIS, Khmer Rouge – not only believe that they are superior but that the intended victims are ‘vermin’ who contaminate the population, and that the only solution is to rid the country of the ‘disease’. Of course, there are many motivations, not least greed, fear and propaganda, which was the original title of my book. 

As I continued to write, the world became more dangerous, balanced on a geopolitical knife-edge, with the rise of populist leaders and governments and the threat to democracy, including from the Republican candidate for president. The parallels between Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini and the rise of populism now are frightening, which is why my book comes at a critical time – to inform and remind people what happens when democracy is threatened and pseudo-dictators are on the rise. Too often, warning bells have rung out, and nobody heeds the warning. The Armenian genocide got enormous coverage, and so did the genocide against the Tutsi. We watch in real-time as the Middle East implodes, yet we have still to learn those lessons.

We all know that the diary of Anne Frank, who died at Bergen-Belsen, brought the horrors of the Holocaust to a global audience. More recently, Nadia Murad won the Nobel Peace Prize for telling the world about the use of sexual violence by ISIS against Yazidis. Another woman, Aurora Mardiganian, was a global sensation when she arrived in the USA, the ‘Christian girl who survived’, and told her story and that of the Armenians. 

It is these personal, accessible and endless heroic stories that I write about in Genocide, which is purposely not an academic work. Many thousands of excellent tomes exist, and the Nazis, more than almost any other murderous gang of thugs, still fascinate us. That was the jump-off point of my book, perhaps because I had gone to Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, as a 12-year-old. My fascination with man’s inhumanity to man has never ceased since then. That conundrum is debated in the book – is genocide worse than crimes against humanity, as the former is narrowly defined in law?

I wanted readers to experience 120 years of genocide with me, learn about our global history through the individual stories of survivors and experts, and experience the root causes of genocide. I have always found trying to understand those compelling, and I hope readers will, too.

Journalist Heidi Kingstone has spent her career covering events around the globe for prominent publications from the Financial Times to the Mail on Sunday. Her interest in human rights and dictatorships led her to Iraq in 2003 and 2004. She reported extensively from Afghanistan. Her first book, Dispatches from the Kabul Café (2014), is a memoir of a country at a tipping point. Genocide: Personal Stories, Big Questions is published by Yellow Press on 7 October.

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