Medill Reports, IL
May 19 2007

Survivors tell horrors of genocide
by Deanna Hartley
May 18, 2007

Cold-blooded murder, starvation and disease were part of their daily
lives. They may be from different age groups, ethnicities and
religions, but they will always be bound by their experiences.

They have survived the world’s greatest atrocities and are speaking
out in the hope of preventing future genocides.

The most recent accounts of horrific acts of genocide are coming out
of Darfur, a region of Sudan where militias and rebel groups are
waging a war that began in 2003. But genocide has occurred in other
places, also on a huge scale.

This week Northwestern University convened a panel on genocide
throughout history including Armenia, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda
and Darfur.

The panel was titled "Silenced Voices"–the poignant accounts of
those who suffered silently during the genocide but now are being
heard. . Here are their stories:

Atrocities in Armenia

Greg Bedian told the panel his grandmother was 10 when she survived
the Armenian genocide of 1915. Her family was forced to march from
their hometown of Bursa across what is now Turkey, but her father
didn’t want her pregnant mother to travel. She watched in horror as
her father and pregnant mother were shot and killed.

During the march, she woke up to find her youngest sister dead from
exposure, starvation and thirst, but she was forced to desert the
corpse and continue the journey.

On a regular basis she witnessed as people were raped, looted and
sold into slavery. She managed to run away and work as a servant for
an Arab family. She worked hard and didn’t get paid, so she ran away
again and was put in an orphanage.

After the genocide, she traveled to Constantinople and later to the
United States. It was not uncommon to place advertisements in ethnic
Armenian newspapers to search for missing relatives – that’s how she
found her long-lost sister in France.

`We’ve lost so much of our Armenian culture,’ Bedian said. `I still
feel like I’m a victim of the genocide; they’re stealing my culture,
my life.’

The Horrors of the Holocaust

Dave Gewirtzman was one of just 16 out of 8,000 Jews to survive the
Holocaust from the Polish town of Losice. He was 14 when the town was
bombed during World War II because it housed a renowned synagogue.

Gewirtzman recalled watching as the Nazis covered people’s heads with
bags, hit them until they collapsed and tossed them out of windows.

Once, he narrowly escaped death at his school. An armed man stormed
in and demanded to know if there were any Jewish children in the
classroom. He almost beat and kicked the teacher to death because she
remained silent. One frightened student pointed to Gewirtzman, who
ran out the back door.

He then spent two years hidden under a pig sty on a Polish farm with
his family.

`I saw some things that no human being should ever witness,’
Gewirtzman said. `I would wake up some mornings, look around and see
corpses sometimes covered with newspapers … some people went crazy
and drank their own urine because there was no water.’

One morning, armed men informed Gewirtzman that he would be executed
that evening, but two other youngsters who were mistaken for
Gewirtzman and his friend were accidentally shot instead.

He later worked in a labor camp. After the Holocaust, he went to
Italy and later to the United States. `We found freedom in this
country and started a life with dignity,’ he said.

Captivity in Cambodia

Leon Lim was a medical student in Phnom Penh at the time the genocide
began. In early 1975, he was forced from his home and into a labor
camp, where he stayed until 1979.

Lim said he said was forced to work in a rice field from early
morning to late night. On the brink of collapsing from starvation and
exhaustion, he would only get a handful of rice to eat everyday. He
often watched helplessly as people around him died.

`They killed people for complaining, working too slowly, often for no
reason at all,’ he said.

He watched as they hammered nails in the back of people’s heads, hung
children upside down, smashed people’s heads against trees and used
the sharp edges of palm trees to behead people. People would
construct makeshift tombs for their loved ones in ditches and cover
the corpses with leaves.

When the Khmer Rouge regime ended, Lim walked for six weeks to the
border of Thailand where he spent three years in refugee camps
working as a medic. He moved to the United States in 1981 and now
teaches at Northside College Preparatory High School in Chicago and
is co-founder of the Cambodian American Heritage Museum and Killing
Fields Memorial in Chicago.

Riots in Rwanda

Jacqueline Murekatete was a 9-year-old carefree child when her
parents and six siblings were killed in the Rwandan genocide in 1994

Growing up, she said she was aware that Tutsis – her ethnic group – were
discriminated against and sometimes persecuted, but she never
imagined the massacre that would follow.

Even churches weren’t havens anymore as people were burned alive in
them. `Who thought that they would kill people in a house of God?’

Murekatete was on vacation at her grandmother’s when the genocide
began. Both escaped in an ambulance at night thanks to a Hutu man her
uncle bribed. It was a risky move considering there were roadblocks
guarded by armed men who would butcher Tutsis with machetes upon
sight.

A Hutu family agreed to hide them temporarily, but one morning
Murekatete woke up to screams of `I know there are cockroaches in
there; let us exterminate them.’

`I thought it was the end,’ Murekatete said. `Even though I wanted to
scream, I couldn’t utter a single sound.’

Because of the imminent danger, Murekatete’s grandmother put her in
an orphanage run by Italian priests – that was the last time she saw
her grandmother.

`Despite hearing of people being killed around me, I always thought
that my [family] was safe and that hope kept me going,’ she said.
Murekatete later found out that her Hutu neighbors – family friends who
came over to her house for food – slaughtered her family and relatives
with machetes.

`We were living a nightmare and our only crime was our ethnicity,’
she said.

Slayings in Sudan

Abrahim Adam’s family was scattered by the militias backed by the
Sudanese government and his 15 siblings were divided among six
refugee camps.

`It’s too painful to talk about the genocide,’ he told the panel.
`The most painful thing is the rape of women.’

He said that young girls were raped in front of their families and
killings were a common occurrence.

`Genocide is not only ethnic cleansing, it’s also destroying 800
years of our history and culture,’ he said.

Adam wants to know why the international community isn’t rising up to
stop the injustice. `Are the numbers [of those being killed] not big
enough for them?’