From Auschwitz, to Bosnia, to Gaza: The Unbearable Price of Silence

Genocide does not emerge from a vacuum. It is meticulously planned in the halls of power, fueled by dehumanizing propaganda, and executed in the killing fields. But it ultimately thrives in the suffocating silence of a world that has chosen to look away. This is not a relic of a darker past; it is a recurring nightmare, and history is repeating itself before our eyes.

When we prevent or halt a genocide, we do more than save lives. We perform the most sacred act of remembrance for the victims of past atrocities, keeping their memory alive not in sorrow alone, but in purposeful action. We draw a stark, civilizing line in the sand, affirming our collective humanity against the primal urge to destroy the “other.” In doing so, we strive to ensure that the suffering of the past is not a prelude, but a lesson.

This is why it is uniquely agonizing for survivors of genocide, and for those who carry its inherited trauma, to witness the atrocities being committed by the State of Israel against the Palestinian population. We grieve, of course, for the tens of thousands of innocent people—the children, the parents, the elderly—obliterated in Gaza. But alongside the grief is a profound sense of betrayal. The repetition of genocidal violence, enabled by global inaction, once again desecrates the memories of our own loved ones, lost long ago.

We write this together because the horrors of genocide are not abstract historical events to us; they are living, breathing legacies that shape our every day. Jill’s father, Gene, was a prisoner at Auschwitz in 1944 at the age of 16. Damir was a child in Bosnia during the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the 1990s. We have both lost dozens of family members, who vanished into the abyss of gas chambers or were swallowed by the earth in unmarked mass graves.

The Architecture of Complicity

The role of the bystander has evolved over the generations, yet its function remains tragically consistent: to provide a passive audience for cruelty. For Gene, it was the neighbours in his Hungarian hometown who walked by as Jews were harassed in the streets. It was the teachers who stood by silently when a Hungarian Nazi, invited to speak at his high school, declared that Jews were the cause of all of Europe’s problems. One of those very teachers later helped the police compile the lists of Jewish families for deportation. Others simply watched from behind their curtains as their fellow citizens were marched away to the cattle cars.

In Bosnia in 1992, the complicity was just as intimate. Villagers saw the machinery of death at work, smelled the unmistakable stench of decomposing bodies from nearby fields, and chose to say nothing. Neighbours peeked through their curtains, but their silence was a form of consent. This bystander effect was then amplified to a global scale. Europe watched the siege of Damir’s hometown, Sarajevo, on live television for 1,425 consecutive days. We broadcast the sniping of children fetching water and the shelling of bread lines into living rooms across the world. And in 1995, in Srebrenica—a UN-declared “safe area”—the world watched, through the lenses of a handful of brave journalists, as 8,000 men and boys were systematically separated from their families and murdered over a single weekend, under the gaze of UN peacekeepers.

The ultimate betrayal of any genocide is not only committed by those who pull the trigger, but by the architecture of indifference that supports them. Genocide requires perpetrators, but it is enabled by bystanders. The Bosnian genocide played out on the evening news, transforming millions into global witnesses. Yet, witnessing without acting became a new form of complicity.

The Illusion of Connectivity

Today, the veil has been lifted entirely. Social media allows us to hear the voices of the victims in real-time, to see the destruction through their own eyes. Imagine if Gene could have livestreamed from the Auschwitz barracks—the starvation rations, the brutal slave labour, the daily terror of “selections” for the gas chamber. Imagine if 10-year-old Damir, huddled in the basement of his Sarajevo apartment block, could have posted about the deafening roar of a mortar impact, the visceral fear that grips a child who knows the sky itself is trying to kill them.

We can imagine Damir reposting a final, desperate video from his 12-year-old cousin, Ibrahim, documenting his family’s flight from their burning village, only to be captured by Serbian forces in the mountains of southern Bosnia. The video would cut to static as they were taken. Ibrahim and his 10-year-old brother, Omer, were murdered with their parents. Their bones remain scattered across separate, unmarked mass graves.

Two years ago, we might have believed that such raw, personal testimony, broadcast directly to millions, would be the ultimate antidote to genocide. We thought it was the lack of visibility, the abstraction of human suffering, that allowed good people to stand by. We placed our faith in the connective power of technology to force the world to care.

Did we have too much faith in humanity? The test is now, and the results are devastating.

A Flicker of Light in the Darkness

Yet, even in the deepest darkness, there are always flickers of light. During the Holocaust, there were those who found the courage to intervene. As Gene’s family was marched through town, he saw a different schoolteacher standing on his porch, his face etched with sorrow, quietly tipping his hat in a gesture of respect and shame. Later, after months of starvation in a slave labour camp, Gene was assigned to work with a German civilian engineer who risked his own life to sneak him food stolen from the SS dining room.

Bosnia was no different. Good people did brave things. Some soldiers could not bring themselves to execute their neighbours; they lowered their weapons and walked away. Damir’s friend was saved by a Serb neighbour who, at immense personal risk, smuggled her family out of a notorious concentration camp in eastern Bosnia where they had been tortured for 17 months. Decades later, in a supreme act of forgiveness and remembrance, she named her baby after her Serb rescuer.

In 2000, shortly after arriving in Australia as a refugee, Damir was walking on the campus of La Trobe University. Something caught his eye among the layers of old posters glued to a pillar. Through a slow, careful excavation, he uncovered the words “Silence is Consent.” He had discovered a poster from 1993, calling for a protest on Bourke Street against the killing in Bosnia. This relic of a forgotten activism was a message in a bottle, sent across time and space. It showed him that while he and his family were struggling to survive, people on the other side of the world had not been entirely silent; they had tried to help.

The Choice That Defines Us

Perhaps the weekly protests in Melbourne and cities across the globe in support of Gaza send a similar message of solidarity to the children hiding in the rubble today. And now, initiatives like the Sumud flotilla seek to do more than protest; they seek to intervene directly, to break the siege with their bodies. They may be intercepted, they may not succeed in delivering aid, but their courage poses a fundamental question: Will others take their place?

Will we, the global public, form an endless line of ordinary people ready to sacrifice our comfort, our convenience, and our safety to bring an end to a genocide? Will we become bystanders no more?

The curtains have been torn down. There is no hiding behind the claim that we did not know. The victims are on our screens, in our homes, their eyes meeting ours, pleading for us to see their humanity and to act. The choice before us is the same one that has confronted every generation: to be a link in the chain of complicity through our silence, or to become a barrier against the tide of violence through our action.

The price of silence has already been paid, in full, by the millions in Auschwitz, in Bosnia, and now, in Gaza. The question is, how much more are we willing to let them pay?

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