The Cummings/Hillel Program for Holocaust and Genocide Education hosted its annual “Survivors Speak” panel on April 19. This year’s panelists included artist Jack Trompetter, author Consolee Nishimwe, businesswoman Jasmina Cesic and activist Bol Riiny, who spoke about their experiences as survivors of the Holocaust and the genocides in Rwanda, Bosnia and South Sudan, respectively.
Rabbi Naftali Brawer, executive director of Tufts Hillel, introduced the speakers and encouraged the audience to “celebrate the brilliant humanity of four survivors” through a balanced discussion.
“Genocide is a heavy topic,” Brawer said. “It’s distressing and yet, as human beings, not to make light of it, but we also need to inject some laughter and some humor to celebrate our humanity. So we’re going to try to balance that.”
He then opened the conversation by asking the panelists about the moment that cemented the reality of the situation for them. Nishimwe talked about an instance where she and her fellow Tutsis were bullied in junior high school on account of their identity, elaborating on the confusion that came with such experiences.
“Because [the bully] was a Hutu, she knew what she was doing,” she said. “But I was not taught anything at home. I didn’t know anything. But my parents told me, just like any other Tutsi, you have to be nice and go to school and go home.”
Riiny highlighted the brutality and suddenness of his life as a refugee, characterizing it as a pursuit of “the next meal.”
“You get sick,” Riiny said. “That’s it. There’s no medication. There was no GPS, there was no road. We are hiding from jungle to jungle. … I can’t help but just cry and pray to God that I’m going to make it to tomorrow. … It took us three months to cross from South Sudan to Ethiopia. About one-third of us didn’t make it.”
Cesic narrated an encounter with a high school student in Belgrade during her time at a vocational school that underscored how the world around her was changing.
“The boy came to me, around my age, and he asked me for some spare money,” she said. “But he could hear [my] accent. … We Bosnians have [a] different accent than people from Serbia, and he looked at me with a face full of hate, and he said, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ And it was the first time I heard those words in Yugoslavia.”
Trompetter discussed his experience as a 3-year-old during the Holocaust and the lasting traumatic impact it left on him.
“My experience was being taken with my little hobbyhorse and rushed into a closet and told to be very quiet. I don’t know for how long I was in my closet,” he said, adding that this resulted in two nervous breakdowns by the time he turned 7. “I was lucky. I was well taken care of during the war, I had a foster family. … Many relatives of mine, some of them camp survivors, were broken people.”
Rabbi Brawer then shifted the discussion, asking the panelists about the struggles they faced in the aftermath of their experience of genocide and how these led them to take on the work they currently do. Cesic discussed the culture shock she experienced upon her arrival to the United States.
“It bothered me that people knew so little about what was going on in the middle of Europe in the 20th century,” she said. “And listening to the news and learning that they [were] imposing the embargo on Bosnia instead of helping Bosnia. At that time, I didn’t know if my father was dead or alive, if my brother was in the safe area.”
Trompetter examined how his experience influenced his view of bystanders in such situations.
“These things don’t happen all of a sudden. Things happen historically, that lead people to behave very badly,” he said, adding that former President Donald Trump’s racist comments about Mexicans triggered him. “I thought, ‘Oops, there we go again.’ And you have to pay attention to that stuff, because it is the beginning of possibly terrible, terrible things. When people say ‘never again,’ I think the nature of human beings is [that] it’s going to happen again.”
Nimshimwe built off this point and emphasized the importance of education to combat the threat of genocide.
“I think it’s so important to educate, making sure that especially for young people, to make sure that they see early signs, and whenever you see anything, speak up,” she said. “We have to learn from what happens, and even though we have … people who are from the family who committed the genocide, … they must know too because we see on [Gregory Stanton’s] 10 stages of the genocide, denial is one of them.”
Riiny shared his perspective on the future of South Sudan and the hope for unity. He too underscored the role education can play in reformation.
“Knowing how to read and write, we learned that there are tribes in Kenya, there are tribes in Ethiopia, there are some tribes in Rwanda. … It’s encouraged them not to fight each other,” Riiny said. “If we all united and have a good leader, we have natural resources that we can use to benefit the citizens that are suffering from lack of medication, running water, insecurity. … So that’s the hope: We just need to be there.”
