Survivors of genocide, living in a world that is so quick to forget

The Holocaust and the other genocides are drenched by tides of sanctimonious rhetoric and empty promises

"I have the same brown eyes as my grandmother but they have not seen what she has seen."
Granddaughter of Holocaust survivor.

Forget the age of gloom and the rattle of war drums. Let us speak of a remarkable woman. Judith Hassan has spent 25 years doing some of the bravest work in the world. Last night she celebrated the fact with a party in London. She was launching a book based on her life's work in what she herself calls "a house next door to trauma". Gathered together were survivors and the children and grandchildren of survivors.

There was an eternity of living history in that room. I said as much to one of the guests. "History," she replied. "Yes, too much history." The survivors were very elderly people. The majority sat around a small table in the middle of the room. Although welcomed and loved they were definitely distinct. Unlike the rest of us they had been to hell. They were a frail little group. Their accents were those of a place which vanished in the middle of the last century.

Months ago I was given a glimpse of that world. I was visiting Judith Hassan at the Holocaust Survivors' Centre in London. We talked about the differences and similarities between the experiences of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. I was introduced to some of the survivors. Among them was Roman Halter, who as a boy was sent to Auschwitz. Afterwards Judith showed me the bright room where survivors attend art and music classes, where they can rediscover the language of the Shtetl and where experiences can be shared.

As we were leaving, an elderly man and woman took up position at the piano. She began to play, a soft and plangent melody, and he sang. I have no idea what the song was or where he first learnt it, but I swear it was like nothing I'd heard before. It was the voice that really caught me, high and pure and straight from the land of the lost.

As I've written before, it was Rwanda that planted the germ of an obsession in me. I needed to understand many things: how could people murder those they had lived beside as neighbours, take children and exterminate them like rats? How could the world stand by? How could we change laws and attitudes to make "never again" something more real than an empty phrase?

For, once it kicks off, nothing is simpler than genocide. There is a targeted group and it must be wiped out. The Genocide Convention makes it clear that this does not have to be total extermination; it is the targeting of a people on the grounds of ethnicity, religion or cultural difference and the attempt to eliminate them in "whole or in part". Be rid of them and live in paradise, the monsters promised. In the genocides of the 20th century the killers never achieved total extermination. There were always survivors. Start in 1915 when the Ottoman Turks deported the entire Armenian population over mountains and deserts with murder gangs waiting for them along the way; those who were not murdered died in their tens of thousands of disease and starvation.

In the Nazi Reich the aim was to leave not a single voice to tell of what had happened. But the voices of people like Roman Halter are still with us, and those too of a handful of Armenians, haunting and eloquent, but unrecognised as genocide survivors by our own ethically righteous Foreign Office. The Armenian survivors whom I met in Beirut and America are destined to die knowing that their suffering will not, as long as Britain and America need Turkey's military help, be recognised as genocide.

On the night of the first National Holocaust Memorial Day two years ago I was waiting to go on stage and speak about the Rwandan genocide, when I wandered past a backstage room and saw a group of survivors huddled together. There were three of Hitler's victims, a Rwandan Tutsi whose family had been murdered, a woman who had survived Cambodia's killing fields and a young man who'd been a prisoner of the Serbs in Bosnia.

All were grateful for the asylum they had found in this country. But I recognised that however much they might integrate into national, neighbourhood and family life, these people belonged to a community of suffering.

It takes a rare kind of sensibility to look into the abyss every day. The human psyche is not built to cope with the murder of hope implicit in genocide. But Judith Hassan is one of a sacred tribe of listeners, among them Mary Bluett who works with the survivors of the Rwandan genocide in Britain, and the legendary Helen Bamber, who founded the Medical Foundation for the Victims of Torture. The rest of us read a book or go to a film or we pay obeisance on National Holocaust Day, if we even do that much.

The Holocaust and the other genocides are drenched by tides of sanctimonious political rhetoric and empty promises. But if our attention is limited to one day of remembrance each year, the work of survival goes on until death. Judith listens and is patient and comprehends that survival will mean very different things to different people. Here is one story from many she has listened to over the years. The survivor – we will call him Survivor A – was a retired academic who was nine years old when Hitler invaded Poland. By then his family had already experienced the Jew-baiting terror of the Nazi rise to total power. The family went into hiding where they lived until 1944 when, in a drive to complete the Final Solution, they were discovered and deported to Bergen-Belsen.

As an adult, Survivor A suffered depression and nightmares. He came to the Survivors' Centre and met Judith Hassan. For a long time it seemed as if he wouldn't escape the depression which had settled over his life. Tranquillisers and anti-depressants provided a temporary but ineffective shield against the pain. As Judith Hassan writes: "In this mire I also began to sink. Nothing seemed to change. I felt useless and exhausted; the deadness was powerful in its destructiveness."

But the survivor kept returning and Judith kept listening. They edged forward. As Judith puts it: "I worked on a more primitive level, trying to build a bridge between the living and the dead. I needed to remain in the world of the living if I was to help hold on to his life in this sea of deadness." She did and he gradually returned to life. Survivor A even travelled and sent her postcards which spoke of good food and sunlit hills.

The most touching words I heard last night came from Roman Halter. They echo sentiments I've heard from survivors of genocide around the world. After describing how in old age he and many others still saw the smoking chimneys of the camps, Roman said that what touched him most about Judith's work was that she made the survivors feel that they mattered. It would seem little to ask after Auschwitz and Belsen but in a world so quick to forget, it is everything.

The writer is a BBC Special Correspondent