 As far as history is concerned, things don't change. A number of people went out and killed their fellow human beings. Most of the population were terrified. Despite all those horrors, despite the world saying never again, genocide has happened since. History can teach us so much, but we keep ignoring history lessons at our own peril all the time. I was born in 1935 when the Nazis were already four years in power. I was very sheltered. I've got a photograph, for example, when I was two, where I'm a normal happy scruffy two-year-old because you could keep a two-year-old child indoors. I was blissfully unaware of what was going on outside. Almost immediately after the Nazis came to power, my father was sacked from his position as a judge. Aryan Germans were not allowed to employ Jews. The Nazis went about it in a very devious way. They were boo-laubed, which meant released on holiday. The Nazis operated in euphemisms. I was born and raised in rural Bosnia, so it was a really nice childhood. My family had lots of animals. We grew some crops. When I was old enough, I was heard in animals in the fields around the village. I had two older brothers who were looking after me, so my childhood was pretty much idyllic. When I was a teenager, that was a couple of years after Tito, the former Yugoslav president, died. Some media started using propaganda, employing propaganda to vilify one particular group in former Yugoslavia, Albanians. After 1984, this propaganda became more vicious. I grew up in a very stable family environment. I went to school. I played football. I went to this primary school. I received a very, very harsh treatment from one of the teachers. She didn't like tootsies, and therefore she used that reason to really target me. I had started having trouble with issues at school. I was becoming this rebellious young child, doing wearer school. Then football all of a sudden became very important in my life. I started realizing that there were some big issues among the Rwandans when I was about 13, 14. That's when my dad lost his job. Then we had to move the government of that time, putting in place those rules that Hutus had more right to jobs and education than Tootsies had less. From that moment, I started realizing who are among the unwanted members of the community. My father was often in hiding. There was a sort of bush telegraph. The Jewish community got warning of what was happening before it happened. They either hold in their homes, which didn't give them any protection at all if the Gestapo were after them, or they ignored it. Most of the population were terrified. The Nazis dominated and terrorized very early on. Immediately they took power. They started killing people. Completely perverted the legal profession, the teaching profession, the medical profession. In 1991, we started having some serious problems. Six months before my village was attacked, one person who used to work for the local education board was tasked by his political party, the Serbian Democratic Party, to form 13 illegal police stations. At the same time, a lot of my Serb neighbors were given weapons. Either by these guys or by the army that I used to serve some years earlier. And no one spoke about it. At the end of April 1992, they staged the coup. Our freedom of movement was severely restricted. Some weeks later, just after three weeks later, my village came under attack. And then there was nowhere to go, nowhere to run. And when we were ordered to surrender, we congregated on the local football ground. It was clear there was a plan. A number of friends and family members got arrested. Purely because they were Tutsis. More people, people who had no idea of what politics are, who had no interest in the politics, who were just there trying to make their living. And all of a sudden, you had such, had been arrested, such as in prison. It became normal to call a Tutsi a cockroach. I think we somehow accepted it. A number of people went out and killed their fellow human beings without actually realizing that they were killing the real human beings. They believed that they were cockroaches. I was a football fan of a club called Rayonspor from the young age because my dad was a big fan of that club. I became a goalkeeper for the club. I went on to play for the club for a number of years and I also played for the national team. When the genocide started on the night of April 6th towards April 7th, I slept and was woken up by sounds of guns and bombs exploding in Kigari. There were so many soldiers around the neighborhood. They came into our house kicking the door in, accusing us to have player parts in the killings of the president. Up till one of them, I think, threw up one of these albums. The photos took his attention. Who are these people? That's me and my teammates. We played for Rayonspor. I said, yes, I know every Rayonspor player. How can you say you're a Rayonspor player? Well, if you really are a Rayonspor fan, then take those pictures and look at the pictures. We started chatting. We sat on the sofa. That moment of him realizing who I was really changed the whole atmosphere there. They had come into that house specifically to kill us. I came to England on the Kindertransport in 1939. I can remember being very shocked at the huge size of the boat. I remember being frightened that the boat would sink. Too many people and too much luggage. Under fives. I think everything bad is caused by them. Which, on being abandoned by my parents in a foreign country, I experienced it as my being so bad that my parents couldn't and didn't want me any longer. I ended up in the Amarska camp, the most notorious concentration camp in Bosnia. I started recognizing a lot of the guards. They were basically the locals. Some of them went to school with me. And some of them were my teachers. And I think if they were complete strangers what was going on would be easier to bear than knowing that you didn't do anything wrong. At the beginning there was no food, I think for four days. We were crammed inside one former locker room. There were maybe 500 of us in this room and you just couldn't sit on the floor. There was no space to sit on the floor. It was extremely humid, extremely hot. After two weeks they began the process of interrogations. I say interrogations but it was really the process of torture. Physically I was there for two and a half months but every day was like a whole eternity because you just want to survive. You just want to live. You want to see your family again. During the genocide I lost so many family members including a young brother of mine who was just seven years old at the time. We were forbidden to speak German from the moment we came to the Steds, the first foster family, which I thought was crazy. I remember asking my brother, why can't we just talk? And I remember him saying, there are soldiers around. He said, they're English soldiers. If they hear you speaking German they'll shoot you because they'll think you're a German. There were stories circulating about America. So the world knew about this place but sadly there was no interest to put pressure on the Serbs to end the violence that was going on inside. ITN and the Guardian, they arrived in Bosnia, it took them some days and once in Bosnia Karajic, he played their host trying to dissuade them from coming to the northwest They were persistent and they finally arrived in the region on the 5th of August 1992 so I guess they didn't know themselves if there were really camps in the region and unintentionally they saved my life. They came to hunt for this story and inadvertently they forced the Serb authorities to close down the camp. The lessons of the Holocaust have not been learned. It's a fundamental lesson that all human beings are equal as human beings. We're a long way from accepting that. I'm only one person, I can't do anything about it anyway. I think that was probably the attitude of most people and still is today. We need a massive drive to raise awareness of the existence of human rights. I have seen and survived something that I feel no human being should ever be aware of. I feel that humanity can benefit from such stories in hope that they don't have to go through the same experiences. The Genocide 80-20 group is a group of students mostly from our school but we work with students from other schools as well. We're trying to raise awareness of genocides that have happened so spreading stories from survivors, from experts who've worked in genocide response but also we're trying to make sure that genocide never happens again. It's trying to teach people the warning signs of genocide and what they can do to help make a difference. Genocide 80-20 project was founded about 14 years ago and it came about through one student coming to see me one day after a lesson. I'll tell him history. And he said, Sir, I've seen a film about something that happened a long time ago in a place called Rwanda and the club essentially started as myself and this boy investigating what happened in Rwanda. From there we were able to invite a survivor to come in to speak to us and as time progressed more and more boys got to hear about the project and what we were doing and they joined and it grew from there and as I say the rest is history. Yeah, I think it's really important there's to it in schools it's very easy for these things to kind of slip into history and people forget about the atrocities that can be committed by people and I think people should be aware of it or to push for more action to be done to stop it. So throughout a typical year of the last 14 years of the Genocide 80-20 project there's been the routine meetings that we hold every week and those meetings build towards a particular aim so whether it's the production of a newspaper, a booklet, whether it's an event in Parliament is essentially anything that the boys think will make a difference. For this year we're planning a genocide awareness week and we are also planning sort of an expedition up to Parliament to talk with the all-party parliamentary group around genocide and we wish to really get more engagement from them. The main thing is awareness. Most people don't even know a lot about the Holocaust they only remember what they were taught in history class but a lot of the time people don't even know what's going on in these terrible situations in China and other places and so if people can have that conversation you can have a network effect where people are talking about this confronting these difficult conversations, these difficult topics then hopefully more awareness will be spread and then that puts pressure on people in authority. I'm really proud of everything that the boys have achieved here they join a club thinking this is just going to be another lunchtime club but what they soon learn is that when they're empowered with the knowledge and speaking to survivors and so on they can actually make a difference so they're listened to by MPs, they're listened to by statesmen and they soon realise that yet they can make a difference and the ripples from the project that they've created can spread far and wide. The New Holocaust Learning Programme is a newly developed learning programme for young people aged 13 plus The session entails a hybrid model of working with a facilitator a trained facilitator in Holocaust education and it also incorporates spending time within the Holocaust galleries with a learning device in groups the activity on the device that they use to guide themselves around the galleries is very engaging it expects students to really take control of the choices that they're making within the galleries work as a group students will find the object within the gallery behind a glass panel and then have the opportunity to explore the whole object including the bottom and the sides and things like that and through doing that exploration we also provide them with information that is not included within gallery text so we're giving them a deeper understanding of why that object is in the gallery if you were to go into other galleries if you were to hear a talk it's very easy for students to switch off and not engage whereas the learning device that we provide students with to use throughout the gallery it really forces them to take note and to take part with the rise in digital and social media and digital technology students are very often not challenged on their opinions and can often go through life not really knowing much more than what is within their comfort zone and so it's really important that we challenge that because that's how you can be more empathetic to different people who have got different experiences and are different to you it's all about just being empathetic and being understanding and accepting of everybody The Generations Photographic Exhibition photographs of nearly 60 Holocaust survivors who are all based in the UK we coordinated survivors to have their photos taken by fellows of the Royal Photographic Society working with some of our sister organisations who work with Holocaust survivors around the UK and the exhibition shows these survivors some of them with family members some of them with objects that are very dear to them some in their own homes and it's a celebration of the lives they've built in the United Kingdom For me this project was about memorial, about remembrance not forgetting but also showing the concept of hope really The experiences have been many varied from hidden babies to sitters who survived the Holocaust through the goodwill of people around them who survived pretty sticky situations you know, war and conflict and degradation in concentration camps and survived because of great luck and stoicism and endurance and perseverance and I suppose that is a message about life really During the Second World War the Holocaust was a thing that defined how we saw and visualised humanity going forward and I think that it's a lesson that we need not forget The title Generations has multiple meanings it recalls the generations who were lost, lost because they were murdered and the survivors who were celebrated in this exhibition almost all of them had no relatives left when they arrived in Britain and they rebuilt their lives here many of them have gone on to build families here and for many of the photographs you'll see generations within the one photograph the survivor with their partner with their children with their grandchildren, some of them with great-grandchildren so it celebrates the families that they've built as well as the members of the families who were murdered of course not everybody was able to rebuild families and some survivors chose not to have family members in their photos so as we look at the photographs we think about the absences who's not in these photos and we celebrate the people who are in the photos it's so important that we pass on that legacy because the generation of Holocaust survivors themselves are passing away and the responsibility for sharing their stories and their experiences shouldn't only rest with their own direct descendants we all have a responsibility Holocaust Memorial Day we all come together in our schools, our civic centres our places of worship and museums and cinemas we all take this one day to learn and to think what can we do what specific tangible actions can we take that will make one day without genocide a reality the Holocaust was an experience of mass murder on an industrial scale 6 million Jewish people including one and a half million children using the most sophisticated and industrial modern technologies memorialising and remembering those individuals murdered just because they were Jewish is important in and of itself I think it's powerfully important that we keep telling these stories because as the next generation arrives on planet Earth and these stories are not told there could be a tendency to forget and that would be catastrophic because I think that we as human beings tend to forget history tend to forget the lessons I think it's the duty of everyone especially in richer safer countries to make a real effort to learn about the stories from survivors of genocides as well as to stay informed about genocides that are going on currently because the truth is that genocide can happen anywhere at any time to anyone and unless we take the messages from the past we won't be able to recognise the signs of genocide and we won't be able to put in place measures that can stop it there are many people who would say that humanity hasn't learnt from the Holocaust and of course it's so easy when you look around the world now what's happening to Uighur Muslims in China or Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar and to think that we've not learnt those lessons humanity still persecutes minority groups simply because of the community that they belong to and we all have that vulnerability to to seeing people as the other and feeling afraid of the other and wanting to remain within our own busy groups and our own echo chambers but we also have within us that capacity to be welcoming and outward looking and be in solidarity with other people and learning about the past I think gives us all that opportunity every year to remind us to squash down that bit of us that is vulnerable to division and to enlarge that bit of us that is outward looking and open welcoming to other people there is nothing that really shows that what went on in Rwanda 23 years ago where over a million innocent people lost their lives within just a period of 100 days had contributed to any lesson on how to deal with future tragic events as someone who survived genocide I can feel that human rights right now are very vulnerable in the UK I can see some very strong parallels between what is going on in the UK and let's say in America and what happened in former Yugoslavia I say we always live just one step away from genocide we have to make sure that we protect our human rights most people don't understand that when you go to bed and wake up the next morning somebody may have come overnight and taken that piece away from you people should look at survivor stories try and go to survivor talks look in the newspapers and really find out about situations around the world but they should also educate themselves about what is happening locally because history tells us that stronger communities communities that don't create an other communities that don't fracture into them and us are stronger communities and therefore these sorts of things are less likely to happen the important thing is to learn for a purpose learn from genocide for a better future I think the critical thing is always to have the conversations with people in your circle because if you can get a population which is educated on these issues why they're happening then as a group of people it puts pressure on politicians and the people who actually have the power the easiest thing you can do is just have the conversation which is difficult for itself we constantly have to fight for our human rights because so many people before us have fought for them and died for them