I am a student of and activist against genocide, that is, all genocides, whatever the name of the perpetrators or the victims.

In the significant past, my focus on genocide has been out of necessity. My own country of birth, Myanmar – for whose freedom from military rule I was prepared to give my life – is in the dock at the International Court of Justice.

Its state-organised and popularly supported mass atrocities against the largely Muslim Rohingya people are well-documented and legally deemed in breach of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

I freed myself from the Pavlovian patriotism of “my country right or wrong”: genocide is my absolute red line.

So, last month’s 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation by the Soviet Red Army in 1945 was of natural interest to me, just as similar genocide remembrance events, whether they commemorate Srebrenica, Rwanda, the Rohingya or Cambodia.

But my stomach turned when I heard the words of Tova Friedman, a Polish-born Jewish American who survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp, as a five-and-half-year-old.

A five-minute video clip on Time magazine featured her address to a distinguished gathering of several dozen fellow survivors, and a dozen heads of European states – including UK’s King Charles III, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, President Emmanuel Macron of France, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Donald Trump’s Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff.

Now an age-wisened 85-year-old, Friedman shared horrific memories of the snarling German guard dogs baring their razor-sharp canine teeth, of naked women prisoners, and of the black smoke billowing out of the chimneys of the four crematoriums at the vast camp.

She talked about the slightly older girls of six or seven – some barefoot and most shrunk by “starvation” – marching, while shivering and crying, through the snow-covered path to the gas chambers.

Auschwitz to Gaza

As I listened to Friedman’s speech with growing numbness, I said to........

© TRT World