Genocide: Personal Stories, Big Questions – Exploring 20th and 21st century genocide

 

Latest work from journalist and author, Heidi Kingstone, examines the unremitting blemish on mankind through the eyes of survivors, witnesses, academics and activists

 

LONDON – Yellow Press has published Genocide: Personal Stories, Big Questions, by journalist and author, Heidi Kingstone.

The book tells the story of the last 120 years of genocide, its impact on the world and its relevance today. Kingstone takes the reader on a journey from the Herero and Nama genocide of 1904, through the Armenian genocide, Ukrainian terror-famine and The Holocaust to the Cambodia, Rwanda and Srebrenica genocides of the late 20th century.

She also explores the Darfur, Yazidi and Rohingya genocides of the 21st century, starkly illustrating that, while some lessons have been learnt, mankind seems to possess a propensity to dehumanise fellow human beings – all too visible in today’s global conflicts. This human failing, argues Kingstone, is fuelled by fear, greed and propaganda, and the refusal to learn from the past.

The book builds on Kingstone’s 20 years as a foreign correspondent for national and international media and is informed by survivors, witnesses, academics and activists. It is a collection of vignettes that link one instance of tragedy to another – a compendium of stories centred around people that Kingstone has met, observing connections that weave their way through relationships, cultures, and continents across time, leading to salutary parallels, past and present.
Kingstone provides us with the origin and definition of the term genocide – it transpires that the word itself did not emerge until the winter of 1944 when Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer born in 1900, coined the term. We learn that in 1945 Lemkin went to Nuremberg to establish the crime of genocide. Ben Ferencz, the youngest prosecutor at Nuremberg – interviewed for the book by Kingstone just before his death, aged 103 in 2023 – was one of the first people to use the term. It wasn’t until 1948, we are told, that the definition was enshrined in the United Nations Genocide Convention.

Other characters we meet in the book include two remarkable women who spoke to the world – Anne Frank, and Arshaluys Mardiganian who survived the 1915 Armenian genocide, escaped to the USA, and became a global sensation with her story, serialised in the media and turned into a film.

Having met a woman born in Bergen-Belsen, the former Nazi concentration camp, Kingstone talks about life after liberation and how people can rise from the ashes. Haunted by ghosts, children of survivors talk about their lives and the impact of their families’ legacy. And we learn about the ‘Heart of Auschwitz’ – the amazing story of a purple origami heart made by prisoners that survived the Death March. Kingstone’s work also explores the psychology of a perpetrator – how people justify mass murder – and draws parallels between leaders from Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler to Josef Stalin.

The book quotes leading authorities on the complex and perplexing history of genocide, including Professor Menachem Z. Rosensaft, former general counsel of the World Jewish Congress and adjunct professor in law at Columbia Law School; Dr Ümit Kurt, the historian whose awakening to genocide took place in his own hometown of Gaziantep, which he discovered was formerly home to a thriving Armenian community; and Dr Jan Ilhan Kizilhan who is a psychologist, psychotherapist, trauma expert and orientalist.

Commenting on the book, Professor André Singer, President Emeritus, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, stated, “In her beautifully penned and wide-ranging book Genocide – Personal Stories, Big Questions, Heidi Kingstone takes up the challenge of not only reflecting on the Holocaust but on genocides worldwide to paint a fresh and comprehensive picture for the world to learn from.  It is her personalised journey covering genocides in so many countries that makes this such a gripping read and fulfils her ambition to help change things and remind us in such a compelling way that we must never look away.”

Genocide:  Personal Stories, Big Questions, is published by Yellow Press (www.yellowpress.co) and is available as a download from Amazon: https://a.co/d/02a4feW4

About Heidi Kingstone:

Journalist Heidi Kingstone has spent her career covering events around the globe for prominent publications from the Financial Times to the Mail on Sunday.

She has interviewed key international figures from Benjamin Netanyahu and HRH Princess Anne to Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind. Her interest in human rights and dictatorships led her to Iraq on four occasions, travelling to Baghdad, Irbil, and Basra before and after the invasion in 2003. She has also reported from Bangladesh, Africa and the Middle East. Arriving in an old Soviet helicopter and a C-130 military aircraft, she reported extensively from Afghanistan.

She later wrote her first book: Dispatches from the Kabul Café (2014), a memoir of a country at a tipping point. War and genocide have fuelled Kingstone’s pursuits and informed her work. Like so much in her life, from moving to London from her native Toronto to ending up in Iraq and Afghanistan, serendipity played its part in writing Genocide: Personal Stories, Big Questions.