Exploring 20th and 21st century genocide , “Genocide” is the latest work from journalist and author Heidi Kingstone. This book is a collection of personal stories of survivors, witnesses, academics and activists.
BOOK SUMMARY
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.
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.”j
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
MY THOUGHTS
I first interviewed Heidi in July 2015 after she released her first book “Dispatches From The Kabul Cafe” about her encounters when she was based in Kabul in 2007/2008. Read the interview HERE
Heidi’s latest book, “Genocide” is an interesting mix of personal stories and interviews from survivors, witnesses as well as activists of genocides that have rocked the world in the 20th and 21st centuries. The large majority of the book focuses on the Nazi atrocities; but not solely – other genocide atrocities in places such as Rwanda, Cambodia, etc are included too. I found the personal stories from the Yazidi genocide survivors particularly interesting, mainly because I was unaware of their plight; but saddened too. My heart bleeds for those young women who were raped, had their rapists offspring and yet were not fully accepted back into their homelands by their own people.
This book also reminded me of a visit I made last summer to the martyr village of Oradour-Sur-Glane , near Limoges in France. During World War II , Oradour was in the German occupied zone of France. On June 10th 1944, troops of the 2nd Waffen-SS Panzer Armoured Division , Das Reich, massacred 642 men, women and children. The reason for the German attack on Oradour remains unknown. The ruins of the village that stand today are just how they were left in 1944. Including prams. Today, the ruins are maintained by the Ministry of Culture. It was a sad but humbling visit.
I highly recommend this book. Heidi definitely has a talented way of weaving the personal stories, her own experiences, the facts and figures together to make the topic of genocide and its influences easier to understand. Heidi’s enthusiasm and passion for the topics she writes about definitely shows and rubs off onto the reader! 8/10
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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
My thanks to Heidi Kingstone for the review copy of “Genocide”.
All photographs have been published with the kind permission of Heidi Kingstone, except where stated.
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