On April 7, 1994, all of my wife’s relatives who lived on a hill called Kunanga, a total of 118 of four generations, were killed. Among the victims were my two aunts, Nyirabagenera and Kamamure, who were married to my wife’s cousins. What happened on that hill on that fateful day was also happening on several other hills and in several valleys across the mountainous country, and would continue to happen in the following 99 days. By July 4, when soldiers of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) took control of the entire country, ending the genocide, over a million Tutsis and their Hutu sympathizers had been killed. As a kid in 1959, I had seen houses go up in flames; unbeknown to me then was that the houses were torched because they belonged to Tutsis. Thirty-five years later when the genocide was carried out, I was living and teaching in Zimbabwe. Although I knew then of the many anti-Tutsi pogroms, I was not prepared for the incessant news of indiscriminate killings of Tutsis —the old, the young, the infant, and even the unborn. The news, though numbing, gave rise to a hatred for Hutus who had killed innocent beings just for who they were. They must have been monsters, I erroneously thought. You see, I had no historical references whatsoever for what was happening in Rwanda. I had not read Karl’s confession to Simon Wiesenthal, author of The Sunflower, to understand how ordinary people become perpetrators. Karl, a dying Nazi soldier, had been raised Catholic and had joined Hitler’s Youth and the SS, institutions in which he had been taught that doing what he was commissioned to do was a patriotic duty. Granted, I knew that approximately six million Jews had been killed during the Second World War, but I did not know why or how they had been killed. The Holocaust had never been part of my curriculum.

That was to change 14 years later when I had opportunities to learn about the Holocaust, which to me was an entry into learning about the genocide against the Tutsi. These opportunities included a seminar on Holocaust education at The Olga Lengyel Institute for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights (TOLI) in 2008; an Echoes & Reflections seminar at Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Centerin 2011; a TOLI educational tour of Poland’s Holocaust sites and Israel’s historical sites in 2012. From these educational opportunities, I learned two fundamental lessons: one, that all genocides have histories; two, that genocide is preventable. Irving Roth, a Holocaust survivor who spoke at the 2008 TOLI Summer Seminar I attended, used the term “signposts” along the road to the Holocaust to underscore the fact that the Holocaust was not a spontaneous event: there had been the Nuremberg race laws, which codified policies of discrimination against Jews; the Kristallnacht Pogrom, when several synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses were destroyed; the letter “J” on Jewish identity cards, which made it possible for Nazis to single out Jews for any nefarious purposes.

The road to the genocide against the Tutsi too, like all roads leading to genocides, had signposts. Using criteria of scientific racism, the Belgian colonial administration had noses of individuals in Rwanda measured to determine who was Hutu and who was Tutsi. Gerard Prunier in The Rwanda Crisis quotes a colonial administration document which described Tutsis as having “features [that] are very fine: a high brow, thin nose and fine lips” and as being “gifted with a vivacious intelligence”; Hutus as being “short and thick-set with a big head” and “less intelligent”; and Twas as having “a monkey-like face.” The administration also issued identity cards with Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa labels, and enacted policies that favored Tutsis and discriminated against Hutus and Twas. For example, it removed Hutu chiefs and replaced them with Tutsis. In the late 1950s, when the Tutsi elite demanded political independence from Belgium, the colonial administration switched its allegiance to the Hutu. In 1959, rumors of an attack of a prominent Hutu leader by a group of Tutsi young men sparked the first anti-Tutsi pogrom. In 1962, following Rwanda’s independence, the exclusively Hutu government continued the policy of issuing identity cards with Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa labels in order to enforce discriminatory policies against Tutsis. For example, teachers were mandated to regularly do a headcount of Tutsi students in their classes so as not to exceed the allowed quota. In her memoir, Chosen to Die, Destined to Live, Frida Gashumba wrote, “The head count of Hutus and Tutsis came to be a three-month occurrence, as the headmaster complied with the government’s directive…. Each time the Hutu children would laugh at us and goad us, and neither the headmaster nor our teacher would make any attempt to shut them up.” The Hutu government also oversaw anti-Tutsi pogroms in 1963, 1967, 1973 when all Tutsi students were expelled from the only university in the country then, and 1990.  Perhaps worst of all signposts on the road to the genocide was the dehumanization of Tutsis; they were called cockroaches, rats, and snakes, which justified their extermination.

In On Austrian Soil, one of the texts we used at the 2008 TOLI Summer Seminar, Sondra Perl wrote: “You are not responsible for the past. But I think you do have, that we all have, a responsibility to the future.... Not to turn our backs. Not to be silent [in the face of any form of social injustice].” Perl’s primary audience was educators, who have the responsibility to teach against prejudice, discrimination, and persecution—beliefs and practices that potentially lead to genocide. That ordinary people in Germany and in Rwanda became genocide perpetrators indeed speaks to the failures of institutions, such as schools, which taught or tolerated prejudice and hatred. This April month we remember the Holocaust, the genocide against the Tutsi, and other genocides to recall mistakes of the past so that they are not repeated.

About the Author: Gatsinzi Basaninyenzi, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of English at Alabama A&M University.

The pronouncement made on New Year’s Eve 1942 gives context to this story. The pronouncement, one of the most powerful primary sources contained in Echoes & Reflections, can be found in the unit on Jewish Resistance. Abba Kovner, its author, was a young activist in the Vilna ghetto who became aware that tens of thousands of Jews had been murdered in the forest at Ponary in the fall of 1941. On New Year’s Eve 1942 Kovner stood before about 150 youth group members and called for armed resistance:

“... Hitler is plotting to annihilate all the Jews of Europe. [...] [T]he only response to the enemy is resistance! Brothers! It is better to die as free fighters than to live at the mercy of murderers.”

Kovner’s proclamation represented a turning point: it was the first time anyone had posited in writing that the murder of the Jews was more than just haphazard localized incidents; that there was a plan to murder all the Jews of Europe. It was also a turning point in the response it demanded: armed resistance against the Germans.

But how could this call for resistance be spread? Jews were trapped behind the walls and fences of isolated ghettos. They were not allowed to travel by train. They were marked by the Star of David so they could be easily hunted. Their mail was censored and they were forbidden to have radios. These German policies intentionally cut off contact among Jewish communities, and they were very effective. And even if the call for resistance could somehow be disseminated, how exactly were the Jews to resist? They had no arms, no ammunition, nothing but their bare hands.

In this seemingly impossible situation, there were those who stepped into the breach. We call them the “couriers”. The couriers were generally young women and girls who belonged to youth movements and were dedicated to the cause of resisting the Germans. They braved danger and death in order to serve as the lifeline between Jewish communities throughout war-torn Eastern Europe. Disguised as non-Jews, with braided hair, peasant kerchiefs on their heads and false names, they transported information, newspapers, money, and ultimately also ammunition and weapons across borders and into ghettos. They relied on forged travel permits and sheer chutzpah to bluff their way through multiple police inspections, document checks, and border controls. They were always at risk of being unmasked, and always under the threat of death. Their task required great courage, quick wits, and nerves of steel. It was said of these women by Emmanuel Ringelblum, Jewish historian and founder of the Oneg Shabbat archives in the Warsaw ghetto,“Nothing stands in their way. Nothing deters them. [...] How many times have they looked death in the eyes? How many times have they been arrested and searched? [...] The story of the Jewish woman will be a glorious page in the history of Jewry during the present war.”

Why were the couriers predominantly women? The Germans imposed the death penalty on any Jew found outside the ghettos. Jewish men on the streets generated suspicion – why weren’t they at work? In addition, men could easily be identified because they were circumcised. It was much easier for women: they had no physical sign of their Jewishness.  They could stroll the streets, seemingly carefree. They were also more likely to speak the local language; many had been educated in secular schools in Polish, while their male counterparts had undergone religious instruction in Yiddish.

Vladka Meed, who appears in the Echoes & Reflections unit on The Children and Legacies Beyond the Holocaust, worked as a courier on the Aryan side of Warsaw. She smuggled weapons into the Warsaw ghetto that were later used to resist the Germans in the heroic Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which occurred 75 years ago this April. In her book, On Both Sides of the Wall, Vladka tells of having to quickly repack a carton of dynamite into smaller packages in order to pass it into the ghetto through the grate of a factory window. As she and the Polish watchman, who had been bribed, worked frantically in the dark, the watchman trembled like a leaf. When they finally finished, the watchman “stood there flushed, drenched in perspiration and unnerved. […] ‘I’ll never risk it again,’ the watchman mumbled. ‘I was scared to death.’” In addition to smuggling weapons into the ghetto, Vladka smuggled Jewish children out of the ghetto, finding hiding places for them in the hopes of saving their lives.

The word “courier” does not do justice to Vladka and others like her. They were much more than messengers. They were the first to smuggle weapons into many of the Eastern European ghettos, risking their lives to do so. They brought hope, along with information, to Jews who would otherwise have been cut off from the entire world. They were incredibly brave and many died trying to fulfill their missions. They are icons of heroism, and they shatter many common stereotypes: that the Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter, and that women are less capable than men of resistance.

About the Author:  Sheryl Ochayon is the Project Director for Echoes & Reflections at Yad Vashem.

For more information, please see the following resources:

For a more in-depth discussion about Abba Kovner and resistance, view the Video Toolbox film on Jewish Resistance.

The full text of Abba Kovner’s Pronouncement is contained in Yitzhak Arad, Yisrael Gutman, Abraham Margaliot, eds., Documents on the Holocaust, Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland and the Soviet Union (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1981), p. 433.

For short films about the Oneg Shabbat archive, see The Oneg Shabbat Underground Archive In The Warsaw Ghetto and Emanuel Ringelblum.

Emmanuel Ringelblum’s full diary entry can be found in Emmanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum, Jacob Sloan, ed. and transl., (New York: Schocken Paperback, 1974), pp. 273-274.

Vladka Meed describes her travails in Warsaw during the Holocaust in her book, On Both Sides of the Wall (Israel: The Ghetto Fighters’ House, 1973), p. 129. Her testimony can be seen on the IWitness website.

Leading up to the Games, many countries, including the United States, considered boycotting the Olympics in protest of Nazi persecution of German-Jewish athletes like Margaret Lambert. However, many African-American leaders in the United States opposed the boycott, believing that the achievements of African-American athletes in Germany would challenge and delegitimize both the discriminatory policies in Germany and in the United States. The boycott did not occur, and in what many considered a controversial move, African-Americans Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe replaced two American-Jewish runners, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, on the US 4x100-meter relay team.

Although the reason behind this last minute decision was never confirmed, Glickman has stated that his coaches feared the optics of two Jewish athletes standing on the winning podium under the Nazi flag.

While the 1936 Games were originally an opportunity for Germany to convince the world of their false notion of Aryan supremacy, in a moment of victory, African-American track and field athlete, Jesse Owens defied the Nazi’s racist propaganda by winning four gold medals and breaking two Olympic records.

One would have hoped that Owens’s achievements at the 1936 Games would have had a profound influence on combating antisemitism and racism; however, history has shown that his performance had no immediate influence on the fate of those affected by such ideology. Following the 1936 Olympics, Nazi influence continued to grow, and the US would not officially abolish Jim Crow laws until passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

A sign of the times in which Owens lived; President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not meet with the athlete to congratulate him, which was customary for returning Olympic champions. It was not until 1976 that sitting US president Gerald Ford formally recognized Jesse Owens by awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Later in his life, Jesse Owens’s reflected on his homecoming:

"After I came home from the 1936 Olympics with my four medals, it became increasingly apparent that everyone was going to slap me on the back, want to shake my hand or have me up to their suite. But none was going to offer me a job."

The story of the 1936 Olympics provides an entry point for students to grapple with complex questions. Despite Jesse Owens’s achievements, in the aftermath of the Games, why was he not given the same respect as other Olympic athletes? What prevented people from calling out the injustice and hypocrisy of Jim Crow, and why was no action taken by the world to prevent the Holocaust?

Such questions are not meant to undermine the determination of the few who were advocating for the freedoms of African Americans and Jews before, during, and following the Games. Yet, it is clear that the numbers were too few and progress too slow. This unfortunate delay in societal change makes it imperative to bring attention to the inaction that took place following the Games, in the classroom. We must give students the opportunity to explore the setbacks of this history so they can think critically about the world around them today, and make choices that will increase the pace in which freedom and equality are universally accessed.

For an in-depth look at how racism played a role at the 1936 Olympics explore this IWitness activity from our Partners at USC Shoah Foundation The Institute for Visual History and Education.