Northwestern University hosted “Silenced Voices: A Genocide Survivor Panel” this past Tuesday, sponsored by the campus Hillel along with the Sheil Catholic Center, Northwestern University Darfur Action Committee and NUnite. With approximately 200 people in attendance, the panel featured speeches on the Aremenian genocide during World War I through the present genocide in Darfur.

The stories of personal loss and survival began with activist Greg Bedian’s account of his grandmother’s hardship during the Armenian genocide, in which 1.5 million Armenians died under the persecution of the government of the Ottoman Empire.

Leon Lim, co-founder of the Cambodian American Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial, spoke of his years living under the campaign of terror conducted by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia beginning in 1975.

One panelist, Jacqueline Murekatete, discussed the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Most of her family was murdered during the attempt by the Hutu-led government to purge the country of Tutsis, Murekatete’s ethnic group.

A fellow panelist who travels with Murekatete to speak at schools across the U.S., David Gewirtzman, told his stories from the Holocaust. Raised a Jew in the small Polish town of Losice, he watched as his community was brutalized by the invading Nazis. After surviving a labor camp at Treblinka, Gewirtzman said he returned there as an adult to face the genocide’s legacy.

“They had a tall monument and around it, 2,000 smaller stones,” he said. “Each stone was a town that sent people to the camp, and I found the one for Losice. Out of the 8,000 Jews in the ghetto there at the beginning, only 16 of us came back. Eight thousand people, and that stone is all that’s left.”

The final panelist, Darfur survivor Abrahim Adam, said his family was scattered by the vicious Arab militias backed by the Sudanese government, with his 15 siblings divided among six refugee camps.