April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dead roots with spring rain

– T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land” (1922)

Each April or early May, Jewish communities and individuals mark Yom Hashoah, the day of Holocaust remembrance. I am among those who mourn the millions of Jewish men, women and children who perished at the hands of the Nazis and their many collaborators.

But April’s memory and the 20th century’s cruelty are shared by others. On April 24, the world’s Armenians remember the April night in 1915 when the Turkish government rounded up the leading Armenian religious, political, and intellectual leaders in the capital of Istanbul and murdered them.

Before the killing of Armenians would stop, more than 1 million men, women and children would die in the 20th century’s first great genocide. For over a century, their descendants have had to live with the knowledge that the perpetrators of these crimes and the generations who have followed them have never admitted their guilt, have never shown shame or remorse for their inhumanity.

A security guard watches from a tower around a detention facility in Yarkent County in northwestern China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region on March 21, 2021. China has responded furiously to a United Nations report on alleged human rights abuses in its northwestern Xinjiang region targeting Uyghurs and other mainly Muslim ethnic minorities. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File)

Three decades later, world Jewry would sit traumatized in April 1945, as the first reports of the concentration camps began to reveal a mass murder unprecedented in human history. Six million Jewish men, women and children, one-third of Jews in the world, were murdered as part of the Nazi plan to destroy European and all Jewish life.

No one knew what to call these terrible crimes against humanity, but one man, a Polish Jew who had escaped the tragedy of European Jewry and left dozens of family members behind to perish among the millions, finally gave them a name. In April 1944, Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer and academic, wrote an article entitled “Genocide,” thus identifying a phenomenon that Winston Churchill called “a crime without a name.” Lemkin identified these mass murders as “the crime of destroying nations, racial or religious groups.”

The cruelty of April could now become its promise as the world said, “Never again.” Those words were of no importance in a genocide that began in April 1974 and killed 1.7 million Cambodians out of a population of 8 million. The Cambodian Khmer Rouge and their leader, Pol Pot, made certain that the “never again” held no meaning and the genocide was committed for reasons never fully explained.

Two decades later, on April 7, 1994, the first of an estimated one million Rwandans, mainly members of the Tutsi tribal community, were murdered over a period of 100 days of the most efficient genocide the world has known. Their murderers, members of the Hutu tribal community, shared a similar language and culture. But that was obviously not enough. Never again?

In April 2003, For the first time in U.S. government history, an ongoing crisis was referred to as “genocide” when then Secretary of State Colin Powell argued that events in Darfur could be labeled as such. In his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Powell said: “We concluded – I concluded – that genocide has been committed in Darfur and that the government of Sudan and the Janjaweed [mercenary soldiers] bear responsibility – and that genocide may still be occurring.” Between 2003 and 2005, an estimated 300,000 people living in the Darfur region of Sudan were murdered and nearly 3 million people were made homeless.

Our world has shouted “never again,” again and again. Humanity must understand that genocide is an evil that knows no boundaries – not of color, religion, gender, or geography – and strikes out against them all.

When is the next time that we will shout “never again?” Will it be after those communities that stand on the verge of genocide today – the Yazidis from Iraq, the Muslim Uyghurs from China, or the Muslim Rohingya from Myanmar – are mercilessly slaughtered for reasons of race or religion and murdered by a constant source of willing executioners?