Today. A birthday. Memories sharpen, even as the rain poured in streams through the halls of Westminster. It was before Covid. A memorial ceremony. The room, heavy with dark wood, was alive. Not an oppressive silence, but one that pulsed with presence. In the first and second rows, scattered all the way to the very back, sat the survivors. Their faces raised, marked by the years, but their gazes alive, resolute.
There was no uncertainty in their eyes. They knew why they were there. They knew their presence mattered because they were history, because they were the last who could speak. They carried the weight of that task with clarity. They looked at us—not to complain, but to ensure that we understood, that we listened, that we would carry what they gave us.
I remember their eyes. Not broken, but clear. In a world that had spent so much time in silence. In an era where the unspeakable had overwhelmed the spoken, they had found words—not because words could suffice, but because they were necessary. Their stories stood in the room like bridges. Between us and what we had never experienced.
What happens when they are gone? That question was already there then, as if it filled the space between their voices and our thoughts. Now, today, it is more urgent than ever. Almost all of them are gone. The rows are empty. What remains when the bridges grow thinner, when the witnesses no longer have faces?
What remains is what they have left us. Not complete stories. Not fixed knowledge. But an obligation. A demand to not let remembrance become an empty ritual, to not let it be just a story we tell, but a stance we live.
Perhaps that is the final task for those of us who are still here. Not only to preserve, but to tell. Again and again, despite everything. Against forgetting, against the noise of time. The voices of the survivors were never loud, but they were clear. And if there is anything we can learn from them, it is this: Humanity is not a condition. It is a decision. Every single day. For all of us