The elders, the ones born into a Bosnia where Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats lived side by side as neighbours, not enemies, they remember a land of green meadows and endless blue skies, where children walked to school picking berries with friends, laughing and carefree, with no idea their world would soon be torn apart.

I have no memory of that Bosnia. I was born in 1992, the year the Bosnian War began. It was also the year my father had to leave.

Not by choice, but out of duty. A desperate need to protect, to save, he left to give me, and thousands of others, a chance at survival. But somewhere along his journey, on the road to Srebrenica, my father — along with 130 other Bosniak men, including one of my uncles on my mother’s side — walked into a forest overlooking a river. All 130 went missing.

None of them ever returned.

More than thirty years have passed. My father is still missing. He’s among the 7,600 still unaccounted for.  Like thousands of others, his remains have never been found, and his story – our story – is left unfinished.

I have never heard his voice nor felt his touch. I have no grave to visit, only silence so loud it follows me through every moment of my life. This silence is heavy and hard to bear.

Growing up, I was haunted by questions with no answers.

What if he had lived? What could have been? Who would I be if he were here?

For those who have found some part of their loved ones, the pain is just as deep.

Many have had to bury their family members in pieces — fragments found in different mass graves. It can take years or decades to collect even half of these pieces. This kind of grieving is heartbreaking. It is a pain I understand deeply, shared by so many families torn apart by genocide.

Protection and abandonment

My birth mother’s choice to leave me behind at just five weeks is a wound of a different kind. I have tried to understand what drove her away — was it fear, desperation, or a need to survive at any cost? I will never fully understand her reasons. My father left to protect, to save. But her leaving felt like abandonment.

As a mother now myself, I struggle to grasp her choice. How could someone walk away from a helpless baby? How could they leave a child crying alone, yearning for the one thing only a mother’s arms can give — comfort and safety? Yet her blood runs through my veins, and somehow, I find the strength to see the best in her. Maybe one day, I will find peace with it.

But I was not left entirely alone.

In the middle of all that loss, I was found by one of her relatives and truly loved. Mevlida didn’t just take me in; she gave me what every child deserves: safety, warmth, and a place to belong. She held me through the cries, confusion, and fear.

She never made me feel like I was someone else’s child. She made me feel like I was hers from the very beginning.

She gave me love without question, comfort without condition, and strength when I had none of my own. She may not have carried me in her womb, but she carried me through life.

Her name is Mevlida Lazibi. To me, she will always be Mum.

She often says she didn’t save me — that I saved her. But I believe we saved each other.

What it means to survive

Though I am, by definition, a survivor, I sometimes feel like a ‘lucky survivor’ — spared from carrying the unbearable memories of the horrors that unfolded in Srebrenica.

I was only two years old. I don’t remember our journey from Srebrenica to Tuzla in the northeast, to Denmark, and eventually to the UK. 

There is a deep internal conflict in being a survivor without memories of the violence. I feel disconnected from the pain others carry daily. And yet, I am compelled to speak for those whose voices were silenced and for those who continue to bear the immense weight of those memories.

Like countless others, Mevlida suffered the loss of 32 members of her family. Among them were her eldest and youngest brothers. Their remains were found scattered across multiple mass graves. Imagine being told you may have to bury your loved ones in fragments — pieces of them lost, never to be whole again. This grief goes beyond words. It lingers in the silence between tears.

Mevlida wasn’t just fighting to survive. She was fighting to protect me, a small child clinging to her through chaos and terror. She carried me through brutal checkpoints where Serb forces searched trucks, hunting for young girls to drag away to rape camps.

Eventually, our journey brought us to England in 1999. Everything was unfamiliar — the language, the customs, even the sky.

But she met it all with quiet courage and endless hope, determined to give me a future better than she could have ever dreamed. Though I was too young to remember, I carry the weight of her love and sacrifice — a love that saved me and shaped everything I am today.

What remembrance means

When people ask what it means to be a genocide survivor, I tell them it means living with the knowledge that your life began in the midst of death. That your father’s story ended before it could begin with you. That your mother’s arms were never there to hold you. That your family was broken into pieces that could never be made whole again.

It means living every day with silence as your inheritance, with absence as your shadow.

But it also means carrying hope.

Because behind every number is a story. Behind every name, a life. Behind every memory, a plea for peace.

On the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, we remember over 8,000 Muslim Bosniak men and boys brutally taken simply because of who they were.

Their belongings — a shoe, a watch, a fragment of bone — are carried by the living as testament, because memory is all that remains when everything else is taken away.

The mothers of Srebrenica carry grief so profound it breaks the heart — the unbearable loss of their loved ones and the haunting knowledge that the world watched in silence and allowed this horror to unfold.

Yet their story is not confined to history. Across the globe, in places too often forgotten or dismissed, others suffer the same cruelty — uprooted, erased, and silenced by systems built on hatred and indifference.

What is happening in Gaza deeply resonates with me. The people are being slaughtered, just as mine once were.

Despite the constant media coverage, the world seems to watch on, unable or unwilling to intervene. We said “never again,” yet it keeps happening again and again.

Gaza holds a special place in my heart. It’s people remind me of my own pain, the loss, and the resilience we carry together. That shared experience is what drives me to do what I do. To be a voice for those who are not heard, hoping that someone somewhere will listen and act. 

We were told the world had changed. But it hasn’t. It has only grown more skilled at turning away, more polite in its denial, more relentless in its destruction.

Survivors carry the weight of the past. But today, we are all called to carry the weight of the present. To bear witness. To speak out. To refuse to look away.

I carry this story for those who cannot — and with fierce hope that through remembrance, we can create a world where no child is born into such silence again.