By Namal Wijayamuni Zoysa –

Namal Wijayamuni Zoysa

My dear Son Yevin,

I still remember the spring of 2017, when I was working in Vienna as a diplomat. During the Easter break, we travelled as a family to Poland. You were only five then. We wandered through the old streets of Warsaw, and on the way back, we stopped in Kraków to visit one of the most important places in history – Auschwitz. I wanted you to see it, though you were too young to understand what it truly meant. Not to frighten you, but to teach you that what happened there must never happen again.

The railway line leading into Auschwitz-Birkenau

Auschwitz was the place where Adolf Hitler’s regime led the world into a war of madness and murdered over six million Jews, along with millions of others. The place we walked through together, silent and cold, was once the heart of that horror.

As we left the small museum and approached the railway tracks that end inside the camp, you looked up at me and said,

“Dad, they must be very happy during this train ride.”

Train carriage that carried the people

I have never forgotten that moment. You saw those old train carriages the ones that carried thousands to their deaths, and you imagined joy, not despair. You couldn’t have known.

The entrance gate of Auschwitz with the words “Arbeit macht frei.

At the camp’s entrance stands an iron gate with the words “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work makes you free.”) The Nazis painted it there to deceive those arriving, to give them false hope. Every man, woman, and child who entered believed they were beginning a new life. None of them left alive. That day, as we walked out, I promised myself and you that such a crime would never happen again, not in our lifetime, not to any people.

But, my son, I must ask your forgiveness, because it has happened again.

In a small strip of land called Gaza only 41 kilometres long and 12 kilometres wide millions of people have been trapped, cut off, starved, and bombed. Children like you live without food, medicine, or safety. The world watches, just as it once did when the trains rolled into Auschwitz.

Do you remember when we listened to the phone call of Hind Rajab, the five-year-old girl trapped in her car after her family was killed? You cried with me as we heard her soft, trembling voice asking the rescue workers to come. She was so afraid. The ambulance that went to save her was bombed before it reached her. Hind died waiting.

She was the same age you were when we stood in Auschwitz.

Yevin’s single picture at Auschwitz

And I think of Mohammed al-Durrah, the twelve-year-old boy who died in his father’s arms in Gaza, caught in the crossfire while trying to return home after looking for a used car. His father, Jamal, tried to shield him behind a concrete barrel, just as I would have done for you. The journalist Charles Enderlin captured their final moments on film. That image travelled the world — a father’s desperate arms around his dying son.

Yevin, that father could have been me. Mohammed could have been you.

When we left Auschwitz, I told you that we, as human beings, were better now that we had learned from our history. I said we would never again build walls to trap people, never again deny food to the hungry, never again let children die unseen.

But I was wrong.

Today, the descendants of those who once suffered behind barbed wire have become the ones who build new fences. Those who once cried “never again” are watching it happen again to others, in another land, under another name.

And the world, my son, is silent.

A single child’s shoe at Auschwitz — a reminder

I am writing this letter because I cannot carry that silence any longer. I am a father, and a man, before I am anything else. I cannot stand by while children starve behind walls, while families are crushed beneath rubble, while history repeats itself before our eyes.

Forgive me, my son, for the promise I could not keep the promise I made to you that day in Auschwitz. I told you that humanity had learned its lesson. But as I look at Gaza, I see that we have not.

Still, I want you to remember something. I want you to carry this letter and those photographs we took the gates, the railway, the empty shoes and one day tell your children what I told you: that the only way to make “never again” real is to refuse to be silent.

Your loving Thatthi,

*Namal Wijayamuni Zoysa – Former Diplomat