Photojournalist David Sladek is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this documentary photography. From his book/project ‘Unspoken Genocide’. To see David’s projects click on any image.
" Methods and brutality were such that even German Nazi officers wrote to the Reich in horror. "
Heroes of Unspoken Genocide are people who, as little children, survived WW2 genocide in the Independent State of Croatia. The fascist Ustashe regime with direct support of Croatian Catholic Church murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Roma people. Methods and brutality were such that even German Nazi officers wrote to the Reich in horror. After the war, Serbs and Croats were asked to build a new country of Yugoslavia and keep unsettled past quiet to preserve political balance. This silence together with immense pain that memories of atrocities caused to the survivors meant, that much of the horror remained unspoken for decades.
"...learning from our past is the only way to prevent such monstrosities from happening again."
My project and book is built on interviews with the survivors and photographs captured during the interviews in Bosnia and Serbia. The main unifying theme are details of hands, which to my mind symbolize a silent language that the society can universally understand but needs to listen. In modern
world, where many of the emotions preceding WW2 are afloat, learning from our past is the only way to prevent such monstrosities from happening again.
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By David Sladek
