My grandmother went to school with Henry Kissinger. Although they never really shared anything beyond a class photo it is a fact that remains after many others have disappeared to that place where forgotten memories pile up like stock to be counted. Sometimes I wish I could find the pile so that I could discover other cool facts to share. Yet I know that what ends up in the pile desperately wants to be forgotten forever. There are some things we drag along with us though, despite their ugliness, their bitterness and the pain their memories cause. We pull them along in the hope they will keep us grounded in the place just in-between remembering and forgetting, so that we won’t be dragged down by them – or led astray without them. In reality though my life is so far removed from that of my grandmother’s that the fact she and Sir Kissinger shared a photo once upon a time seems ludicrous to me.

My grandmother also once came home with shit smothered in her hair. She was a beautiful lady and as a girl was tall, voluptuous and vivacious. She would light up eyes with her smiles and when she laughed her whole body would dance ever so elegantly. The only problem was she was Jewish in Germany. So when she came home one day covered in brown manure, smelling awful and crying with shame the fact that she was once at school with Henry Kissinger made no difference at all. This story is one of those memories I drag along with me, hoping it will keep me in that place that stops you from going numb from the senseless bullshit we seem to be smeared in ourselves every day that in turn keeps us from smelling what is actually happening around us.

If I look around me I can find lots of similar memories to drag around. I don’t need to look too far to find words like apartheid, Nazi, death camps, survivor, genocide and bloodshed in relation to my recent past. Yet every day, as the news of the world I live in uses words that are associated with my personal lexicon of horrific history; as killings and hate fill the screens of our news broadcasts to the point where it almost appears that the world is exaggerating I feel the numbness setting in and taking over. As the words become louder and seem to be drawing closer my stories about Henry Kissinger feel even more far-fetched than ever before.

This week while the world remembers the Holocaust I will remember my grandmother. She didn’t manage to meet Henry Kissinger again, although she did send him a letter once with a copy of her class photo attached. She did escape genocide though and just like him went on to live a relatively comfortable life in a world so far away from the one she was almost exhumed by. Yet as I remember her, I realise she was one of many and for each of her hundreds more didn’t get away in time. I sit here and think of her and no matter how hard I try I cannot envisage the place her home in Germany became as the Nazi regime set in. It is as far away to me and my comfortable life as Syria, Egypt, Sudan, Ukraine, Afghanistan and North Korea are.

This week people will flick through posts about Holocaust commemoration, just as they flick through updates about asylum seekers on our shores and war-torn places that all blend into one big mess they brush aside and put in a place they can refer to when it suits them to feel politically active. What are human rights? Shouldn’t that be a rhetorical question? On the one hand it seems so crazy to think that they need to be contested at all. On the other hand, as I put pieces of bits of war, bloodshed, racism, senseless killings and thoughtless hate-crimes together with the memory of my grandmother and the fate she was saved from the recent past suddenly morphs into the present and human rights sound like something the lucky few stumble upon.

Yet still this week will pass and nothing will have changed. I will carry on as you will. You might keep in your memory an interesting fact about my grandmother and Henry Kissinger but the world will go on and people will get away with murder. Women will be raped. Children will be tortured. Communities will be excluded. Soldiers will lose their lives. Borders will be crossed in the dead of night offering a glimpse of hope and we will carry on sighing together because the life we take for granted has so many of its own issues and problems that we so flippantly forget how lucky we are. And as hard as I try to actually see Henry Kissinger himself; to see the little boy who escaped Nazi Germany and became state secretary standing in front of me –I cannot. Until I am literally knocked over with a real-life pot I will continue to inhale the apathy drug that puts so many of us to sleep comfortably and enables us to live relatively unaccountably.

When I was much younger I dealt with the harsh realities of war that I learnt about in textbooks with the naïve notion that they occurred in some faraway time when people were monsters intermittently and for a lapse in time didn’t care about each other. That couldn’t happen now, I’d tell my much younger self; people couldn’t possibly let that happen now. And now, years later, as I read headlines of ‘never again’ and ‘lest we forget’, my naivety shines with obviousness. How did World War II happen? Did people get away with genocide simply because it wasn’t televised? What about when it was? What about Bosnia and Herzegovina? What about Rwanda? What about Sudan? What about Nigerian school girls getting kidnapped by the hundreds and used as sex slaves? This is just a brief list of the things we know about – what about the things we don’t know? Would it make a difference? Would you let it happen? What could you do to stop it?

Henry Kissinger, my grandmother and a long line of others were simply lucky. Luck is what saves some and drowns others; it is what feeds babies and lets others starve to death. I have seen how genocide is allowed to happen. It happens just as easily as we switch channels and switch off screens. How do we get away with simply saying ‘oh that’s terrible’ and ‘how can we let this happen?’ How do we walk past indifference in our own backyards and not get knocked over the head by its relevance? We wake up with this drive in our core to change the world and then we go to sleep drunk on the comfort of our own immediate surroundings. We say we care just as quickly as we order another latte and get on with life. We use the same signature to sign a petition as we do to sign a credit card receipt. We say we care. We say we understand. We say our grandmothers were refugees as well. We say our families also arrived on boats. Again we say we care while we thank our lucky stars we weren’t born in that faraway place where people are monsters and nobody cares about each other.