Survival Begins With Refusing to Minimize

One of the hardest lessons of history is that survival often belonged to the people who refused to ignore what was happening. They listened when the rhetoric changed, when the laws grew tighter, when neighbors began to shift their tone. While others said, “It won’t get that bad” or “You’re overreacting,” they resisted. While neighbors told them they were paranoid or overreacting, they quietly prepared. And that preparation saved their lives.

Germany in the 1930s

When the Nazi Party came to power, Jewish life in Germany changed with alarming speed. Shops were boycotted, professions closed off, neighbors began to echo the language of propaganda. Many believed it was a passing fever, that it couldn’t possibly grow worse in a civilized nation.

But some families read the signs. They sold their businesses for pennies, abandoned family homes, and carried only what fit in a suitcase. They left for Britain, the United States, Palestine, and Latin America. Friends and relatives often told them they were foolish, that they were giving up everything for fear of shadows. Yet those “alarmists” survived. For the ones who waited, escape routes closed almost overnight — visas denied, borders sealed, ships turned away.

Armenians Before the Genocide

In the Ottoman Empire at the start of the 20th century, Armenians had already endured massacres in the 1890s. By 1915, hostility and scapegoating were returning, and a few families recognized the danger. They emigrated to France, the United States, and the Middle East. Leaving meant severing ties with land, extended family, and traditions rooted in place for generations. Many neighbors couldn’t imagine leaving — they told themselves that this, too, would pass.

It didn’t. Deportations and mass killings swept through the empire. For those who left early, survival often came at the price of exile, but they carried their culture and memory forward when so many others were silenced.

Rwanda, 1994

In the months before the genocide, the radio grew darker. Broadcasters called Tutsis “cockroaches” and warned of imaginary threats. Many dismissed it as ugly rhetoric, politics as usual. After all, neighbors had lived alongside each other for generations. Surely words couldn’t undo that.

But a few families recognized the warning for what it was. They slipped across borders into Burundi, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo before militias began to move. Those who left endured displacement and uncertainty, but they lived. Those who stayed often found themselves surrounded when neighbors, once friendly, turned violent under the weight of propaganda.

Sarajevo Before the Siege

In the early 1990s, Bosnia simmered with rising nationalism. Sarajevo was still a cosmopolitan city, proud of its diversity, but tensions were sharp. A handful of residents noticed the stockpiling of weapons and the hostility in everyday conversations. They made the painful choice to send their children abroad or to leave for safer European cities.

Many who stayed told themselves that Sarajevo’s spirit would hold, that the city would never be attacked. But in 1992, the siege began, and it lasted almost four years. Those who had left were spared the years of sniper fire, shelling, and starvation. Those inside survived only through tunnels, barter networks, and a resilience born of desperation.

The Thread That Connects Them

What unites these stories is not wealth or privilege. It is clarity. The people who survived were often ordinary families who trusted their instincts when others begged them to calm down. They were willing to endure the heartbreak of exile rather than gamble on hope that the storm would pass.

They lost homes, businesses, and landscapes they loved. They carried grief that never left them. But they survived. And survival gave their children and grandchildren the chance to build lives beyond the violence.

Why This Matters Now

It is tempting to minimize danger, to believe that “it won’t happen here.” Comfort whispers that things will settle, that we are overreacting, that neighbors would never turn on neighbors. But history urges us to listen more closely. The people who survived weren’t reckless or paranoid — they were clear-eyed. They believed what they saw and acted before it was too late. They trusted their intuitions, even when it was unpleasant.

Tending the hearth means protecting not only the warmth of today, but also the possibility of tomorrow. It means noticing when the wind picks up and shielding the flame before it blows out. The people who kept their fire alive in times of unrest were not always the strongest or the wealthiest. They were often the ones willing to believe the storm was real — and to act accordingly.