Home

Nie wieder.

Never again.

These words are not history. They are a responsibility.

Today, Iran is covered in bullets. Not metaphorically but literally. Bullets in streets, in universities, in homes, and in hospitals. Wounded protesters are shot where they seek care. Families are denied information. Internet and telephone connections are cut. Iran is being sealed off from the outside world while violence continues inside.

This is not chaos. It is a system.

Mothers search for their children with no answers. Some never receive a body. Others are forced into silence. One mother buried her daughter in the yard of their own home… no cemetery, no public farewell, no justice. She wrote only this: “She is close to me now. I will join her soon.”

This is the weight Iranian families are carrying today.

We in the diaspora watch all of this from afar… helpless, sleepless, constantly refreshing broken news feeds, waiting for fragments of information that may never come. We carry guilt for being safe while others are hunted. We live with the fear of unanswered messages and the dread of silence from home.

Yet this pain, real as it is, is not comparable to what people inside Iran are enduring.

Our suffering is the suffering of witnessing.

Theirs is the suffering of survival.

They face bullets, prisons, torture, disappearance, and death. They face the terror of knocking at the door, the fear of hospitals, the danger of mourning. Any attempt to equate these experiences would be dishonest. What we feel abroad is an echo… painful, relentless, but still an echo.

Silence does not protect neutrality. Silence protects perpetrators.

Those who remain silent while people are executed in the streets do not stand outside history, they stand inside it. Silence kills not with weapons, but with absence. And absence, when repeated by governments and institutions, becomes complicity.

Germany knows this truth. Europe knows this truth. The words Nie wieder were born from the understanding that looking away has consequences. That human dignity cannot be selective. That “never again” loses all meaning if it applies only to some lives and not others.

Human rights are indivisible or they are nothing.

Human dignity does not stop at borders.

Iranian lives count.

I write this not only as a witness, but as someone in exile. Iran is my homeland… one I have missed for many years. Distance does not weaken love; it sharpens it. Every image, every name, every mother’s cry reaches across borders and settles in the bodies of those who were forced to leave but never stopped belonging.

Iran today is bleeding. But Iran is not broken.

History shows us that regimes built on fear eventually collapse under the weight of their own violence. Ashes do not mean the end. They mean transformation. From ashes, something stronger can rise if the world does not help the fire by remaining silent.

Never again is not a monument.

It is not a slogan for memorial days.

Never again is now.

Now in Iran.

Do not look away.