There is no reconciliation without repentance.

“Blood and power are intoxicating… the return of human dignity, repentance and regeneration become almost impossible.” (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from a Dead House)

In the summer of 1976, the West German government organized a study trip for high school seniors who excelled in their knowledge of the German language. That year, representatives from 27 countries participated; there were eight of us from Yugoslavia. It was an exceptional opportunity to join the regular classes of our German peers in Celle for a few weeks.

The exchange was complemented by excursions organized by the Pädagogischer Austauschdienst (PAD) as part of a cultural and informative program.

One of these trips was a visit to Bergen-Belsen, a former concentration camp, now a memorial center about twenty kilometers from Celle (photo 1). It is difficult to describe the feeling that comes over you when you walk in silence past the mounds covered in heather, on which is written only: “Hier ruhen 5000 Tote” - here rest 5000 dead. There are more mounds. About fifty thousand people died in Bergen-Belsen, and about twenty thousand more Soviet prisoners in the nearby camp. Among them was Anne Frank, who died of typhus at the age of fifteen, a few weeks before the British liberated the camp. These were people who were marked in advance and condemned to death by collective hatred.

Bergen-Belsen had no gas chambers. That makes it all the more terrifying: it was the final stop on the death marches from Auschwitz and the camps to the east in the winter of 1944-45 - overcrowded, without food, water or medicine, with typhus killing thousands every week. No technology was needed to kill.

The decision was enough for people to stop considering themselves human.

That summer, I heard for the first time from my German peers the words they kept repeating: Nie wieder! Never again!

Behind those two words stood a whole struggle. After 1945, Germans had to admit that their fathers and grandfathers knew about the crimes, or participated in them, and almost no one resisted. The first decade swept it under the rug; silence was the way to survive. But the generation born after the war did not agree to silence. In the 1960s, it asked its parents the question they did not want to hear - Where were you? - and out of that conflict grew the Germany I met in 1976: one that builds monuments to the victims, pays restitution, and enshrines the inviolability of human dignity in the first article of its constitution.

Reconciliation - with neighbors, with Jews, with ourselves - was not the beginning of that journey. It was its fruit.

But in 1976, Germany was still divided, and Berlin was a city cut off by a wall. Our visit to the western part, which the Americans, British and French held in their sectors, was particularly impressive. Photo 2 was taken in the French sector, on its very edge - Fin du secteur français, says the sign. On the wall, below the inscription Diese Schande muss weg! (This shame must go!), a wreath and fresh flowers for someone who, longing for freedom, tried to cross to the other side and was killed.

There I literally became convinced of the power of geopolitics and the misfortune that can befall you if you fall on the wrong side of the wall. That side was not just geographical. It was a side where the murder of a young man or woman who wanted to cross the wall was not asked for repentance, but was awarded a medal.

I say all this in connection with our mass graves. Those from World War II, and those more recent ones, over which mothers still stand weeping. I also say this in connection with the death of Ratko Mladić in the Hague prison, and the haste with which some have rushed to weave a wreath of glory for him - as if the verdict for genocide had not even been pronounced, as if the mothers were not standing where they were.

The Germans showed me in 1976 what the alternative was. Not reconciliation signed by politicians, but repentance that no one can sign on behalf of another. Repentance is not a collective category. It is individual, like the bones of those who lie in the mounds - each one is someone else's.

He who refuses to repent cannot even reconcile; he only waits for a more opportune moment. And while the one who ordered it is celebrated, instead of mourning the one who was killed, "Nie wieder" remains a sentence that no one has ever uttered in our country.

The hands of weeping mothers remind us that the path to salvation for our souls does not lead through reconciliation, especially not the kind that politicians offer and organize for us, but through repentance. Only after that, reconciliation comes of its own accord.

These photos are fifty years old. They were once my private memories. Today, it turns out, they are a warning.

The author is a civil engineer.