In July 1995, following three years of horrific ethnic war between Bosnians, Croats, and Serbs in the former Yugoslavia, war crimes intensified against the Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica, a town in eastern Bosnia. United Nations peacekeepers abandoned a safe zone to Bosnian Serb forces, who in a single day killed more than eight thousand men and boys, and raped and expelled thousands of women and children in the largest genocide in Europe since the Holocaust.

In the aftermath of the genocide, a group of mothers came together to try to find the bones of their family members. Since then, the Mothers of Srebrenica Association has become a formidable organization that remains committed to disrupting the cycle of genocide that took the lives of their families and friends and still haunts their every day. They have fought to establish a burial ground, helped open a memorial center, compiled evidence to prosecute the perpetrators, secured an international day of remembrance, and built a home (on land where the genocide occurred) that they use as a base of operations and a guesthouse.

In 2024, British artist Hannah Rose Thomas and I traveled to Srebrenica to honor these mothers who have rebuilt their community after the genocide.