I don’t have many pictures of myself as a kid. In this one, I was probably two or three years old, living in a small village in Iraqi Kurdistan. You might not know it from my innocent baby face (model status?), but a few years before this photo was taken, my family survived a genocide. My parents were farmers, members of a Kurdish tribe that had cultivated our homeland for countless generations. The Kurds are no stranger to persecution, but nothing rivaled the campaign of bombs and chemical weapons that fell on Kurdish civilians throughout Iraq in the 1980s, part of an effort to erase our people and culture from history. My family were among thousands who fled to the frozen mountains of the Iraqi-Turkish border, running for their lives from an army invading and destroying Kurdish villages. Before humanitarian aid arrived, many people starved and froze to death on those mountains. Others survived by eating snow, and cooking whatever food they had carried on their backs to the mountains. Many Kurds were denied refugee status by neighboring countries. We were one of the lucky families granted asylum in the United States when I was five years old. I hope that the number of people heartbroken over the current situation and fearing for the Ukrainian people will extend that same compassion to people who look like my family, too. There are millions of stories just like mine, of children who barely survived war. And there are tragically millions of stories of children who did not. Let’s take this opportunity, this awareness, to pray for and protect all children suffering the horrors of war. We can’t change the past, but we can and must do more for one another in the future.