YOU never think that your teachers and classmates will become killers, but for survivor of the Bosnian war Kemal Pervanic, in 1992 that became his reality.

Imprisoned in the notorious Omarska concentration camp, Kemal’s former middle school teacher became his interrogator and his Serb former classmates became torturers, settling old scores with deadly results.

Last week, more than 20 years on, Kemal found himself at another school, not in Bosnia but at Royal Wootton Bassett Academy as he joined other survivors at a conference exploring ways that the horrors of genocide can be used to teach the next generations.

Rounding off the conference on Friday evening, he was joined on a Question Time style panel by Holocaust survivor and former Auschwitz prisoner Zigi Shipper as well as Eric Murangwa who survived the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

The event began with a personal tribute to the late Elie Wiesel, himself a survivor of the Auschwitz and Buchenwald camps whose work as an educator and author has been so important in making Holocaust education a reality.

Nicola Wetherall, who heads up RWBA’s pioneering Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights programme, spoke of the impact that Wiesel’s personal support had on her and her students.

Speaking about the importance of engaging young people and providing them with testimony from which to learn the lessons of history, Friday’s panel were all agreed that education was vital.

Kemal Pervanic said: “After the Second World War and the Holocaust they used to say ‘never again’.

“I can tell you I wish I was deaf so I would never hear that phrase again – we must continue to do more.”

Talking about his own motivations for talking about his experiences, even now at the age of 86, Zigi Shipper said: “If we give up then they all win – nobody is forcing us to do it, we do it for those who didn’t survive.”

They were speaking in front of an audience of students, teachers and members of the local community.

One member of the audience said she saw the three men before her as “beacons of light in a very dark world.”

The previous evening, a similar audience had gathered at the school for a screening of Pretty Village, a documentary film that saw Kemal return to the village where he grew up, to the site of the Omarska camp and to the very school were his former teacher-turned interrogator was still working.

As the moving film came to a close there was silence in the room as those watching came to terms with what they had seen.

Year 7 student, Grace, said: “I admire how positive Kemal is and was, he doesn’t let what happened define him.”

Annie Sheldon, year 12, said: “I have not experienced horror like this since my trip to Auschwitz in March.

“The complete lack of trust in humanity but the great desire to change it to a hopeful future.”