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On the moment I understood what kind of work I was actually inside

I was at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam.

My bag had just been stolen. Passport. Cards. Everything. I was supposed to be on a flight home for two weeks of leave. Instead I was making a list of everything to cancel, replace, and rebook.

I was frustrated. Honestly furious.

I got back to The Hague and started making calls. A credit card company put me through to a customer service representative. She asked me to confirm my address. I gave it.

She said — oh—the Hague.

Something in her voice shifted. I asked if she had been there.

She said yes. Once.

I asked what had brought her there.

She said she had testified at the Tribunal.

I asked — if she didn't mind — which case.

She said Krstić.

My heart dropped.

Krstić was my case. The Srebrenica massacre. Eight thousand men and boys. The first case in which a court found that what happened at Srebrenica constituted genocide.

I had spent 2 years on that case. The documents. The evidence. The proceedings. I knew it the way you know something you have carried for a long time. Intellectually. Professionally.

She knew it differently.

She had been a professional, a doctor maybe, something that required a license. In the United States her credentials were not recognized. So she was starting over. She said she was happy. That she had made something of herself on the other side of the unsurvivable.

She had left her family behind. She told me she had never looked back.

I finished the call. And thought, you cannot make this up. What are the chances. Of everyone I could have reached, I got a witness from my case.

In that moment my stolen bag meant nothing. New passport. New cards. I could go home. These were inconveniences.

She could not go home. Not for a long time. Maybe not ever in the way home is supposed to mean.

That is when I understood what kind of work I was inside.

Not a career. Not a professional posting. Not a line on a CV.

The people who walk through the doors of these institutions, as witnesses, as survivors, as the subjects of the decisions being made, are not abstractions. They are not case numbers. They are people whose lives were interrupted by genocide, by mass atrocity, by systems of violence that courts were built to reckon with.

And the people who work inside those systems, lawyers, court officers, witness support, moving between post-conflict courts, fragile institutions, and high-stakes reform, we carry that too. Whether we name it or not.

Most leadership frameworks will not tell you this. They will tell you how to manage up, navigate culture, build influence. Useful things.

None of them tell you what these systems deposit in your body over time. What they ask of you that no job description names. What sustaining yourself through it, not just performing through it — actually requires.

The professionals carrying the heaviest work in these institutions deserve honesty about what they are holding.

That is what this series is for.