‘Lest we Forget’ – an evening to remember and honour all victims of racial, ethnic and religious hatred.

January 24, 2024

‘Celebration’ might be the wrong word for what a large audience took part in last night at the wonderful West Greenwich Library. And yet the word did crop up a few times. As well as deploring cruelty and crying for the victims, we must also celebrate the resilience, courage and selflessness of survivors and of the individuals and families who put their lives at grave risk to protect others.

Shivaun Woolfson presented ‘Surviving History: Portraits from Vilna’, a documentary made in 2008 (and still sadly relevant) by her and her sons Daniel and Jesse Quinones (Wolfcub Productions) in Lithuania, where their family originated from. A trip that was much more than ‘fact-finding’. Having recently lost both her parents, Shivaun felt the urge to find some meaningful family and cultural traces. What she found was a town where skinheads still marched chanting ‘Jews Out!’, where the remaining Jewish community had dwindled to a small number of elderly and very old people. The memory of what happened to the once thriving community would disappear with them, were it not for a small, tucked-away Jewish museum, dedicated to preserving those memories, to recovering the faces and names of those who were killed by their neighbours, as well as by the German SS.

Shivaun interviewed some of the survivors, who showed such humanity in the face of indescribable and still-fresh sorrow. All we could do at the end of the short film was to sit in silence for a short moment.

After some questions to Shivaun and an interval, we watched ‘Hidden Childhood: Vesna’s Story’. The documentary, produced and kindly supplied by the Zagreb Festival of Tolerance, charted, in Vesna Domany Hardy’s own words, the terrible events that affected her and her family during WW2, with the assassination of her Father, the Resistance work of her Mother – through to the post-war years and her Mother’s two year internment under Tito’s communist (but not Stalinist) regime on the notorious island of Goli Otok. This complicated, painful story is also populated by courageous, selfless people, by quiet heroism and startling resilience.

There were some questions, too, at the end of Vesna’s Story, and many heartfelt pleas for peace, tolerance (or, even better, a welcoming, open attitude to differences and diversity).

Just for one night, to coincide with this event, a few library shelves were devoted to a display of prints of very poignant poems and pictures written and drawn by Palestinian children in early 2023, as part of an English language project (www.handsupproject.org) and now collected in a book called Moon Tell me the Truth. This display, and its explanatory notes by Mick Delap, who promoted the display, added to the poignancy of the evening.

We all feel that oral histories and testimonies, in whatever form, are essential to our mutual understanding at this time of great global turmoil and appalling suffering.

A big thank you to Shivaun and Vesna (I feel privileged to be their friend).

I also wish to thank Natasa Popovic of the Zagreb Festival of Tolerance, Wolfcub Productions, Mick Delap and the amazing audience and, as always, Debra Sullivan and her staff at the Library for all their help and support over this important event.

Shivaun Woolfson is a writer and lecturer, with a special interest in life history writing, research and practice. She holds a PhD in history and has taught extensively in the US and the UK, most recently at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where she served as Senior Tutor in Community Studies and visiting lecturer in life writing. She has facilitated workshops, seminars, public readings, performances and writing residences in hospices, prisons and community centres. She has also developed numerous interdisciplinary arts projects based primarily on the life experiences of participants. In 2002, she published an autobiography, Home Fires (Atlantic Books). Between 2008 and 2009, Shivaun fielded a team and made numerous trips to Lithuania to conduct fieldwork research for the project ‘Surviving History – Portraits from Vilna’. The project ultimately culminated in the short documentary we have watched, and a travelling exhibition, which opened at the Tolerance Centre in Vilnius in September 2009. Between 2009 and 2011, the exhibition toured – among other locations – the Holocaust museums in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban, University College Dublin, Shropshire Council’s Shire Hall, Central Synagogue in London, London Jewish Cultural Centre, and Biddenham Upper School, Bedfordshire. During that time, Shivaun also conducted several teachers’ seminars and public talks relating to Holocaust legacy in Lithuania.

Vesna Domany Hardy was born and educated in Zagreb, Croatia. She obtained a degree in Comparative Literature and English language and Literature at the University of Zagreb, and much later an MA in Art History from Goldsmiths College, London. In 1974 she left Yugoslavia to join her English husband in his British Council posting in Pakistan. That posting was followed by one in Paris and, after two years in Greenwich, by two in Italy, in Milan and Rome, before the family returned to London. Vesna made the most of these experiences by continuing to study, write, translate and work for radio, schools and cultural institutions. Vesna was one of ten women who founded the Croatian Peace Forum to counteract the lies about the causes of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and to lobby for peace. After Croatian independence, she continued working with refugees from Bosnia, especially children, and coordinated a project, aiming to reunite war-dispersed families. She also worked as an interpreter on the ICTY investigation into the war crimes committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia. Vesna’s links with her country of origin and her own roots are deep and important: she is continuing to write and to collaborate with several newspapers in Croatia, contributing regularly to a Croatian Jewish cultural magazine and sitting on the board of the Jewish Festival of Tolerance in Zagreb. She is on the Holocaust Education Trust’s list of survivors and provides talks on the Holocaust to schools.   

Events

Tuesday October 8th: ‘Loving Nature in Troubled Times’
7pm at West Greenwich Library

As close as we could to National Poetry day, the launch of Derrick Porter’s and Jude Rosen’s new poetry collections (The Art of Timing and Reclamations from London’s Edgelands respectively, both with Paekakariki Press), who will be joined by Alex Josephy and Jane McLaughlin.

A free event. Books and pamphlets will be available to buy. Plenty of refreshments (donations welcome). Door will open at 6.45 for a 7pm start.

Here’s some information about the poets:

Before moving to Rye, Alex Josephy lived in London and sometimes in Italy. Now her imagination and her poems live in three different worlds; she feels lucky to be discovering a new one among the East Sussex marshlands. Alex has worked as a teacher and university lecturer and as an NHS education adviser. Her most recent collection is Again Behold the Stars, a Cinnamon Press pamphlet award winner, 2023. Other work includes Naked Since Faversham (Pindrop Press, 2020) and White Roads (Paekakariki Press, 2018). Her poems have won the McLellan and Battered Moons prizes, and have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the UK, Italy and India. You can find out more on her website: www.alexjosephy.net

Jane McLaughlin writes and publishes poetry and short stories. Her publications with Cinnamon Press include Quintet (poetry with four other poets); Quartet (short stories with three other authors) and Lockdown (prizewinning full poetry collection). Her short stories have been widely published by Arachne Press, The Frogmore Papers, Under the Radar and elsewhere. Her short story ‘Trio for Four Voices’ was included in Best British Short Stories 2018 (Salt). She has been longlisted in the National Poetry Competition and has been placed and listed in many other competitions. Ephemeral, her collection of thirty poems on the themes of climate emergency and the natural world was one of the winners of the Dreich Classic Chapbook competition in 2023. Phil Barnett writes of Ephemeral: These fine poems are like breaths on a window pane. Her words condense the ineffable…into something we can see, read, feel.

Derrick Porter grew up in Hoxton and why he began to write poetry from the age of thirteen remains one of life’s unsolved mysteries. From the time he first began to write, to well into his thirties, he wrote in ignorance of there being a poetry scene. In his early forties he joined a ‘Writing for Pleasure’ group tutored by the poet Ted Walter – the first poet he ever met. Ted suggested he send his poems to Envoi, and from then on Derrick’s poems began to appear alongside mainstream poets. In 2002 he joined the Poetry School where – under the guidance of Mimi Khalvati – he became part of the wider poetry scene. His poems have appeared in magazines such as Magma, Acumen, Interpreter House, The New Writer, Brittle Star, Poetry Review, The Long Poem Magazine, and in two anthologies: I Am Twenty People, and This Little Stretch of Life. He has also enjoyed success in a number of poetry competitions. His second collection, The Art of Timing, is coming out in September for Paekakariki Press.

Jude Rosen is a former historian, urban researcher and translator and as a poet currently runs workshops for refugees. Her pamphlet, A Small Gateway, (Hearing Eye, 2009) explored East End Jewish life and intercultural exchange with Berlin, Sarajevo, Palestine. At the moment she is writing a long sequence on Gaza. Reclamations from London’s Edgelands,  which emerged from artistic resistance to the Olympic redevelopment, has recently been published by Paekakariki Press (May 2024). Poems from it appeared in The Art of Dissent: Adventures in London’s Olympic State, (Marshgate Press, 2012); Long Poem Magazine, South Bank Poetry London Poems Anthology and Envoi and were performed on poem and living history walks of the marshes, 2015-19 (poemswalks.wordpress.com). A video “Desire Paths – a film haibun” of a walk on Leyton Marsh was produced by Fawzia Kane in 2016 (https://vimeo.com/197324168).

NOVEMBER 26th – an evening with poets who write in English while English is not their native language – with Natan Barreto, Isabel Bermudez and Kostya Tsolakis (and more).

FEBRUARY 4 – readings by Jacqueline Saphra and Sue Rose