‘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 NOVEMBER 26th at West Greenwich Library, 7pm (doors open at 6.45)
BETWEEN LANGUAGES – an evening with poets who write in English while English is not their native language – with Natan Barreto, Isabel Bermudez, Farah Naz and Kostya Tsolakis.

What are the internal processes that allow poetic expression of beauty and meaning in a language different from the native one? Is there a ‘shadow language’? And does that language leave the shadows and becomes ‘light’? As bilingual (though not technically) myself, I find the concept both important and intriguing. I know that our journeys into the English language are bound to be very different and I am looking forward to a conversation about it after what promises to be great and diverse readings.

A FREE event as always, with books for sale and refreshments galore…

Here’s some information about the poets:

Natan Barreto was born in Salvador, Brazil. He has lived in Rio, Paris, Rome, and, since 1992, in London. He is the author of seven collections of poetry in Portuguese: Under the Roofs of the Night (1999); Hiding Places on Paper (2007); Still Movement (2016); Creatures: animal sketches (2017); A backyard and other corners (2018), which won the Sosígenes Costa Poetry Prize, awarded by the Academy of Letters of Ilhéus, in Bahia, Brazil; The Rhythm of the Circle: photographic poems (2019); and The Hollow Soul (2021). He is also a published novelist, biographer and translator. Natan’s poems in English have appeared in Poets Adrift: first anthology of Brazilian diaspora poetry (2013); and, in 2019, an anthology of his poetry was published in German, titled Ausgewählte Gedichte. He has given poetry readings at the Brazilian Embassy in London, the Museum of London, the Royal Court Theatre, the Barbican, and the universities of Queen Mary and Nottingham. www.natanbarreto.com

Isabel Bermudez is a poet and textile artist living in Orpington, Kent. Her collection Serenade (Paekakariki Press, 2020) features poems evoking Spain and the New World, with illustrations by Simon Turvey. Her most recent published collection is Bar de las Reminiscencias (Paekakariki Press, 2024), also with illustrations by Simon Turvey. She performs her poetry widely at readings and festivals and was recently hosted by the Colombian Embassy and the Instituto Cervantes, Manchester, in conversation with Welsh poet and translator, Richard Gwyn. In a previous life she lived and worked as a television producer/director in Sri Lanka and as a documentary film maker in Colombia. She has held many jobs, including grape picker in France, shop assistant and special correspondent; she now works in the Sen department of an Academy in South East London. More at www.isabel-bermudez.com.

Farah Naz is a British Bangladeshi poet, writer, story teller and translator. As well as teaching at a Lewisham primary school, she is a performing member of the acclaimed storytelling group ‘EAST’ and is Director of the British Bilingual Poetry Collective (BBPC). Maya Mirror of Soul, her collection of English poems was published in 2004 and her Bengali poem book Hemonter Chirkut in 2022. Farah’s poetic themes encompass nature, human emotions and metamorphosis of love and life. Farah received the ‘Youth Leadership Award’ from Unicef, Bangladesh in 1999 for her writing, and won the ‘Story of 1971’ short story competition by Tower Hamlets Council in 2021. Her poems and stories have been widely published in various books and magazines such as Swirl of Words, British Bangladeshi Poetry Anthology, London Folk Tales for Children and many more. Along with writing poetry, Farah enjoys cooking and nature photography. 

Kostya Tsolákis was born and raised in Athens, Greece, and now lives in London. He is founding editor of harana poetry, the online magazine for poets writing in English as a second or parallel language. In 2019 he won the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition (ESL category). His poems have been widely published in magazines, including fourteen poems, Magma, Poetry London, The Poetry Review and Under the Radar, and anthologies, such as 100 Queer Poems (Vintage, 2022). His debut poetry pamphlet, Ephebos, was published by ignitionpress in November 2020. Greekling, his much-anticipated poetry collection celebrates and commemorates damaged and rejected Greek bodies, be they of flesh and blood or made of marble. The collection intertwines Greek culture, history and poetic influences with the contemporary queer experience in a perceptive, lyrical, and deeply evocative way.

And save these dates….

TUESDAY FEBRUARY 4 at West Greenwich Library- readings by Jacqueline Saphra and Sue Rose.

TUESDAY MARCH 25 at West Greenwich Library – ‘Mica Press launch: new poetry from Rosie Johnston and Michael Vince.’ With Nayma Chanchoun, Michael Foley and Lesley Bell.

TUESDAY MAY 13 at West Greenwich Library – ‘Maggie and Maggie’. Same name, different voices: poetry from Maggie Butt and Maggie Harris.

TUESDAY JUNE 24 at West Greenwich Library – Poetry with Robin Houghton and friends.