Petra (26 years old)
The work with the contemporary witnesses impressed me the most.
In view of the fact that the people who experienced the war first hand will all be dead soon, I think it is tremendously important to record their memories for future generations. Of course history must also impart facts, less in the form of numbers or data and more in the sense of an over-arching understanding of the influence of the past on the present. Nevertheless, I find the remembrance work with contemporary witnesses very important because they can impart a real impression of historical events. They give the horrible events, which can hardly be imagined from an abstract description in a history book, a human face.
I will never forget the story that Luis, one of the contemporary witnesses who experienced the bombing of Guernica when he was 14, told us. I especially remember one part of his story: While he was on his way back to Guernika after a few weeks, he told a man in the train that the city had been bombed. The man told him to be quiet and never say those words in public again. And for the next 40 years or so, he could not publicly speak about what he had experienced.
I must admit that I only had a vague idea about the Spanish Civil War and the bombing of the city of Guernika by the German Condor Legion before our trip there. To be in Guernika together with people from various European countries and speak about remembrance using the Spanish Civil War and the city of Guernika as an example showed me that there is or could be a type of European remembrance. The feeling was especially intense during Marina Grasse’s workshop, “Transmission of Remembrance.”
Although we were a mixed-age group, the Second World War was a dramatic experience for all of our grandparents. And while I an writing about this, what is so special for me has finally become clear: Our grandparents were enemies and we spoke together about how we can impart remembrance of those historical events to future generations. How we can remember so that we don’t forget, and most importantly, so that nothing like this ever happens again.
I don’t know who it was any more, but one of the residents of Guernika told the workshop participants that her heart was always open to us and that we were welcome to visit at any time because we were doing important work for intergenerational remembrance. That impressed me a lot. The majority of the participants were from Germany, the country that had bombed the city.
Maybe this point seems banal to some, after all, we are living in the 21st century and the “question of guilt” has (apparently) been resolved. But if the goal of all political education is that Auschwitz should never happen again – to speak like a middle-class intellectual with Adorno – then I find that our workshop was a small step in this direction.