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THE IMPORTANCE OF A LINK BETWEEN TWO GENERATIONS
Concerning the two generations, the oldest and the youngest one...
The project is also an informal meeting of the oldest and the youngest generation. A teacher only helps the students to prepare and keeps in mind that in life, nothing always goes smoothly and that there might be some doors that will remain closed. It is the young people who search for and eventually find someone who survived the Shoah, lost someone or was an least an eye witness.
This small group of two or three participants often becomes friends with a survivor or eyewitness who is willing to talk about his or her experience. If all goes well, this person may offer not only words but also photographs, documents, names or stories. This detective work often takes months.
We often have the feeling that nobody ever came to these people with such an interest, especially not someone so young. We feel that such work is worth the invested time and effort. Such meetings have deeper meanings than a lecture in class.
They do not only bring interesting activities, knowledge, experience and changes of attitude to young people. They also bring something which we secretly wished for even before starting the project but never thought it would come true - they reduce and soften the suffering, remorse and pain of the oldest generation. Arnošt Lustig, a contemporary Czech writer and survivor of Auschwitz had said that Neighbour Who Disappeared give this suffering a sense.
The researchers will present the story to their class, their school and the public. If they manage to turn their work into an exhibition, it will become a permanent reminder of the disappeared neighbours in their area. And if they turn it into a panel according to our parameters, it will become part of an itinerant exhibition that can be seen in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the USA, Italy and elsewhere.
Let us hope that such tireless researchers can be found abroad as well.
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