Have managed to skip February in this blog but that's probably down to the fact that my OU course began and I've been totally immersed in early 20th century history.
Today I found a way to combine a free activity with my studies by attending a free lunchtime talk at the Wiener Library.
Free talk: 'Testimonies/Témoignages' - Documenting the Stories of Refugee Children Rescued into Switzerland During World War II
Samantha Lakin has been researching the histories of refugee Jewish children who escaped into Switzerland. In her talk, Samantha gave us a brief glimpse into the lives of two of the survivors who managed to join the all too small group of children who were permitted to cross into Switzerland, aided by French adults who risked their lives to help them pass.
Lone children under 16 and families with children under 5 were, in theory, given refuge in Switzerland, but in practice these lone children had to rely on luck and sympathetic border guards to grant them safe passage to the orphanages and welcome camps that were set up by organisations like the Salvation Army, the Red Cross and Jewish groups to look after the children. Young children were expected to walk for several days, often badly shod and ill clothed through the mountains before crossing barbed wire and a no man's land patrolled by armed guard to get to safety. Older children were sometimes given babies to carry. Even if they made it, there was no guarantee they would be permitted to stay.
We were also reminded that these kids were the lucky ones. So many children and their families were rounded up from 1942 and deported to the death camps. The survivors themselves made clear in their testimonies that they were not badly treated and were grateful for their escape.
Painful to contemplate that these atrocities were committed in living memory. Even more painful to be reminded by a short poetry reading from an Iraqi refugee academic that war continues to make children refugees and victims.
Earlier in the week I paid a visit to the new Furtherfield exhibition in Finsbury Park.
Free exhibition: Being Social
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, blogs, Flickr...so many ways to share all our waking moments, the highs and lows, the funny and the tragic. Chances are, you are all using some form of social media, even if only membership of Harringay Online.
Does this new technology change us? More and more, people, especially the young, are sharing intimate details and feelings online, where they can be accessed easily by strangers. Being Social, the new exhibition at Furtherfield’s gallery in Finsbury Park explores our relationship with social technology and asks questions about our willingness to share so much of ourselves.
All the exhibits are fascinating; these are the ones that particularly provoked a reaction from me:
‘Kay’s Blog’ by Liz Sterry is a reproduction of Kay’s bedroom based entirely on reading Kay’s blog. Liz lives in England, Kay is a teenager living in Canada. Thinking about photos and thoughts shared via social media, it makes you wonder how easy it might be for someone to do the same with your own domestic world.
A tweet wall is a stream of consciousness. Tweets collected around Finsbury Park on a certain day expressing many emotions (and quite a lot of thoughts about football) have been captured by Jon and Ali. Reading them altogether is like suddenly being granted telepathy and able to hear everyone’s thoughts at the same time. Twitter is sometimes referred to disparagingly as the ‘hive mind’, but this exhibit suggests the opposite, a raging sea of disjointed thoughts and feelings.
We’ve all heard of people who create multiple identities online, maybe some of you reading this have more that one online ID. Karen has turned that idea on its head by allowing multiple personalities to create her. Invited people are permitted to interact with others on the internet as Karen. Karen doesn’t hide behind by anonymous ids, she is hidden because you can no longer be sure that the person you are interacting with is Karen.
Finally, what if you want out? What if you decide that you want to disappear from social media altogether. It’s not as easy as you’d imagine, but the people at modd_r have built a machine to commit web2.0 suicide to definitively delete all social media profiles. If you go will you miss it? Will you be missed?
I was intrigued and challenged by this exhibition. As an enthusiastic user of social media and a great believer in its use for collective action and inclusion, it provoked me to thinking about how we help a generation who has barely known a world without social media to understand its power and pitfalls and build a relationship with the new technologies that allows them to use it safely and effect the change they want with it, without being ruled by it...and even giving them a way out of it if they have had enough.
Being Social is open until 28th April Thurs-Sat 12-3 in the Furtherfield Gallery, Mckenzie Pavilion, Finsbury Park.
Free workshops every Saturday 10-1 (booking advisable, info@furtherfield.org)
Furtherfield
Free book: The Invasion of 1910 by William Le Queux
A piece of alarmist popular fiction from 1906 that imagines the German invasion of England, notable as having started its life as a serial in the Daily Mail (the Mail promoting fear of foreign invasion, how unusual!) who went as far as dressing up their newspaper sellers as Prussian soldiers and posting fake headlines about Germans marching on the Home Counties.
An extract from it was printed in my primary sources book for my course, but I had to admit to being tickled by it as it imagines that the surprise invasion would be via Suffolk (Lowestoft) my county of birth. The list of towns and villages taken by the invading forces read like a list of my days out as a kid, so although it isn't exactly high art, I couldn't help turning the pages.
Although it turned out to be fantasy, the book also gives a little shiver of recognition that it could have been my great-grandparents fleeing for their lives from their little rural backwater in East Anglia away from an invading force, a situation that unlike most of Europe, we in England are fortunate enough to have avoided for hundreds of years. We should always be grateful for that.Available from Project Guthenburg or as an audiobook from LibriVox (American reader)
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