Action Reconciliation Service for Peace Seminar
by Larissa Henskt, Museum Intern
Nearly three months of my voluntary service have now passed, so it was time for a first review and reflection of all experiences and impressions I have gained.
For that reason I went to a really tiny Welsh village called Bwlch over the last weekend to attend to my first Action Reconciliation Service for Peace Seminar in the UK. Our group consisted of 14 German and Polish volunteers and three programme coordinators, staying in a cosy self-catering house.
Nearly every volunteer works in a different non-profit organisation, such as the Aegis Trust, the Wiener Library, the Association of Jewish Refugees or the Southwark Day Centre of Asylum Seekers. As everyone’s field of work is really different, every volunteer presented his or her project in general and their own specific tasks.
To show what I’m doing in the museum I led a small Hebrew scribing and object handling session from our popular school workshop Totally Torah instead of an ordinary PowerPoint presentation. It was really fun, and it seemed like the other volunteers enjoyed the scribing part as much as our visiting primary school children do.
Another part of the seminar was our so called “Biography Project”, which we started at the weekend and which we will work on over the coming months.
This project deals with our family history during World War II. Nowadays, World War II and the Holocaust is a topic taught in many subjects in all German schools. History lessons are mainly focused on general incidents e.g. in politics; revealing the National Socialist ideology, its effect on the people and the behaviour of society as a whole.
As we know this history from school, our project deals with our personal family history. Every German volunteer has ancestors who lived during this time in Germany and even when most of us did not meet these ancestors in person or only when we were really little.
It is important to remember. Remember that all this did not happen far away, but where we grew up, and that it wasn’t done by total strangers. All our families were somehow involved in it.
For me it is really interesting to get to know my family history better because I only met one great grandma when I was a young child. She was always just a very old nice lady to me, so I’m quite excited to see what I will find out.
I’m also really interested in getting to know some of the family stories of other volunteers, especially those of the Polish volunteers, as their stories will be seen from a different perspective than my own family story.
