Fanya and the Forest
The Europeans | European news, politics and culture
Katy Lee and Dominic Kraemer
0.0 • 0 Ratings
🗓️ 22 January 2020
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, Katy heads to the forest in Lithuania. Ahead of International Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27, we're talking about memory politics with a formidable 97-year-old.
This is the last podcast in our mini-series Postcards from Europe, featuring intimate portraits of lives and places across the continent. It was made possible by the European Cultural Foundation, who support initiatives that rethink Europe as an open and democratic space.
This podcast was written, produced and edited by Katy Lee, with help from Sonia Zhuravlyova, Dominic Kraemer and Katz Laszlo. Voiceover by Haya Vardy. Music provided by Moni Ovadia, Yad Vashem and Blue Dot Sessions. Artwork by La Kingsbeer.
Thanks for listening.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, Dominic. Hi, Katie. I've got a story for you this week. Oh, have you? What is it? It might not be the cheeriest of stories, but it is really important. And it does have a grain or two of cheeriness in it, actually. Not everything on the podcast has to be cheery, so... To make it feel like it does. |
| 0:33.1 | All right. That's what the happy ending's there for. You don't have one this week, do we? |
| 0:38.1 | We don't, but I do have a defiant story for you. It's a story about fighting back and |
| 0:44.1 | fighting against things being forgotten. Go on then, what are we talking about? Well, a couple |
| 0:49.8 | of times over the past year or so, we have talked on the podcast about the rise in anti-Semitism across |
| 0:55.2 | Europe. Yeah, I mean, there's an endless list of examples that we've mentioned and that we haven't |
| 1:01.1 | mentioned. The Jewish cemetery in the village of Quadsenheim in eastern France, they faced with |
| 1:05.6 | swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti. The signboards of a Jewish restaurant smashed, a pig head marked with |
| 1:12.3 | a star of David, dumped by a door. |
| 1:14.6 | It was screaming that Jews have to be gassed. |
| 1:18.1 | It just feels like we're in danger of forgetting where this kind of hatred can ultimately lead. |
| 1:23.6 | And these horrible things are coming at a time when fewer and fewer people who actually live |
| 1:27.9 | through the Holocaust are still around to talk about it and we're running out of chances to hear |
| 1:32.4 | from them. And I guess that's why International Holocaust Memorial Day is still so important. |
| 1:37.5 | And it is coming up this Monday, 27th of January, and this year more than ever, while we still |
| 1:43.6 | can, I wanted to take you to meet someone |
| 1:46.0 | who survived it. In particular, I wanted to take you to a corner of Europe that has sometimes |
| 1:50.9 | struggled with how to remember the Holocaust. That place is Lithuania and I'm taking you to the capital |
| 1:57.1 | Vilnius to meet a former resistance fighter named Fania Bransowski. |
| 2:02.0 | Fanya, is 97 and she's tiny, like not nearly tall enough to reach my shoulder. |
| 2:09.6 | And for those of you who've never seen Katie IRL, she's not exactly tall. Is that fair to say? |
| 2:15.3 | I'm actually very tall for a person of Vietnamese descent, but that's |
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