On December 15 and 16, the Shoah Memorial in Milan hosted a two-day workshop as part of the “Persecution Through Their Eyes”, a project funded by the European Union. The gathering was intended to share and discuss different educational approaches to persecution during WWII, as well as brainstorm ideas for the upcoming exhibition and youth events.
The Milan workshop is one of the several activities that structured “Persecution Through Their Eyes”, an EU-funded LRE Youth Programme which involves a number of international partners: Camp Vught National Memorial (Netherlands), Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation (Germany), the National Peace Park of Sant’Anna di Stazzema (Italy), and “Grodzka Gate ‐ NN Theatre” Centre in Lublin (Poland).
After the welcoming remarks by Rémi Praud, Managing Director of LRE Foundation, and Mirco Carrettieri, Moderator and President of LRE Italy’s Scientific Committee the workshop’s first section featured experts’ speeches and presentations concerning various educational approaches and methods to the topic of persecution during WWII. The inclusion of speakers from different backgrounds gave this panel considerable value: Taja Vovk van Gaal (LRE Foundation’s Supervisory Board member and founding director of the House of European History), Talia Bidussa (Program Manager at the Shoah Memorial of Milan), Marta Baiardi (researcher at the Istituto Storico della Resistenza in Tuscany), Greta Bianchi (project assistant Children and Education at Fondazione Feltrinelli), Emanuele Edallo (researcher at the University of Milan), Elena Monicelli (coordinator at Scuola di Pace di Monte Sole), Chiara Nencioni (Università di Pisa – Istituto storico della Resistenza di Lucca ), Paolo Pezzino (President of Istituto Nazionale Ferruccio Parri), and Francesca Poli (Deina’s vice-president) focused on their institutions’ approaches, and their personal research in front of an audience made up of historians, museologists, university and high school professors.
Subsequently, the second part of the seminar brought together the “Persecution Through Theis Eyes” project’s partners to discuss the structure and the details of the upcoming exhibition, which will be one of the project’s core initiatives, taking place both virtually and physically in each of the four partner institutions and telling a wide range of personal stories related to persecution during WWII.
Eventually, the two-day workshop came to an intense and meaningful end with a guided tour provided by the Shoah Memorial in Milan to all workshop participants.
