ABOUT

Shivaun at Ponar
Shivaun Woolfson is a writer and lecturer, with a special interest in life history writing, research and practice. In 2002, she published an autobiography, Home Fires (Atlantic Books). She has taught extensively in the US and the UK, most recently at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where she served as Senior Tutor in Community Studies and visiting lecturer in life writing. She has facilitated workshops, seminars, public readings, performances and writing residences in hospices, prisons and community centers. She has also developed numerous interdisciplinary arts projects based primarily on the life experiences of participants. Shivaun recently completed her PhD in History at the University of Sussex.

Between 2008 and 2009, Shivaun fielded a team and made numerous trips to Lithuania to conduct fieldwork research for the project Surviving History - Portraits from Vilna. In that same year, Shivaun co-founded the non-profit Living Imprint to coordinate the outputs derived from the research. The project ultimately culminated in a short documentary and a travelling exhibition which opened at the Tolerance Centre in Vilnius in September 2009. Between 2009 and 2011, the exhibition toured - among other locations - the Holocaust museums in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban, University College Dublin, Shropshire Council's Shire Hall, Central Synagogue in London, London Jewish Cultural Centre, and  Biddenham Upper School, Bedfordshire. During that time, Shivaun also conducted several teachers' seminars and public talks relating to Holocaust legacy in Lithuania.  If you would like to contact Shivaun, please email her. Thank you.

A Personal Note

This website and the book Holocaust Legacy in Post-Soviet Lithuania grew out of a project on Lithuanian Jewry I undertook between 2008 and 2011. The project was driven by personal motivations.  In January 2007, my father died unexpectedly; eighteen months later my mother passed away. In response, I embarked on a series of research trips to Lithuania to explore my own ancestral links to the region, a trip my father had promised himself many times but had not made. This led to my exploring 'what might have been' for my forebears had they not managed to escape the pogroms to Ireland in the early 1900s and, ultimately, to grasp the lived reality of Holocaust survivors in a country where only the faintest traces of a once thriving Jewish heritage now remain. Over the course of a two-year period, between 2008 and 2009, I met with and interviewed ten individuals. I asked them to share their stories and memories with me, to show or give me biographical objects of particular significance and to take me to 'their' special places. In the process a kaleidoscope of experience has emerged –- each statement or memory, each personal item, each special place , a small bead, which, when co-joined, creates a world in which the remnants of Jewish Vilna come, however faintly, into view. The resulting outcomes of these endeavours are dedicated to the memory of my father and mother.
Photos credit: Frances Tay

Surviving History - Portraits from Vilna

Project and Exhibition 2008 - 2011

Surviving History: Portraits From Vilna presents the life stories of 10 individuals who survived the Holocaust in Lithuania where ninety-five percent of the 240,000-strong pre-war Jewish population was annihilated. The routes of escape were narrow; those who survived did so because they joined the partisans or the army, or escaped to Russia. Or because kind strangers hid them in basements and attics and on farms, because they slipped unnoticed through a hole in the ghetto gate, or somehow lasted in the camps until liberation. All of those interviewed lost family members to the Holocaust. 

This exhibition explored the points of intersection where the personal and the collective collide.  Drawing on an interdisciplinary range of media: photography, video, text, archival documentation, visual biography and biographical objects, it seeks to express how history is lived from the inside. Glimpses of the personal – a tiny bottle of perfume tucked into a pocket before fleeing the ghetto, a silent promise made beside a mass grave, shoes made from parachute material – typically absent from the historical record, are afforded prominence here. 

We travelled to Lithuania to discover what remained of its once thriving Jewish presence. We found a city alive and teeming with memory, where every single thing – a powder case, a silver spoon, a photograph, a chess piece, a flower, a stone—speaks.  As in the work of Yiddish poet, Peretz Miransky, ‘everything has its melody’ and its meaning. It is with the intention of honouring the melody, the essence of these individuals and their inimitable life experiences that we staged this exhibition. For more information on this project and exhibition, visit the archived blog  http://survivinghistorylithuania.blogspot.co.uk/

CREDITS
Project Leader: Shivaun Woolfson
Project Coordinator/Project Blog Author/Materials Archivist: Frances Tay
Translator and Research Aide: Ruta Puisyte
Film/Camera: Jesse Quinones, Daniel Quinones
Photography: Daniel Quinones, Frances Tay
Artists: Dwora Fried, Katie Dell Kaufman, Lynsey Cleaver, Mike Moran, Birgit Muller
CLICK ON IMAGE ABOVE TO EXPLORE COMPONENTS OF THE EXHIBITION