Thursday, 13 January 2022

Kitty Hart-Moxon ....... a story from the last century

Now here is a wonderful quirky piece of radio where Public Historian Greg Jenner explores the vast BBC sound archive.

Arrival of Jewish refugees to London, February 1939
The series is called Past Forward: A Century of Sound, and each progranmme lasts just 14 minutes, starts with an archive interview, places it in a historical context and looks for parallels today.

And they range across our history over the last two centuries

The one I was drawn to this week was when  Greg Jenner "listens to an archive interview with the veteran Holocaust survivor Kitty Hart-Moxon and then speaks to Kitty, now aged 95. 

They reflect on human brutality, human survival and the importance of preserving Holocaust memories. Greg also speaks to the historian Zoe Waxman about the challenges of remembering and representing the Holocaust as the event itself fades into history.

Marking the centenary of the BBC, Past Forward uses a random date generator to alight somewhere in the BBC's vast archive over the past 100 years. 

Public historian Greg Jenner hears an archive clip for the first time at the top of the programme, and uses it as a starting point in a journey towards the present day. 

The archive captures a century of British life in a unique way - a history of ordinary people’s lives, as well as news of the great events. Greg uncovers connections through people, places and ideas that link the archive fragment to Britain in 2022, pulling in help from experts and those who remember the time – and sometimes the speakers themselves, decades later - along the way. 

What he discovers are stories, big and small, that reveal how the people we were have shaped the people we have become.

Producer: Eliane Glaser"

Pictures; Arrival of Jewish refugees to London, February 1939, German Federal Archives, from Jewish refugees from German-occupied Europe in the United Kingdom, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_refugees_from_German-occupied_Europe_in_the_United_Kingdom

*PastForward : A Century of Sound, BBC Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00139ck

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