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THE ALLEYNIAN 710
SAM COWELL (YEAR 7) DESCRIBES WHAT IT WAS LIKE TO TAKE PART IN THE ECHO ETERNAL HORIZONS FESTIVAL
It was silent in the audience as Maurice Blik recounted his experiences of the Holocaust. Thousands of faces were watching as he swallowed, before finishing with these words: ‘My father said goodbye, look after your family . . . and then he was gone.’ The stage went black. The auditorium was completely quiet, those words still ringing in our ears. The 2022 Echo Eternal Festival was the first live production of the annual event for two years, and I was lucky enough to go and perform with students from Dulwich, as well as those from throughout the country, to remember the sacrifices made by those who lived through the Holocaust, and to honour the testimonies they had provided to Echo Eternal seven years previously. The words spoken by Maurice Blik and many other people whose childhoods were torn apart were hard to hear, but they had to be heard. There is no straightforward way of educating young people about a genocide that rocked the whole of Europe, but the stories must be told, through the generations, from grandparent to child, because if they are left untold, they will be forgotten. This performance was about telling that story, and helping a new generation understand. It was about expressing the moral outrage of a people towards a leadership that was prepared to eradicate a people – a faith – without a second glance. This was about remembrance. The experience of working with other young people was amazing, and being able to express our ideas to contribute to the creative process, as well as being able to create a performance that reflected our beliefs about society, made the performance even more special. When the performance had finished, there was a tangible sense of melancholy in the air, because this was something we had all worked hard for since the Michaelmas term, and to have it end created a feeling of happy sadness.
Taking part in the project was an amazing experience and it really developed my understanding and ideas about that period in history, and how, even though it is indeed part of history, it must be remembered for the lessons it teaches us, rather than simply being an interesting topic for historians to debate. Those people who were kind enough to give their testimonies must also be remembered as storytellers as well as people whose childhoods were ripped apart. The coming together of students from all over England must be remembered as a coming together of people who were telling that story through drama and music. The emotional impact of the show was clear. People left slowly, quietly and solemnly, touched deep down by the collaboration of young people who had been prepared to give up time and effort to retell the story they had been handed by the previous generation, keeping it safe from wandering out of our memory. As we left the building, the powerful words still echoing through the room, I remembered the sentence which I had previously thought of as a cliché, but which for me had taken on a new meaning.
We will never forget.
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