THE THREAD OF MEMORY AND THE FLOWER OF HOPE
Natal’ja Davtjan, Psychotherapist, Director of the centre for personal development and psychological support “Vita Nova”, Kharkiv, Ukraine; Irina Scerbakova, Memorial Founding Member; Ol’ga Sedakova, Russian poet and translator; Elena Zhemkova, Memorial Executive Director. Introduced by Giovanna Parravicini, Christian Russia Foundation.
Reconstructing memory means giving back a face, a history, a dignity to men and women who seemed to have been swallowed up forever by the spiral of violence of the past, but above all, retracing their lives, it means realising with amazement that the human flourishes again even in the most inhuman situations. We can also cling to this tenacious thread today, in situations where we need to learn again, stammering, words like freedom, responsibility, sacrifice, and then love, forgiveness, mercy. To learn to share pain without letting our hearts be clouded by feelings of resentment and revenge, to leave room for the possibility of a daily miracle.
