Persecution
“The best news this week has been the capture of Ratko Mladic,” Henry Wuga said as I spoke with him and his wife Ingrid at the opening of the Kelvingrove’s “Refugee Stories” Exhibition.
“Did you know that he massacred thousands of human beings just because they were Muslim?” he continued. This news story is so important to Mr Wuga because it is a reminder to him of what his fate might have been like had he not escaped the Holocaust many years before.
His narrative is all the more pertinent set against the exhibit of various artefacts selected to illustrate each Refugee’s personal story. I can see over his shoulder his old German passport, brandished with a red “J” ; his name torn apart by the artificial insertion of the middle name “Israel”, which was designed to communicate to the German authorities that he was Jewish.
Dignity
“Our parents had to start at the bottom of the pile. Can you imagine being a middle-class, professional person and having to start out all over again as a domestic? I’m so proud that they did that for our safety. They couldn’t afford to be proud…”, Henery’s wife Ingrid explains.
Dignity and identity is stripped when someone leaves everything defining them behind. I can’t help but feel that it is only in moments such as these, when we give these testimonies their true credence, that dignity is finally restored.
Truth
In the safety and grandeur of Glasgow’s finest Museum and Art Gallery the stories of Henry Wuga, Carlos Arredondo and Patience Tsungu are illustrated. No academic book, frontline journalism article nor dispatches documentary can ever replace or replicate the meeting of exchanges of the heart. The familiarity is what makes a testimony compelling, not the embellishment.
The Exhibition will run from 28 May until 1 July.
