Sound in the Silence is an interdisciplinary remembrance project aimed at encouraging high school students from all over Europe to reflect actively on the complexities of the 20th century history with the use of artistic means.

The locations of this year’s edition of the programme are the House of the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, Germany, and Jasenovac Memorial Site, established near Jasenovac in Croatia.

For eight days, an international group of up to 28 students will work together with professional artists to create a performance based on their reflections and emotional responses to the programme, bringing together acting, dance, sound and creative writing.

While the programme participants learn about the site's past and work on the final performance, their teachers will take part in workshops on interdisciplinary ways of teaching history and exchange experiences with colleagues from other countries.
 

On 20 January 1942, in a villa at Am Großen Wannsee no. 56-58 in a picturesque and wealthy suburb of Berlin, 15 leading representatives of the German Nazi state administration met to discuss the implementation of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” During the 90-minute meeting, they divided responsibilities and provided the coordination necessary to extend the genocide to whole Europe. This resulted in the death of about 6 million European Jews.

In 1945, Joseph Wulf, a historian and Auschwitz survivor, embarked on what became his life’s mission. Until his death in 1974, he published 18 books on the history of the Third Reich and the crimes committed by the Nazi regime, while stressing the fact that the perpetrators had not yet been tried and convicted. Wulf strove to make the role of the perpetrators of the Holocaust appear in the collective memory of the Germans.

Only in 1992 the House of the Wannsee Conference became a memorial and educational site – 18 years after Wulf’s death.

The Jasenovac Concentration Camp, built between August 1941 and February 1942 at the confluence of the Rivers Sava and Una in Croatia, was the biggest camp established on the territory of former Yugoslavia during the Second World War. It consisted of five subcamps, including Stara Gradiška, and was operated exclusively by the members of the fascist organisation Ustasha who ruled the newly created Independent State of Croatia (NDH), an ally of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. In the three and a half years of  its operation, the complex claimed around 100,000 victims: Serbs, Roma and Jews, as well as members of other ethnic groups, and political opponents. Over a half of them were women and children. Many of them are nameless, but also forgotten by history. In April 1945, with partisan troupes approaching, the camp was set on fire and all the documents were destroyed in order to remove evidence of the crimes.

The mission of the Jasenovac Memorial Site is to restore the memory of victims of the Holocaust and of the genocide committed by Ustasha regime in the Jasenovac camp, but also to bring back from collective oblivion the memory of heroines such as Diana Budisavljević, who defied the force of fanaticism and hatred by saving around 10,000 children.