LEST WE FORGET is a project by the German-Italien photographer and filmmaker Luigi Toscano under the patronage of the German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas. In 2014, he started traveling in order to meet Holocaust survivors who are now living in the US, Germany, the Netherlands, Belarus, Ukraine, Israel and Russia. He gave them the opportunity to share their personal story – probably for the last time. The result: more than 400 portrait photos – the heart of the project. They are at the center of a photographic installation as well as the photo book, an app and the documentary movie. The number is still growing, but as the years are passing by, it won’t be long before there are no contemporary witnesses alive anymore.
When the meetings with the first protagonists started, we quickly realized that LEST WE FORGET was going to be more than just a short-term project. The people shared a lot with us – their very personal life stories. And they encouraged us to go on. Like Anna Strishkowa, who abused for human experiments by the Nazi “doctor” Mengele, when she was just a child and who we portrayed in Kiev in 2015: „If not us, who?“ Each and every story is unique. But at the same time, each and every story was also told for the countless others that could not be heard anymore. LEST WE FORGET is more than just a look back at our past, as remembrance has a great influence on how we feel and act. The protagonist Susan Cernyak-Spatz shared a quote with us that gets to the heart of it: „If we forget the past, we are condemned to repeat it.“
LEST WE FORGET is designed as an exhibition in the public space. Our goal is an open and barrier-free presentation of the pictures with access to all people. This democratic demand will remain crucial for us. However, with regard to the concrete form of the exhibition, we place great emphasis on openness and flexibility. This opens a broad range of opportunities: Even if places, conditions and forms change, the nature of the installation can be maintained.
More than one million visitors worldwide have seen the photo installation LEST WE FORGET. In 2015 it was shown for the first time in Luigi Toscano’s hometown Mannheim. One year later it accompanied the state ceremony for the commemoration of the massacres in Babyn Yar in Kyiv, in which the then-president of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko, the then-patron of this project the German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and the mayor of Kyiv Vitali Klitshko participated. Three stations in Ukraine followed as well as two in Berlin. In 2018 LEST WE FORGET had its first exhibition in the US. The installation was invited for the International Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Headquarters of the United Nations. Later that year, it was shown at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., where about 150 000 people saw the 120 exhibited portraits, the biggest of its kind. In autumn that year it traveled to Boston and in 2019 to San Francisco. Parallel to San Francisco, it was shown in Mainz and Vienna, firstly in three cities at the same time. The next stations in the US were Kansas City and Pittsburgh. There the exhibit took place at the Campus of the University of Pittsburgh – one year after the most horrific Anti-Semitic attackin US-history on the Tree of Life synagogue.
In April 2019, when the portraits were exhibited at the Burgring in Vienna under the patronage of the Austrian president Alexander Van der Bellen, something happened what we have feared for a long time: Several pictures were defaced with knives and vandalized with National Socialist symbols and slogans. The blatant hatred and the force have deeply shocked us. But from then on, we could learn that other forces are stronger. The theater group Nesterval, the Muslim Youth of Austria, Young Caritas as well as other organizations and individual volunteers grouped up on their own and started to protect the exhibition from further attacks until its end, and this around the clock. The sympathy, solidarity and humanity we could experience has shown us: We are not alone and it is worth fighting on. In January 2020 the project accompanied the International Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Office of the United Nations in Geneva. Further exhibitions are already being planned.
Would you support us taking LEST WE FORGET to your city? Then we are looking forward to hearing from you!