Refuge - Confidence - Future. Essenrode. 12 war children tell their stories
Refuge - Confidence - Future. Essenrode. 12 war children tell their stories
Film and Talk
The year 1945 affected the village of Essenrode in Lower Saxony - like countless other places - in a special way. Essenrode almost doubled its population by taking in refugees and expellees from Pomerania, West and East Prussia, Silesia, the Sudetenland and Wartheland, the Baltic States, Bessarabia and Galicia. In the years that followed, refugees from the Soviet occupation zone and later from the GDR also arrived. The homeless people found refuge in Essenrode. Many of the war children and their families still live in the village near Braunschweig.
75 years later, Sabine C. Langer and Roland Remus initiated a project on the question of how locals and arrivals took their own future and that of the village into their own hands. Filmmaker Thomas Knüppel composed the touching documentary "Refuge - Confidence - Future" from twelve interviews with people in Essenrode. It shows individual perspectives on displacement and expulsion, such as the memory of the communal flight of the "Elisenhof-Treck" with twelve families and two French prisoners of war from Pomerania to Essenrode before the approaching Red Army. The documentary (78 minutes) also highlights transgenerational aspects and the importance of remembering from the perspective of the generation of the war's grandchildren.
Free admission Programme
Welcome Dr. Gundula Bavendamm, Director Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion, Reconciliation, Berlin
Film screening
Podium Prof. Dr.-Ing. Sabine C. Langer, Initiator of the Essenrode Project, Braunschweig Roland Remus, Initiator of the Essenrode Project, Brunswick Thomas Knüppel, filmmaker, Brunswick
Moderation Dr. Nils Köhler, Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion, Reconciliation, Berlin
Afterwards we invite you to a reception.
An event in cooperation with the German-Polish Society Berlin e.V.
The event will be livestreamed on our YouTube channel Flucht, Vertreibung, Versöhnung!