History Speaks Lecture Series

Stumbling on History: How Nations Atone for Past Wrongs

Non-Members: $10/adult, $9/youth (4-12) and students

Naper Settlement Members: $8/adult, $7/ youth (4-12)

Held in the Century Memorial Chapel

How do countries recognize, accept responsibility, and atone for historical crimes? From Australia to the United States, nations have wrestled with this serious ethical dilemma.

Interestingly, Germany provides leadership through a public arts project. Edith Westerfeld, an 89-year-old Holocaust refugee who has lived in Chicago since arriving in the United States in 1938, wondered if the memory of the Nazis murdering her parents, along with millions if other victims, will outlive the survivors. Seventy-six years after Edith’s parents saved their daughter’s life by sending her, alone and terrified, to America, she returned to the small German town where her family had lived for hundreds of years. Invited to witness the installation of an artistic memorial to her family entitled Stolpersteine (“Stumbling Stones”) – part of an effort throughout Europe to confront the genocide of World War II – she experienced how art is helping today’s generation face and atone for crimes of the past. Presented by author Fern Schumer Chapman. 

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