Joseph Pearson meets our Global Politics classes during Holocaust Memorial week
Dr. Joseph Pearson (UWCAD 92-94), is a Canadian alum and historian currently based in Berlin, where he lectures at the Barenboim-Said Academy – a German university and peace project. This alone would make him an interesting guest speaker for UWC Adriatic students. On top of that, he is also a writer with a new book of literary nonfiction coming out in April, in which Joseph succeeds in finding truth and life lessons in inanimate things, presenting artifacts as touchstones of history: My Grandfather’s Knife: Hidden Stories from the Second World War.
One would think that this choice of subject matter is no coincidence for an alum of a pre university educational institution like UWC Adriatic – where students from countless cultures and backgrounds discover their common humanity precisely by living together for two years in a residential environment. And yet, surprisingly, an element of randomness is involved after all, as Joseph explained in meeting first-year students taking Global Politics during Holocaust Memorial Week in Duino. “I ended up inheriting a knife dating back to WWII from my grandfather – formerly a Canadian soldier stationed in The Netherlands”, Joseph explains,
Joseph and our students from many different countries had an interesting exchange of views about the Holocaust and the way in which other minorities alongside Jews were targeted at that time, and the perils of present-day situations in which an “us-vs-them” attitude in the face of diversity needs to be defused through knowledge and empathy. In this respect, Joseph’s astonishing detective work that has uncovered such poignant and original stories is perhaps showing us one way to go.
