We are honoured to host another special event with survivors of Nazi terror. Their contributions to two ongoing oral history projects in cooperation with the Österreichische Mediathek and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research will be presented.
The event will feature a short introduction to the interview projects followed by a talk with one of the survivors, John Hans Gilbert.
This is an extraordinary opportunity to hear directly from a survivor about his experience and on topics like identity, personal experiences of displacement and refugees today.
Following the talk, we will open up the conversation to our audience for further questions.
For the project ‘Menschenleben’, life-history audio and video interviews are conducted, collected and stored on the platform of the Österreichische Mediathek – Austria’s archive for sound recordings and videos on cultural and contemporary history.
On the online platform www.weitererzaehlen.at, video and audio material with survivors are archived for educational and research purposes. The platform aims to collect all video interviews with relation to Austria. It exists under the umbrella of erinnern.at (Austria’s Centre for Holocaust education) which is part of the OeAD (Agency for Education and Internationalisation) and was originally created by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research.
John Hans Gilbert was born Hans Goldstein in Vienna in 1929. In early 1939, he and his mother fled to England, his father was able to follow them soon afterwards. John lived with different foster parents, survived the Second World War, and studied Economics at Hull University. He got married and had three children. Together with his father, he ran a successful family business, selling catering equipment. In 1992, he was chairman of the trade association CESA and presented the young people apprenticeship award to give something back to the British economy. In 2020, during the first lockdown, he cycled 175 miles (by using an indoor pedal exerciser) to raise money in support of Hospice UK and Hospice Biographers. John Hans lives in Tickton, Yorkshire.
