A Theatrical Setting

The sun returned today after the last few days of gloom and I decided to return to the riverside in Maidstone - this time to the opposite bank to my last visit. I had strolled through here previously but the light hadn't been good enough to do it justice.
Its official title is the Hermitage Millennium Amphitheatre - it's close to the Lockmeadow bridge and the Archbishops' Palace. It's built of Kentish ragstone and brick in the style of a Roman amphitheatre and it can seat up to 250 people - but on a cold day in the middle of winter I was completely on my own as I took this shot. I love the combination of the formal planting, the curves of the seating and the lovely morning light really enhancing the shapes and sweeping lines, with a glimpse of All Saints Church through the branches of the trees.

I read an incredible article today about Janine Webber (now aged 90), a survivor of the Holocaust who witnessed many atrocities as a child during the Second World War - including the murder of her own seven year-old brother Tunio - and why she believes it is her duty to keep her story alive, even after she has gone.
She recounts how in 1942 she is looking into the eyes of an SS officer who is about to shoot her. She is 9 years-old, but age is irrelevant when you're living in Nazi occupied Poland and you're Jewish. She has been caught outside the ghetto, betrayed by the daughter of a Polish family - the very people her uncle has paid to hide her and her younger brother Tunio.
But instead of shooting her, the officer orders her to run away. She still wonders to this day why her let her escape. "Maybe he had a daughter like me" she says. "Or maybe he felt I was a sweet girl and harmless." The officer then shoots her brother, wounding him, then buries him alive. Tunio is just seven years old.
She was born in 1932 in the Polish city of Lvov, now Lviv in western Ukraine. Before the war it was a thriving centre, filled with theatres, universities and and opera house where Polish Catholics, Ukrainian Orthodox Christians and Jews live side by side - with Jewish people being respected for their contribution to the region's status as a centre for intellectual, cultural and and academic excellence.
This would all be shattered when the Nazis invaded her city in 1941 and her family were plunged into an apocalyptic nightmare within days - death squads began targeting Jewish men, dragging them out of their homes and on to the streets to shoot them.
Her parents were forced into a small room in a shared house and created a tiny hiding space under the floorboards beneath a wardrobe but there was only space for her, her mother and her brother Tunio. Her father and grandmother hid in the loft but would eventually be discovered by The Gestapo and both be dragged away to be shot. Her mother would later die of Typhus, at the age of 29, in the newly created ghetto - where 120,000 Jews were crammed together with scant food and no sanitation.
Amid the deprivation her uncle, Selig, scraped together enough money to pay for Polish farmers to give her a home but she was mistreated which would eventually lead to her betrayal by the farmer's daughter, her escape and the murder of her brother. 
After she escaped from the farm should would go on to be hidden in a basement for nearly a year alongside her aunt, uncle and 11 others by a  member of the Polish Resistance called Edek. They would all survive the war but she never saw Edek again and regrets that she was never able to thank him.
She went on to live a full and happy life but for 50 years she was never able to speak about what she had endured, even to her own family until her psychotherapist, as part of her recovery, suggested she started opening up about her ordeal  She now gives talks to schools, churches and other organisations and gives more interviews online. She still finds this causes her suffering but her equation is "I suffer but I'm prepared to suffer if it inspires you to be a better human being".
She remains firm in her belief that her story has the power to help shape the future. "I know a lot of survivors wonder if it is worth doing all this, but I really think it is" she says. "Even if only one person hears me and alters their point of view then it's worth it. I always say to young people, "'You are the future, you will stop people being prejudiced. You will stand up to persecution. You must.''' 
At the end of the article the interviewer asks her what three words sum up her approach to life. After a pause to consider her answer and with the perfect summation of her irrepressible passion for life she says with fierce clarity "Joie de vivre." A truly incredible and remarkable woman and a warning from history that we should never forget about those who seek to sow the seeds of prejudice, division and hatred and what it can lead to.