The Girls We Must Not Forget
At the Cultural Information Centre (KIC) in Zagreb, we held a series of public lectures titled “Aleksandra, Lea and Madina Are Part of the Neighbourhood”, opening difficult but necessary questions – why some victims remain on the margins of collective memory and what we as a society can do to change that.
The lectures brought together citizens, activists, representatives of civil society organizations and the interested public with the aim of opening space for conversation about the culture of remembrance, the responsibility of institutions and ways of memorializing the lives of the girls (Aleksandra Zec, Lea Deutsch and Madina Hussiny), whose fates are marked by violence against members of minority communities.
Although decades and different historical contexts separate them, their stories are connected by the same question – how society remembers children whose deaths are the result of discrimination, violence and institutional failures.
Three stories that reveal different faces of violence
We began the series on February 28 with a lecture by Ida Ljubić about the life and death of Lea Deutsch, a talented young actress of the Zagreb Croatian National Theatre who, during the Second World War, in the context of the persecution of Jews, was deported by train toward Auschwitz, which she did not reach alive. The lecture opened the question of how we remember the victims of the Holocaust today and how public space can preserve the memory of interrupted lives.
At the second lecture, held on March 14, Antonia Pindulić addressed the case of Madina Hussiny, a six-year-old girl from Afghanistan who died on the railway tracks in 2017 after being struck by a train, after she and her family were expelled from the border by Croatian police officers. The lecture addressed the responsibility of institutions, the position of children in migration, and the importance of public remembrance of contemporary tragedies that occur at European borders.