Jean-Claude van Itallie was 3 years old on May 10, 1940 when Germany invaded Belgium. The van Itallie family immediately fled, eventually arriving in New York, thanks to Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the courageous Portuguese consul whose visas saved many Jewish refugees.

 

Edith Goldenhar’s mother, Paulette Szafran, was 12 years old when she fled Brussels with 1000s of other refugees. Stranded in Calais, she and her family were saved from the catastrophic bombings by a kind stranger, Madame Ducatel. In her short film, Return to Calais, Edith follows Paulette’s wartime diary to Calais where she meets with today’s refugees and with Care4Calais volunteers, showing how empathy connects the dots of displacement across geography and generations. 

 

Matilda Velevitch is a British playwright, actress and volunteer for Care4Calais. Her critically-acclaimed play Three Mothers premiered in London in 2017 and completed a UK tour in June 2019.  Other works include After the Blue and The Netherlands. Her most recent projects, Fabric of Our Lives and Broadway, have recently been recommissioned. She is currently developing 1974, a four-part series about the division of Cyprus. For the past five years, Matilda has worked on the front line with refugees in Calais, Dunkirk, and Belgium and currently supports refugees in the UK, many of them victims of horrific abuse. For refugees and witnesses, hope is not a strategy. However, by acting upon conscious instinct, we can reinstate hopeful futures and form lifelong connections.