Lessons in Resilience from the Holocaust and Genocide with Carl Wilkens: Rwanda’s community approach to rebuilding trust: restorative strategies for healing relationships.

Join us on this transformative journey; let this series serve as your source of empowerment, inspiring our community to find their own light within the encompassing shadows.

Carl Wilkens:
“Rwanda’s community approach to rebuilding trust: restorative strategies for healing relationships.”
In conversation with Tali Nates

Carl Wilkens

For over a decade, Carl Wilkens has been sharing stories around the globe to inspire and equip people to “enter the world of The Other.” He was the only American who chose to stay in Kigali, Rwanda throughout the 1994 genocide. Venturing out each day into streets crackling with mortars and gunfire, he worked his way through roadblocks of angry, bloodstained soldiers and civilians armed with machetes and assault rifles in order to bring food, water and medicine to groups of orphans trapped around the city. Working with Rwandan colleagues, they helped save the lives of hundreds. His harrowing yet hopeful journey weaves together stories of tremendous risk and fierce compassion in the midst of senseless slaughter. In 2011, Carl completed a book detailing these days titled I’m Not Leaving. A 40 minute documentary by the same title has since been released.
Carl’s storytelling does not stop with Rwanda’s tragic history, but moves forward to the powerful and inspiring recovery process. Among the many lessons he shares from his experience is the transformative belief that we don’t have to be defined by what we lost or our worst choices. We can be defined by what we do with what remains – what we do next after terrible choices. Each year he returns to Rwanda with students and educators to
see for themselves how people are working together to rebuild their country and rebuild trust.

Tali Nates

Tali Nates is the founder and director of the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre (JHGC) and Chair of the South African Holocaust & Genocide Foundation (SAHGF). She is a historian who lectures internationally on Holocaust and genocide education, memory, reconciliation, and human rights. Born to a family of Holocaust survivors, her father and uncle were saved by Oskar Schindler. Tali has been involved in the creation and production of dozens of documentary films, published many articles and contributed chapters to different books among them God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors (2015), Remembering The Holocaust in Educational Settings (2018), Conceptualizing Mass Violence, Representations, Recollections, and Reinterpretations (2021) and The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism (2023).

In 2021 she was part of the 12-member Expert Group of the Malmö Forum, serving in an advisory capacity to the Secretariat of the Malmö Forum on their programme on Holocaust remembrance, education and actions to combat antisemitism. Tali serves on many Advisory and Academic Boards including that of the Contested Histories Initiative, the Interdisciplinary Academic Journal of Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center and the Academic Advisory Group of the School of Social and Health Sciences, Monash University (IIEMSA), South Africa.

In 2010, Tali was chosen as one of the top 100 newsworthy and noteworthy women in

South Africa by the Mail & Guardian newspaper and won many awards including the Kia Community Service Award (South Africa, 2015), the Gratias Agit Award (2020, Czech Republic), the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Award (2021) and the Goethe Medal (2022, Germany).

In the midst of uncertainty and shadows, our series on resistance stands as a beacon of hope.

Over the course of our 8-part series, we aim to shed light on the stories of individuals and communities courageously facing prevailing challenges. Our mission is to create a space where narratives of resilience take center stage, unveiling the indomitable strength of the human spirit in adversity.

Thank you to our Partner:

Future Events in this Series:

• May 1, 2024 – Johana Sliwa: An Unlikely Rescue: A Jewish Woman Who Helped Thousands of Poles during the Holocaust
• May 22, 2024 – Khatchig Mouradian: Resisting the Armenian Genocide: Lessons in Resilience from a Clandestine Network of Humanitarians
• August 28, 2024 – Wolf Gruner: Resisters in Hitler’s Germany (Tentative)
• September 25, 2024 – Asya Darbinyan: Chhange and Holocaust Education (Tentative)
• October 23, 2024 – Paul Lowe: Capturing the Siege of Sarajevo (Tentative)
• November 20, 2024 – Sarah Brown, PhD: Women as Perpetrators and Rescuers (Tentative)