Tag: WWII

Today a friend sent me an amazing email with a video link.   I felt it related to many of our topics we have been discussing here on Anti.  I am going to cut and paste Nancy’s (or whoever she copied them from) words and then post the link.  The woman shown in the video  is a sand artist.  The rest tells the story:

Please read the following paragraphs all the way through and then view the video…

This video shows the winner of “Ukraine’s Got Talent,” Kseniya Simonova, 24, drawing a series of pictures on an illuminated sand table showing how ordinary people were affected by the German invasion during World War II.  Her talent, which admittedly is a strange one, is mesmeric to watch.

The images, projected onto a large screen, moved many in the audience to tears, and she won the top prize of about £75,000. 

She begins by creating a scene showing a couple, sitting holding hands on a bench under a starry  sky, but then warplanes appear, and the happy  scene is obliterated. 

It is replaced by a woman’s face crying, but then a baby arrives, and the woman smiles again. Once again, war returns, and Miss Simonova throws the sand into chaos from which a young woman’s face appears. 

She quickly becomes an old widow, her face wrinkled and sad, before the image turns into a monument to an Unknown Soldier. 

This outdoor scene becomes framed by a window as if the viewer is looking out on the monument from within a house. 

In the final scene, a mother and child appear inside, and a man standing outside, with his hands pressed against the glass, saying  goodbye. 

The Great Patriotic War, as it is called in Ukraine, resulted in one in four of the population’s being killed, with eight to 11 million deaths out of a population of 42 million. 

Kseniya  Simonova says:  “I find  it difficult enough to create art using paper  and pencils or paintbrushes, but using sand and fingers is beyond me. The art, especially when the war is used as the subject matter, even brings some audience members to tears. And, there’s surely no bigger compliment.”

View the video

Our country has been blessed.  We have never known our cities to be destroyed and one fourth of our population killed.  Even our own Civil War didn’t destroy the entire country, although many Virginians, Georgians and South Carolinians might beg to differ.   

Sometimes it helps to put things in perspective, when viewing one’s country through the eyes of this very talented young artist.  How does one so young capture the horror of the world in the 40’s?  Those living in the Ukraine must have long national memories to be able to produce such talent.  It would be hard to tell where Stalin stopped and Hitler started.  Judging from the reaction from those in the audience, the feelings are still strong and very much a part of the Ukrainians’s national being.