BIBLIOTOPIA 2020 | Anna Bikont and Philippe Sands in Conversation: The Crimes of our Fathers

BIBLIOTOPIA, 3rd edition online! Anna Bikont and Philippe Sands in Conversation The Crimes of our Fathers; Community, Family and Individual Memories

Anna Bikont, born in 1954 in Warsaw, is a prize-winning Polish journalist and nonfiction writer. She co-founded and ran the underground weekly Tygodnik Mazowsze, which was associated with the Solidarity movement from 1981 to 1989. In 1989 she was one of the co-founders of Gazeta Wyborcza, the first independent daily newspaper in post-Communist Europe, where she continues to work. Of Jewish origins, she discovered her roots by accident at the age of thirty-three. She is the author of several books, including “My z Jedwabnego” (Prószyński i S-ka, 2004), published in English as “The Crime and the Silence; A Quest for the Truth of a Wartime Massacre” (Heinemann, 2015) about the 1941 pogrom of Jewish population by their Polish neighbors in a small town of Jedwabne. The French edition of the book won the European Book Prize in 2011.

Philippe Sands QC, born in 1960, is one of the UK’s most prominent human rights lawyers, celebrated for his work in international human rights. He has been involved in many of the most important cases of recent years, including Pinochet, Congo, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Iraq and Guantanamo, frequently appearing before international courts including the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice in The Hague. He is also a Professor of Law at UCL, President of English PEN and a member of the Board of the Hay Festival. His last book, the Sunday Times bestseller, “East West Street” (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016) won numerous prizes, including the Baillie Gifford Prize and the Prix Montaigne.”The Ratline; Love Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive” (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2020) is his latest book and looks at the daily life of a high-ranking Nazi, his attempts to escape Europe after the war and the way his ancestors see him now. “My Nazi Legacy” (2015) is a documentary film he made when researching for this book.

In English| Moderation: Salomé Kiner, journalist and literary critic | Interpretation: Starr Pirot et Frances Steinig-Huang

Recorded at the Jan Michalski Foundation on the 22 of November 2020, Montricher, Switzerland