Letters from the past

INTRODUCTION

A month before Peace and Goodwill Message project started I was looking through the list of participants and writing down countries: Germany, Japan, Spain, France. All of them would have their folders at the National Library in Aberystwyth, Wales. All of these folders hid a history of replies to the children of Wales from children of Germany, Japan, Spain, France ever since the first Urdd call for peace was transmitted in 1922. "We have no idea what's in those folders," - told Catrin before we first entered the Library.

And then a day came to open secret cases. We came into a reading hall and split into countries. Some received five, some - a dozen of towering carton blue folders. years starting with roaring 1920s and going into painful years of WW2. letters from children and teachers all over the world saying how they supported theoretic world peace in 1920s and very real scared and scarred messages from children whose parents had to go and fight in 1940s. Pretty handmade postcards and photographs of secondary schools which might not even exist now. Letters written in such unusual old handwriting that we would sometimes not even be able to decipher them. Letters in old archaic German no one has read or seen in decades.

For our group of modern university students reading them must have felt like seeing old relatives, visiting a grandma, everyone'd forgotten and discovered again by accident. And yet those letters from children from a century back can be relevant now. They show what changed between then and today, between how we feel the world now and what threatens peace today, it shows if we can learn from the past.

And how many other countries are still there undiscovered in other folders in a Welsh library?

As for my own country, naturally I didn't find a folder with "Ukraine" written on it. I started looking into Italy, which seemed to be responding to Welsh children through Italian Ambassador in London. Then Catrin said there was three folders on "Russia" (1932-1934). Situation when western countries put a sign of equality between USSR and Russia is not new. I got excited to look into it. And the very first letter confirmed my guess, making me both happy and confused. Happy because the first Russian folder turned out to have a letter from a Ukrainian school somewhere in Nikopol region. Confused - because the letter was written in Esperanto!

Now it was my time to discover new things. And with the help of Welsh Esperanto society who carefully translated the letter I learned that there was a village of Mikolo-Musievka, with 120 houses and 700 inhabitants, and a common farmland, where "every villager must work if they are of age. Children must study and old people must rest."

I always thought of 1932-33 as dark and scary times of our history, where people could only live in terrible suffering. I never knew those were also times when our people learned and dreamed about universal language for everyone and wrote letters to other schoolchildren across the world, and were part of this global movement life I naively thought I was the first generation to live.

This is one instant and I'm sure other volunteers have their own, when Peace and Goodwill Message response from children became suddenly relevant for a grown-up in 2017.

About the French letters

It was absolutely wonderful to discover all these old letters in the library. You know, it was a real thrill to be able to touch theses letters from the past and change into a witness of your country history, especially after one year studying french history of the 20th century. The first document I found was precisely dated from the 16th of May, that is to say on my birthday, 90 years exactly before I was born ! Then, I started to feel like I was traveling into the past and was enjoying every words I read. I will strongly treasure all these memories from the past and remember that we have to appreciate our luck to live in a peaceful time and country.

Messages from the letters

Most of the answers came from primary schools. It was really sad to read most of them have been affected by the first world war and had lost a father,