Flemish author Joseph Pearce has a strong connection to family history. His Radio Books story explores the importance of remembrance. If people are allowed to forget can the horrors of the past be repeated?

Joseph Pearce - 'Legacy'

Joseph Pearce was born in 1951. His name may sound very English but it hides the reality of his family history. He was born in the Flemish part of Belgian and he believed that his father was from England. It wasn’t until he was fourteen that he was told his father was, in fact, a German Jew and had fled Germany to England a year before the outbreak of the Second World War.

Pearce’s background has heavily influenced his writing and his family history was the main focus of his award winning novels ‘Koloniale Waren’ (Colonial Goods) and ‘Maanzaad’ (Poppy Seed). He also wrote an autobiographical family chronicle called ‘Land van Belofte’ (Country of Promise).

Memory and archaeology  

His story for Radio Books is set in the future. What’s described as simply ‘The Event’ has already taken place. An old man, in his mid eighties, has been forced to give up his job as a guide at a museum that commemorates a genocide. Despite his age, he doesn’t want to leave and sees himself as a witness and an essential link to the past. If he is gone then remembrance will become even less relevant in a world where everyone looks to the future and ignores the past.

"Perhaps his opponents are right. Each year the same wreaths and the same parade, each year the speech full of bombast and hollow phrases, each year the national anthem that can’t drown out the din of traffic on the motorway behind the park. The bloodbaths during the crusades or the persecution of the Jews are also no longer commemorated. A footnote in a book. At some time the last museum devoted to them was boarded up, the last memorial razed to the ground. At first a burning issue that appealed to the conscience of the whole of humanity, then the distant echo of a message no longer understood, and finally, archaeology. The writing indecipherable, the bones decayed, the memory a legend."

‘Legacy’ is a devastating critique of the human psyche and the need for individuals and governments to draw a line under the atrocities of the past. But there is hope. At the old man’s retirement party a young man vows to ensure that his legacy will live on and the sins of the fathers will not be forgotten. It is a pledge that could lead to more conflict.

‘Legacy’  by Joseph Pearce was translated by John Nieuwenhuizen. The story is read by Chris Chambers.

The series Radio Books is an initiative of Flemish-Dutch Huis de Buren in Brussels, in association with the Flemish radio broadcaster Klara and Radio Netherlands Worldwide.