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| Left
for Posterity |
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consider five of the monuments and memorials set up to commemorate
the people and events that marked last century. |
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Heroine
of the Skies
 Listen
Read
Rick Batten is the nephew of Jean Batten, New Zealand's aviation
pioneer whose Percival Gull monoplane is now desplayed at Auckland
airport. Rick describes how, in that small plane, Jean Batten
made her record-breaking solo flight from Britain to New Zealand
in 1936, and recalls the enigmatic woman who, many years after
her glorious achievements in the air, died in obscurity.
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Monument
to Franco
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Read
Laurentino Saenz de Baruaga is one of the Benedictine monks
who still tend the Valle de los Caidos, or Valley of the Fallen,
General Franco's gigantic masoleum and Spanish civil war memorial.
For him, the Valley symbolises a notion of Spain that was worth
fighting for: A Spain which resisted communism and anti-clericalism
and which, he insists, now finds comfort in the spirituality
surrounding Franco's notorious monument.
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Message
of Hope
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For Ben Helscott, the twentieth century has been dominated by
his memories of the Holocaust. As a child, he suffered the loss
of both parents in the Nazis' ruthless campaign against Europe's
Jews. As he explains, the suffering of the Jews is powerfully
commemorated at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial site.
But, he says, Yad Vashem symbolises much more than tragedy.
For him it is also a beacon of hope and an inspiration for all
mankind to fight evil in future.
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Wound
in the Earth
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Jan C. Scruggs is responsible for one of the most stirring
monuments of recent years - the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington
DC, upon which are written the names of the 58,000 US personnel
lost in the conflict. A Vietnam veteran himself, Mr Scruggs
describes what moved him to propose the memorial, and how
its construction has helped America to recover from the divisions
and trauma of military involvement in Vietnam.
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Memorial
to a Friend
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Sir Brian Urquhart enjoyed a long and distinguished career at
the United Nations. He was also a personal friend of the second
UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjold, who died in a plane
crash in 1961. Sir Brian recalls a man whose commitment and
vitality helped shape the United Nations, and explains why he
helped commission the statue that now stands in memory of Hammarskjold
at the UN Plaza in New York -- Barbara Hepworth's massive bronze,
"Single Form". |
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