Willem Poelstra - Future Stories from the Past - 2017

Hardcover. Illustrated in b/w and colour. – Design: Regina Geerts – Texts & research on Kosovo by Guido van Eijck. – Texts in English, Albanian & Serbian. – Willem Poelstra (1956-2018) worked five years to tell a timeless story of the impact of war, after he learned about his own parents’ untold past. In Kosovo he saw how war can divide families, friends and lovers. – Willem Poelstra didn’t know much about his parents’ past. It was only in 2011, after they had both died, that he found a box filled with letters, pictures and other documents. It unfolded a history they had preferred not to speak of. He learned that his Jewish mother [Hanna] had lost dozens of family members in concentration camps during World War 2, whilst his father was working in a German locomotive factory at his own free will. Yet, they fell in love when the war was over. – Poelstra wanted to mirror his parents’ untold past to present-day stories of war and the deep scars it leaves on people and their communities. And to show a timeless story that keeps repeating itself. – Fine/as new copy

In his second and what came to be his last and ultimate book, for Hanna, Future Stories from the Past…, Willem Poelstra aims to recount the story of his parents: how a volunteer worker in the German war industry and a woman who lost her family to the holocaust married and lived a happy live after the war. Their story proved to Willem that true post war reconciliation happens through personal relations. In for Hanna, Future Stories from the Past… (FSFTP in short) he searches for a parallel to this story in the post war relations between Kosovo and Serbia. Forhanna Collection added a series of five prints, a typology of unfinished houses in the open landscape of Serbia and Kosovo.