Young mother

Country: Spain

Manufactory: Lladro

Date of establishment: 1980

Sculptor: Francisco Catala

Size (cm): 39*32

Porcelain Story

In each of us, involuntarily, in the depths of consciousness, in the genes that are passed down from generation to generation, fear and anxiety live, and the hope for a better future for our children, so familiar to refugees. Many generations of our people, and some other peoples as well, have experienced the full horror of the humiliation and suffering associated with flight. On Earth, perhaps, there are no countries and peoples that have not been subjected to violence and persecution. At different times, as a result of different circumstances, millions, hundreds of millions of people who were forced to leave their homes became unfortunate wanderers, forced to think daily not about the happiness, education and health of their children, but about the elementary opportunity to feed them. Just to survive...

Older brothers and sisters told me in my childhood about how, during the occupation of Ukraine by fascist troops, my mother had to take four children in her arms from the Vinnitsa region for several months (!) to travel in "cars" to distant Uzbekistan. Risking every day to lose their kids at the crowded half-stations, where everyone thought only about how to get a sip of water and a piece of bread for loved ones exhausted in a grueling flight. My father fought at the front and could not help the family in any way ...

According to UN statistics released on the eve of World Refugee Day, celebrated in many countries today, 86 percent of refugees are women and children. The most helpless, the most vulnerable, the most desperate to find selfless help among strangers who are simply not interested in the problems of refugees at best.

Could we ever, listening to the sorrowful stories of our mothers and grandmothers about their military wanderings with children in their arms, imagine that all this will return to our land again? In our present time?! .. But the period of the current war on Ukrainian soil has already far exceeded the military hardships of the Great Patriotic War. But the number of forced migrants in their native country has long been in the millions. And if a million Syrian refugees became an incredible shock for a prosperous and prosperous Europe, then what can we say about Ukraine, exhausted by years of bloody war?..

I have been looking for this beautiful porcelain work all over the world for a long time. Not on purpose, of course. Without throwing all your strength into it. I knew that one day I would find it for sure. And found. On one of my trips to Belgium. In a small, unremarkable town. True, for me it became memorable because for many years this composition, brought from there, quietly pleases the eye and warms the heart with rare warmth, in the depths of which the pain of forced refugees, seemingly not experienced, has been miraculously preserved.