Minutes of the meeting at La Rosa Hotel on the above date.
Present: Adele, Ian, Jenny, Suzanne.
Apologies: Gill, Harry, Jan, John, Laura, Magda, Michele, Pip, Suzanne.
Topic: Members’ work-in-progress.
Matters Arising
Ian invited Adele to give a progress report on the Whitby Lit Fest. The main thrust at the moment is to involve the local schools (and their parents), concentrating on pupils from less privileged backgrounds to take part. There will be a poetry / short-story writing competition with the theme: The Person Who Inspired Me. The National Literary Trust will arrange for a celebrated poet to get involved in a role to be decided.
Suzanne reported on the arrangements for a workshop: A Way with Words at the Boggle Hole Youth Hostel, 10.30 am to 1.30 pm, Saturday 7 June 2025. This will take place during the Robin Hood’s Bay Folk Weekend.
Members’ Readings
Suzanne — distributed copies and read an article entitled Listening in the Silences, about her experience as a volunteer staffing a helpline in London for desperate gay people who needed help. One of the calls she took was from a young HIV sufferer who had taken pills, and just wanted company as he died.
Ian — distributed copies and read an article entitled Remembering Hadamar, based on a chapter of The Door Out Of Hell, which he intended to republish as a standalone article of topical relevance.
A young nursing assistant in 1961 is moved to hug and kiss a baby born blind and deaf, as he recalls the wartime episode of the Hadamar Killing Centre at which thousands of German citizens – patients at mental hospitals – were “involuntarily euthanased” with carbon monoxide in gas chambers from 1940 onwards under the Aktion-T4 programme. This allegedly humane programme served as a pilot project for the “Final Solution” to the “Jewish problem” which, when it got going, routinely exterminated 10,000 to 20,000 individuals each day in each of the main death-camps: Belzec, Treblinka and Auschwitz.
The meeting closed at 12:55 PM.
Whitby Writers Group 