Check this out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=vOhf3OvRXKg
A friend sent it to me on Sunday. I watched it over and over, captured by the passion of the artist and the appearing and vanishing images on the unlikely inspiring medium of an illuminated sand table.
The artist, "Ukraine's Got Talent", Kseniya Simonova, 24, with her lighted candle and hand strokes, offers her interpretation of how ordinary people were affected by the German invasion during World War II. The Great Patriotic War, as it’s called in Ukraine, resulted in one in four of the population being killed with eight to 11 million deaths out of a population of 42 million.
I didn’t have to think while watching Simonova. I am not an expert on Ukrainian history. I am not sure if the faces that appear in the sand are political or metaphorical. I cannot translate the words that she writes at the end. Watching this I only know what I feel; without specific historical details, I plainly know what I know.