Hayley
It’s not about the whole world being perfect, it’s about enough people doing the right thing.
Describing
herself as an ‘ambitious, creative, female warrior’, Hayley started her
floristry business in the early 2000s at the age of 22.
She credits her longstanding involvement with Kabbalah – a school of thought within Jewish mysticism – with giving her the tools to process living memories and trauma, and to understand how the universe and the Judaic traditions work. As she puts it: ‘The past happened and it happened for a reason, but your soul chose the journey,’ adding, ‘My father is from Berlin originally. They escaped during the war. One of my great uncles was arrested by the Gestapo and my great Aunt Liesl – five foot nothing – demanded to know where he was. They said: “We’ll tell you on one condition: you leave tonight”. So they bought the last five tickets on a boat to Shanghai and took whatever they could carry. My grandmother was already living in England with my father. My mother is also German. She came here when she was nineteen.’
Having suffered so much at the hands of the Nazis, one might expect Hayley to be ambivalent about her German heritage, or the German language, which she used to speak regularly with her grandmother and her ‘Omi’ (as she described her great grandmother). When asked about this she replied: ‘Kein Problem’.
As we discussed the burgeoning anti-Semitism in Europe, Hayley concluded: ‘There are all sorts of ‘isms’ going on in the world. It’s not about the whole world being perfect, it’s about enough people doing the right thing.’
She credits her longstanding involvement with Kabbalah – a school of thought within Jewish mysticism – with giving her the tools to process living memories and trauma, and to understand how the universe and the Judaic traditions work. As she puts it: ‘The past happened and it happened for a reason, but your soul chose the journey,’ adding, ‘My father is from Berlin originally. They escaped during the war. One of my great uncles was arrested by the Gestapo and my great Aunt Liesl – five foot nothing – demanded to know where he was. They said: “We’ll tell you on one condition: you leave tonight”. So they bought the last five tickets on a boat to Shanghai and took whatever they could carry. My grandmother was already living in England with my father. My mother is also German. She came here when she was nineteen.’
Having suffered so much at the hands of the Nazis, one might expect Hayley to be ambivalent about her German heritage, or the German language, which she used to speak regularly with her grandmother and her ‘Omi’ (as she described her great grandmother). When asked about this she replied: ‘Kein Problem’.
As we discussed the burgeoning anti-Semitism in Europe, Hayley concluded: ‘There are all sorts of ‘isms’ going on in the world. It’s not about the whole world being perfect, it’s about enough people doing the right thing.’
This project is part of the initiative ‘Stand Together and Go Virtual’, supported by the German Embassy London and the Goethe-Institut London.