Our organization was founded by trauma therapist and retired deacon Peter Klentzan (left) and regional bishop Thomas Prieto Peral (right), who in this interview talk about the beginnings and take a look to the future of Wings of Hope.
Dear Peter, dear Thomas, you have accompanied the work of Wings of Hope from the very beginning. How did it actually start back then?
Peter Klentzan: In the early 1990s, in the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, I saw pictures of Bosnian children who had experienced the war. At the time, I worked as a deacon at the Church of Reconciliation in Dachau and then organized a similar exhibition here. A member of our board of trustees – the son of a former concentration camp prisoner – saw the pictures in the memorial and suggested that we expand our commitment to the children of war.
Thomas Prieto-Peral: At the time, I was a consultant in the ecumenical department of the regional church and responsible for memorial work. It was important to me not only to look back in history, but also to consider: What can be taken from history as a responsibility for today? What can peace building look like today? We wanted to do something for the victims of the Bosnian war at the Church of Reconciliation in the Dachau concentration camp memorial site – out of our historical responsibility of ‘Never War Again’.
PK: The Board of Trustees of the Church of Reconciliation then decided to found an organization. We called it “Wings of Hope”. The name goes back to a child’s picture from Sarajevo that really touched me at the time: A little girl had painted butterflies and she called it “Butterflies Live Shortly”. So the work of Wings of Hope has been going on for more than 20 years, but it was only in 2003 that Thomas suggested giving it a structure and setting up a foundation.
TPP: That was formally the beginning. Above all, however, our motivation was important: We wanted to do reconciliation work that would support the bridge builders beyond the confrontation of war. In the beginning, it wasn’t about trauma care, it was originally about peace building. The subject of trauma only came up step by step. Today, I believe that this is exactly the right message that everyone involved sensed at the time. That in hardened conflicts it is necessary to build bridges and search for the source of the misery, namely that violence makes people mentally ill, that it traumatizes them. And that this sets in motion a downward spiral that must be broken, where healing must take place. We see today in Israel and Gaza and elsewhere that this is exactly the right approach and that much more of it is needed. And that is the motivation that has driven me and continues to drive me to move this great work of Wings of Hope forward.
Is there anything from your work over the past 20 years that you particularly remember?
PK: One highlight was the first youth project in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which we set up at the beginning of the 2000s. At the time, I traveled around the country looking for critical young minds who were willing to engage in dialogue and reconciliation. They had to be brought together across ethnic and religious divides, which was not easy. This gave rise to groups that met every year at summer camps with hundreds of young people. At that time, we started to work with interfaith impulses, as we still do today at the Summer Academy in Ruhpolding. This was the first time that we brought together trauma and peace education. These encounters were really impressive.
TPP: Perhaps the biggest highlight for me was our first trip to Iraq in 2004. When we set up the foundation in 2003, we had already planned to go beyond Bosnia to other crisis regions. So Peter and I set off for Iraq with the bold plan of setting up a trauma care center in Baghdad one year after the Iraq war. The journey was adventurous. We flew to Amman and only had the address of a family in our pockets who had agreed to accommodate us. Someone would pick us up there and then drive us the long way to Baghdad. We arrived in Amman at two in the morning, were taken by cab to a suburb and received a very warm welcome.
Then, sometime before dawn, the driver arrived and we set off with him: first 200 kilometers to the Iraqi border and then another 500 kilometers through the Iraqi desert until we arrived in Baghdad. The trauma care center then really began its work and was in operation for several years. Unfortunately, the facility was then threatened by extremists and we had to move to northern Iraq. But this trip in 2004 was an absolute highlight for me because we were breaking new ground. At the time, I thought: This is a lot of the idea behind Wings of Hope.
What would you say has been the biggest challenge of the past 20 years?
PK: Perhaps the biggest challenge for me was to get involved in peace building in Israel and Palestine. I come from working in a memorial site and from the German responsibility for the crimes of the Holocaust. In Israel, I suspected that I would come into inner conflict and that was the case. I then tried to turn this challenge into an opportunity. I have learned that in conflicts between two groups, there is always a need for letter carriers, i.e. message carriers who act as mediators. Wings of Hope still has this role today: We create spaces in which understanding is possible. This creates a link to peace and trauma work.
TPP: From the very beginning, we wanted to give hope and strength – in other words, to be a source of strength for the many people who have experienced violence. That was very draining for us at times. In the past, I sometimes had the impression that there was a lot of exhaustion in the system. The team today is perhaps better at ensuring that the battery doesn’t run out. That was a learning process.
How do you see Wings of Hope now and what do you wish the organization for the future?
PK: I look at the work of Wings of Hope from the outside, but I still think your work is fantastic. Back then, I did the work more on instinct. It was a great time and many new things were created. You have professionalized the work and are a great team – you can tell and I think that’s great!
TPP: I think Wings of Hope is fundamentally very well positioned with a clear concept and good leadership. You have a very good team that coordinates, does reliable work and develops ideas. I am therefore very confident about the status of the work.
I can see that the need for our work in the world is growing exponentially – just from what I’m hearing now from Israel. I’m not even talking about the Palestinians in the West Bank or even in Gaza. The amount of work that will be required to deal with the consequences of the trauma will be endless. And that means that Wings of Hope will be needed even more, but will also have to grow with these tasks. I believe we now need a plan for how this great expertise and the Wings of Hope network can be put to even greater use. I think the move to Ukraine is exactly right now and it will open new doors for us. We can’t save the world, that would be presumptuous, but we can generate a lot of leverage with our multiplication work. And that’s what I’d like to see for the next 20 years, the courage to think bigger and tackle what’s going on in the world at the moment. We can do that.
The interview was conducted by Friederike Regel.
Peter Klentzan is a retired deacon and trained trauma therapist, teaching therapist and supervisor. He founded Wings of Hope together with Thomas Prieto Peral and managed the foundation’s domestic and international work for many years.
Thomas Prieto Peral is Regional Bishop of the Evangelical Church for Munich and Upper Bavaria and one of the two founders of the Wings of Hope Foundation. He served as Chairman of the Foundation’s Board for many years. Thomas Prieto Peral is an Evangelical pastor with additional training in trauma therapy (zptn).
