Media: Times.si
Author:
Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2022
Link: https://www.times.si/a/eb2eba23a2f50eeed8492363426f81be0bd6cad5/
Pianist, conductor, humanitarian. Živa Ploj Peršuh together with her husband Tomo, rescued as many as 142 Ukrainians from the horrors of the war in Ukraine – members of the orchestra, their mothers and also a few grandmothers and grandfathers. Fourteen minors fled their homes from gunfire and explosions without their parents. Overnight, Živa and Tomo became their legal guardians – their Slovenian parents.
We meet on Friday, 1 July, at noon in the scorching sun near SNG Ljubljana Opera and Ballet, where Živa works. Živa Ploj Peršuh also artistic director of the Slovenian National Youth Concert, together with her husband Tomo Peršuh , a music producer, says that it all began on an ordinary family evening when they saw footage on television of a destroyed music academy in Ukraine, where promising young people had practised, studied and played every day – just like those Živa teaches here. She contacted the conductor of the Ukrainian youth orchestra, Oksana Liniv, to ask how they could help, and Oksana asked them to help get as many young musicians as possible out of the country.
Tomo called an acquaintance from Maribor, the humanitarian Uroš Dokl , who has years of experience with refugee children from crisis areas in the Middle East. He agreed immediately, and the City of Ljubljana, without hesitation, provided two buses and four drivers and arranged the first temporary accommodation. On Friday, 5 March, the Slovenian humanitarian mission set off on the 800-kilometre journey.
“Now they are safe, they are playing, they have got their soul back,” Tomo Peršuh recalls of the Ukrainian musicians’ first rehearsals on Slovenian soil. “A symphony orchestra usually has a set line-up; we enlarged it, stretched it and, in short, adapted it as far as we possibly could, so that each of them has the chance to perform and each of them can go on tour . If someone cannot manage more than two notes, then they will play two notes – involvement and inclusiveness are the guiding principle of this entire integration process,” says Živa Peršuh Ploj.
What Živa and Tomo are doing is not evacuation; these are not just refugees – it is integration. A holistic approach to young people united by music. Ljubljana is not just a city where they wait in safety for the war to end, but a place where they learn music … and life. They enjoy the same things and struggle with the same troubles as their peers in Slovenia – except that chaos reigns in their homeland.
You will meet young Ukrainian musicians and hear their stories – stories of the tragic fates of civilians who, thanks to noble-hearted people, have found hope, a new chapter, a perspective and a future.
