Tutti fratelli @museum.de

“The women of Castiglione soon realised that for me, there was no difference in nationality, and so they followed my example and demonstrated the same goodwill to all the soldiers, who were complete strangers to them. They continuously, poignantly repeated “Tutti fratelli” – wrote Henry Dunant in his book “A Memory of Solferino”.

“Tutti fratelli” – “all are brothers and sisters” is also the title of this room. This display was created in 2013 for the 150th anniversary of the Red Cross. Excerpts from books and newspaper articles describe famous and less well-known individual campaigns from an eventful period.

Have you ever heard of the “White Buses” rescue mission? In 1945, the Swedish Red Cross painted a number of buses white, marked them with a red cross, and freed more than 15,000 predominantly Norwegian and Danish inmates from German concentration camps.

Or did you know that the Red Cross carries out forensic work all over the world? During the war in Yugoslavia, for example, mass graves were excavated and DNA samples taken from the dead. That allowed the Red Cross workers to let next of kin know about the death of their son, father, mother or daughter.

The large picture with people flocking towards the red cross is eye-catching. It’s a piece by the artist Detlef Kellermann from Aachen. He’s addressed the organisation artistically in a lot of his work and created a series of pictures on show here at the museum. What he’s trying to say with this particular piece is best explained by an African saying:

“A lot of little people in a lot of little places doing a lot of little things can change the face of the world.”