Teenagers draw on animation film to highlight plight of child soldiers

Dili Diey, 25, fled to England from southern Sudan as a boy soldier and now lives in Huddersfield. "Count yourselves lucky to be at peace in Kirklees. Killing someone haunts you for the rest of your life," he tells a group of young people from four Kirklees schools.

Diey's harrowing story features in the animated film, Untold Stories, part of a new campaign, Books Not Bullets, to highlight the plight of child soldiers. Books Not Bullets is the brainchild of a group of Kirklees teenagers after they heard firsthand Diey's tales of genocide survivors.

"Dili's story shocked us," says Janita Rauf, 14. "On a bad day, I wish I didn't have to go to school. But for Dili, every day was a bad day and he had no education at all. I know I'm lucky."

As part of its annual event to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, Kirklees Museums and Galleries, part of Kirklees council, asked children from four schools to come up with a campaign inspired by Richard Oastler, who in the 1830s successfully campaigned for shorter working hours for child workers in Huddersfield's mills. Following workshops, at which the teenagers heard tales from survivors of genocide, they chose to highlight the plight of child soldiers.

"The children were from different social, economic and ethnic backgrounds. We thought they might choose bullying or knife crime, something they had heard about in school for their campaign, but when they heard Diey's story it brought it home to them that this sort of injustice was still going on today," says Kim Strickson, community history projects manager at Kirklees Museums and Galleries.

In workshops with Huddersfield animation company, Zoom Animation, youngsters learned how to bring stories to life through animation and their ideas inspired the way animator Zane Whittingham put together the final film, which includes narrations by Iby Knill, 86, a survivor of Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp in the second world war, and Diey. Youngsters then designed a logo and poster, and organised a civic reception for the mayor, council chief executive and other local figures to hear Knill and Diey's stories.

Most of the £8,000 funding came from Museums and Galleries with extra cash from the council's reducing inequalities fund. "The project was designed to help them realise how small things they do day to day, like how they react when they see racism going on, can make a difference. The project is as much about what it does for Kirklees as what it does for the child soldiers," says Strickson.

"I'm proud of our efforts and people are taking notice of what we are telling them," says 14-year-old Sabba Akram.