The Story of Flight PS752 Families at the Frankfurt International Book Fair

The books published by the Association of Families of Flight PS752 Victims were presented at the Frankfurt International Book Fair. This fair, the largest international book exhibition in the world, has been held this year from October 16 to 20. Shahnaz Morattab, a board member of the association who lost her nephew Arvin and his wife Aida on the flight, along with several Iranian authors, introduced three books from the association at a shared booth.

On the second day of the fair, time was dedicated to introducing two books, “It Shouldn’t Have Been Written 2” and “Red in Embrace of the Sky”, in both Persian and German, accompanied by a Q&A session with visitors. These two books are part of a trilogy of memoirs from families whose lives were shattered by the missile strikes from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on January 8, 2020. Since the early days following this tragedy, these families have come together to seek truth and justice and to fight against forgetfulness.

The association’s publishing house made its debut at the fair in 2021 with a dedicated booth, attracting significant media attention. Since then, it has participated in various events around the world, where the authors of these memoirs have introduced and read from their works. Some of these writers had never published before, and now they write true stories about the lives of their loved ones that “shouldn’t have been written.”

Last year, the association’s publications were also present in cities like Munich, Nuremberg, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Cologne, Eindhoven, Oslo, London, Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver at the eighth “Uncensored Book Fair”, which is held annually in parallel with the Tehran Book Fair.

Moniro Ravanipour, Amirhossein Yazdanbod, and Hamed Esmaeilion are among the authors who, by holding memoir-writing workshops, have helped families along the challenging path of documenting these stories and turning them into lasting literary works.

Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 was shot down on the morning of January 8, 2020, just three minutes after taking off from Tehran’s international airport by at least two missiles fired by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. All 176 passengers and an unborn child were killed.