Presentations, Openings and Polish Friends

Our last day in Radom was a most eventful one.  The weather was sunny and warm, the first such day we had experienced in Poland.  We started the day with a stop at the post office.   When we did research at the archives the prior day we learned that we could no longer pay them cash for our records as we did the prior year.  Instead we were required to go to the post office and give them a slip of paper with the account number of the archives as well as the sum they advised us for payment.  That paper was then stamped and we could take it back to the archives to receive our documents.  Our friend Jakub accompanied us to the post office down the street from our hotel which proved to be fortunate.  Whether we paid by cash or credit card, the post office required a local address in case something went wrong and they didn’t receive payment.  Our home address in the US wasn’t acceptable for this purpose.  It was illogical even to our Polish companion, especially when paying with cash, but without his address on the slip we were unsure how to get our material.  Fortunately he was happy to assist us and we received our stamped paper.

Soon it was time for our presentation to high school students at the Resursa.  We arrived at the Resursa which is a grand building with figures atop it and a statue in front of it.  Jakub had advised us that it was a Citizens Club long ago and was used as an officers club by the Germans.  Now it is an arts and culture center for the city with a variety of programs and exhibitions. They had a large auditorium which slowly filled with students.  Dora, Jakub and I were on stage together with our interpreter.  As I entered the auditorium and arrived at the front row I saw our young friend Michalina who had been so helpful to us on our prior trip.  We hugged warmly and I was then whisked on to the stage.  I had just a minute to ask Michalina to translate for Dora’s son as they had decided only to translate from English to Polish.  Dora was quite determined to speak in Polish, no small feat after 70 years of not speaking it, but she accomplished it masterfully.

The format of the session was to have Jakub ask us questions to which we would respond, with most of the questions directed at Dora as the focus was on her recollections of her life in Radom.  The questions for me related to what drew me to Radom, researching my family history and how I felt about Radom.  As Dora replied in Polish, I would recognize a similar word to English and instantly know which story she was referencing.  As I sat and listened to the stream of Polish words I counted the students in the auditorium, about 100 filled the room.

Midway through the presentation we learned that there was a class of Israeli students who had come to the presentation. They understood English, but not Polish and as no one was aware that they had joined us they had missed a portion of the presentation.  The program then switched to English with a promise to the class to provide them with Dora’s written memories in English that I had provided to Jakub.  After the presentation we invited the Israeli students up to the stage to meet Dora.  She conversed with the teacher while her son spoke with them in Hebrew.  The students surrounded Dora eagerly taking pictures of her.  Dora also had an opportunity to speak with the teacher of the nearby school which is memorializing the school, The Friends of Knowledge, that Dora attended and gathering information on its attendees.

After the session we had some time to explore the town.  We walked towards the archives where we planned to exchange the slip of paper for our documents. As we walked we noted many abandoned buildings or buildings propped up with wood.  We had learned on our last visit that the buildings that were abandoned by Jews upon their deportation often deteriorated as there was no clear title to them.  The city would periodically place an ad in the paper so they could begin the process of taking them over.

At the archives we found that some of our documents had been copied, but the identity papers were on a CD.  Papers in hand, we took advantage of the nice weather to stroll down Zeromskiego, the main commercial street that is closed to traffic.  We stopped for a quick bite to eat and it was soon time to return to the Resursa for the opening.

 As we entered the Resursa we were greeted by a very dapper Jakub.  He advised us that some press were in the room.  We soon saw our friend Michalina.  Her parents who had hosted us at their home on our last visit, greeted us warmly.  They had invited us to visit after the opening.  The room soon filled with people and it was time for comments.  Jakub made some brief comments and Dora spoke warmly of her experience in returning to Radom doing her comments in both Polish and English.  I spoke about the development of the artwork that was there, my ties to Radom and my collaboration with Dora.  They presented us with flowers and we were whisked to yet another room to do a radio interview.

Our beautiful day had now turned rainy and we piled into the car of Michalina’s father.  On our last visit, the men had shared a number of shots of vodka so it appeared that they had cleared any barriers to a repeat performance.  The plan was for Michalina’s mother to drive us home as the designated driver.  Dora sat in front and in no time was chatting with Michalina’s father in Polish.  We arrived at their home to a spread of salads, herring and meats.  This was followed by a tasty fish dish combined with vegetables and then a coconut dessert.  Wine and vodka flowed freely throughout. While I’d like to report on the conversation, much of it was in Polish with Dora and Michalina’s parents engrossed in conversation.   Finally our evening came to a close with fond goodbyes as our time in Radom concluded.

Across the Pond: London Opening

Earlier this week I gave a talk at an opening of my Lithuanian based artwork at the London gallery of Woolfson and Tay.  The opening was coordinated with national Holocaust day.  My comments related to the experience I had in Lithuania that underlies this body of work and I thought it would be appropriate to share an excerpt of those comments here.

I was especially pleased to show this artwork at this particular gallery because the context was very appropriate to the nature of this work.  The owners of this gallery also run a nonprofit called Living Imprint through which they produced a film titled Surviving History.  The film is composed of interviews with survivors of the Vilnius area and is truly poignant as it examines the experience of these survivors in the latter stage of their life.  Two of the survivors were our guides in Lithuania.

I wanted to share with you the back story of what brought me to London.  A few years ago I decided I wanted to learn Yiddish.  Now the reason I wanted to learn Yiddish was to include it in my artwork.  Several years ago I did a series of artwork on family history.  In the series I frequently used language and especially liked the use of non-Latin languages such as Russian, Yiddish or Hebrew because one first experiences them on a graphic level.  If one knows a bit of the language you might then decipher the literal level.  Since my work was focused on family and cultural history, I decided to learn Yiddish to better incorporate it into my artwork.  As there are few opportunities to learn Yiddish in my community I signed up to attend the Vilnius Yiddish Institute in Vilnius, Lithuania.

There I participated in an intense language program of several hours of class a day and several hours of homework each evening.  In addition to the language program, I also participated in a cultural program led largely by two guides who were both survivors.  They took us through the former Jewish areas of Vilnius and the ghetto.  Fania, a former partisan, took us to Ponar, the forest where most of the Jews of Vilnius were murdered.  They talked of their experiences during those times and the community as it once was.  When we were in the forest of Ponar, one of our group asked Fania how she could come and tell the story of what occurred when her family lied buried in the pits.  She replied, “I speak for them because they cannot stand up and speak for themselves”.

When I returned home I developed this body of work, my attempt to tell the stories that we learned from our guides and from living in Vilnius.  I wondered how I could create the sense of intensity that we experienced because of these amazing women in their 80s who were our guides and I remembered the film Surviving History that I saw while in Vilnius.   I contacted Living Imprint to see if I could get a copy to show in conjunction with my artwork and included a link to my artwork. They liked what they saw and here I am.

I call this series The Silence Speaks Loudly because I was very aware of silence in Lithuania about the former Jewish community and the Holocaust.  There were few traces of the former Jewish community and frequently silence about what had occurred.  For me the silence only made me more conscious of the missing communities.  I often use the metaphor of negative space to describe it.  When I say “negative space”, I mean in the artistic sense.  You have probably seen the image of two faces in profile facing each other.  When you focus on the space between the faces, the negative space, you see the form of a goblet created by the outlines of their profiles. For me the Jewish communities existed in that negative space and were formed out of the silence and the edges of the community that remained. 

 The silence, the negative space, is manifest in a number of ways.  There is a lack of physical traces of the former Jewish community.  In Vilnius, a community which was 45% Jewish ,there are few buildings with Yiddish writing on them that remain.  In a city that once had over 100 synagogues only one remains in active use supporting the small Jewish community that is left. The traces of other former synagogues were not evident. So physical traces are largely absent.

The memory is also often silent.  While we were in Vilnius there was a young woman in the Vilnius Yiddish Institute program who grew up in Kaunas.  She told us that she didn’t know that Jews had made up 45% of her city until she was in college and accidentally ran across a book by a Lithuanian Jew.  Now that in itself is an oxymoron in that one is either considered to be Lithuanian or Jewish, but not both.  In any case until she was 13 the Soviets were in control and they did not talk of Jews dying in the Holocaust, only Soviet citizens or people.  So the exposure didn’t occur then, but even after that it was only by accident that she learned this.  Now she was interested in learning more and sought information, but that is far more the exception than the rule.

There is a silence that is perpetuated today through such institutions as the Genocide Museum.  The term genocide was coined by a Polish Jew after the Holocaust.  It literally means “race killing”.  In a city where 45% of the population was murdered there is no mention of the Holocaust in the Genocide Museum, a building that was once Gestapo headquarters. The story that is told is that of the Soviet occupation.  The only allusion to the Holocaust was in reference to the Lithuanian partisans where it says “some violence against the civilian population occurs as happens in any war”.

So where does this silence come from?  During the war, Lithuania was very complicit with the Nazis.  Now that is not to say that there were not some Lithuanians who reached out to their Jewish neighbors, but for the most part Lithuania cooperated with the Nazis and performed many of the murders.  Many of the people who fought with the Nazis and actively murdered Jews during the war subsequently became partisans fighting the Soviets.  They are viewed as national heroes.  It is hard to have a dialogue about the Holocaust when it implicates your national heroes.

I also think the division between being Lithuanian or Jewish creates a sense of otherness, allowing a distancing from the Holocaust and a separation of histories, the Holocaust as  the history of the Jews, the Soviet Occupation as that of Lithuanians.

I found these issues very disturbing and my artwork was my response to them.  I felt that in my small way I needed to share my observations and my artwork is the vehicle by which I do that.

I then shared a number of paintings with their accompanying stories.  You can find the stories at Studio 409 Art.  Two of them are included below:

The painting Gedenken is really the signature piece of this series.  It is of the forest of Ponar where the Jews of Vilnius were murdered.  I started sketching it on the plane returning home.  When one stands in a forest that was a killing site, it is natural to look up at the trees and think about them witnessing what occurred.  Or conversely to look at them and think they were the last vision of those who perished. I wanted a painting that was tall and this one is six feet high.  The one I did for London is actually a second iteration on two hinged canvases so I could more easily ship it.  Below the trees I wanted to represent the pits in which people were murdered, but not get too macabre.  I decided to use Yiddish letters turned on their side as figurative elements.  In many ways the language also faced near extinction along with its speakers. Upright bands of the word "Gedenken" run between the random letters getting larger at the bottom as if they were being viewed from that vantage point.  "Gedenken" means "remember".

The companion piece to this painting is one called Buried Truths which is based on a true story.  During WWII a Polish journalist lived in the forest near Ponar.  He witnessed the murders of Jews by Lithuanians.  He saw them brought to the forest, their clothing confiscated as the murderers learned that clothing with bullet holes didn’t sell as well on the secondary market.  From the Lithuanians he heard the stories of escapees and attempts to hide children in piles of clothing. Each day he wrote about what he witnessed and buried what he wrote in jars in the forest.  After the war what he had written began to surface in archives.  A woman named Rachel Margolis pieced it together and published the book the Ponary Diary.  Needless to say, it was quite controversial as it named names. I liked the idea of bottles buried underground, representing truths that were too dangerous to reveal at that time. I wanted some sprouting pages like leaves as truth will eventually emerge.

 The show will run through February 20th in London at Woolfson and Tay.