How was it possible to create, work and feel normal in a concentration camp, where misery and the sword of death was ready to cut every minute? Myself, I cannot write or do anything creative when I am not with a clear mind and clear space. Preferably beautifully adorned. The exibition at the German History Museum, organised in collaboration with Yad Vashem, offers samples of works by artists that created until the last moment, in awful conditions, sometimes trading food for any small tool that can help them work. Over 70% of them perished during Shoah, but their works were testimonies - sometimes with a legal value too, presented in international courts - of the camp life and atrocities happening there.
Alexander Bogen, who fought against the Germans as partisan, and lately settled in the state of Israel, gave me the plain answer to the question about how art was possible: drawing and fighting day and night, being creative during Shoah was a protest of the artist against what was happening. Besides graphic work, the exhibition included also some beautiful poetry where hope and desperation are part of the artistic dialogue and diary.
Besides the life in the camp, there are interesting insights about Jewish life in Europe at the time, in general. In the picture, the drawings of the Dadaist artist Marcel Janco about the attacks against religious Jews in Bucharest, Romania, 1940. A reality often denied and neglected in this country even today.
There were so many impressive works at this exhibition. From the documentation of the daily hunger, to the atemporal girls in the field by Nelly Toll or the painting Children of the ghetto made on a potato sack. Moritz Müller paints in beautiful colours and using contrasts the idyllic nature around Theresienstadt. Or the self portrait by Esther Lurie, part of a long series of such self representations in the camps.
Noteworthy was also the high quality of the documentation, either the leaflets in German, English and Hebrew with extensive biographies or the audio guides explaining in the smallest details the history of the artwork and the particular context it was created.
An opportunity to humbly let the silence in and appreciate any moment in life while being aware that such tragedies will never happen again.
