Image, Word, Number: the Print as Tattoo
©2015 Jana Zimmer
In April I will go to Germany, to attend the opening of an exhibition of my artwork with the title,“We
are Still Here”. The town of Freiberg, Saxony, is commemorating the 70th anniversary of the
evacuation of a slave labor camp, a subcamp of KZ Flossenberg, known by the code name of Freia,
GMBH. Seeing this project to completion is a significant way point in my life’s work as a Jewish
daughter of Holocaust survivors, and as a Jewish artist. It is about what images can convey, and
provoke, emotionally and spiritually, when words catch in my throat. If poetry has been described as
an act of unveiling, and remembering what has been forgotten– that can also be a way to look at the
images that I create.
In Freiberg, I will meet for the first time with a German named Michael Duesing, my contemporary,
with whom I have communicated over the last fifteen years as he has fulfilled his avocation of
documenting what occurred in Freiberg during the war, after a porcelain factory owned by a Jew was
taken over and turned into a war materials factory, manufacturing airplane parts for the Luftwaffe, and
dependent on Jewish slave labor. Over the last fifteen years I have contributed narrative and images
for three books he has written about the Jewish slaves in Freiberg,1000 women, mostly Czech, who
arrived from Auschwitz in the fall of 1944.
My mother was one of those slaves, having been deported from Terezin, and selected for labor– or
rather– “Vernichtung Durch Arbeit” (Extermination Through Work) by Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz,
thence to Freiberg and finally to KZ Mauthausen, where she was liberated by the Americans in May of
1945. I will arrive in Freiberg on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the transport of these “Haefltinge”
from Freiberg to Mauthausen. I will arrive by train, reserved First Class seat from Berlin. My mother,
Prisoner No. 54193, traveled in an open cattle car, packed in with a transport of 1000 Jewish women,
for over two weeks, from Freiberg to Mauthausen.
I am one of three artists of three generations and nationalities whose work will be represented. The
oldest, Helga Weissova Hoskova, was a teenage inmate, in Terezin, who began to make art there, and
continued throughout her life as a professional artist. She is 93, and still lives in Prague. The
youngest is Stefanie Busch, part of the third- ‘Dritte- Generation”, a German artist from Dresden, who
has previously participated in Holocaust remembrance projects. I am in the middle, the so-called
Second Generation. I started to make images about the Holocaust, and the themes of memory, exile
and return, in my 50's, with no formal training, when my mother came to live with me. It was a way
of honoring her, documenting her experience, and making a mark for her and our family. I thought
this work would be finished when she died, but it wasn’t, and isn’t.
Instead, my visual stories have expanded and spiraled around the same themes, historical text, memoir
and image, with strange intersecting details, in
disparate places that suddenly become connected, in
people appearing who are connected to the past, in
connections made and unmade. All unexpected,
and at this stage, uncanny. I have gone back and
forth between making the art, writing, and
documentation, my own and in collaboration with
others.
Image # 1 Josef and Ritta
I had a good deal of difficulty both with the
medium and the imagery for this exhibit. First,
because it seemed to be the last major opportunity
to make a tangible mark specifically for her, I
wanted to put my mother, Klara, front and center.
The organizers of the exhibit appeared more
attuned to my father’s story, and the story of my
half sister, even though neither of them had anything to do with Freiberg. Ritta was ten when she was
deported to Terezin, and only twelve when she was gassed at Auschwitz with her mother, Katerina
Zimmerova. I agreed, as did the Jewish Museum in Prague, to loan for this exhibit some of her
original drawings, done between 1942-44 in the Terezin Ghetto, when she was in one of Friedl Dicker
Brandeis’ art classes. And I did include, for the exhibit, this image of my father and Ritta,– a collage
from a photograph of them in Prague in 1937, scanned onto one of my mother’s linen napkins. While I
usually insist on the accuracy of the individual story, I decided to go along with the curators’ desire to
conflate these stories of unrelated parts of my family.
But because of the appeal of childrens’ drawings,
I felt that I had to fight to keep this about my
mother. I have my mother’s handwritten
narrative of her life, so I know a lot of details
from her experience in the factory.
Image #2 Klara Before Arado This is an altered
photograph of my mother a few years before the
war, overlain with some collage and a letter dated
May, 1944,from the Arado Flugzeugwerk
(airplane factory) announcing to Berlin that
henceforth they would be known by a ‘code’
name, Freia Gmbh, to disguise the production of war material, and, presumably, the slave labor to be
used. I suspect, though, that the primary purpose was to camouflage the work from the Allied
bombings. The townsfolk saw the prisoners march through town every day, and seemed unfazed,
except for complaining about the sound of their wooden clogs on the cobblestones at four a.m. as they
were marched from the barracks to the factory.
Image #3 From her Window: Before I made a lot
of new images that combined references to Klara’s
life from before the war. For example, I had a small
photo of the temple in Kromeriz which the Nazis
burned down during the war, altered it, and
juxtaposed with it with a negative of a photograph of
her living room, in the home which she and her first
husband had barely finished building when the Nazis
entered Czechoslovakia in 1939.
Image # 4From her Window Freia Using the same
photo, I imagined what filled Klara’s mind as she sat in
these same chairs after her return. The image of the
synagogue is replaced with an image of the factory, and
the route of the cattle car journey from Freiberg to
Mauthausen. I wanted to convey the despair of the
return and her near suicidal depression when she learned
she was the only survivor of her immediate family.
Image#5 Klara:
Workservice/
Mauthausen
Here I overlaid
an altered photo
of Klara after the
war from her
emigration visa
in 1948, with a
document from
Mauthausen,
dated May
18,1945, given
to her by the American administrator so she could leave the camp to go for a walk in the countryside.
The ‘liberation’ was May 5, but the survivors had to wait for transportation to their home countries. I
tried to discern a change in her eyes that might reflect what had happened to her, inside.
As I made these images, I became obsessed with using the material objects of Klara’s life from before
the war that portrayed what her life had been. She was not always a victim, a 70 pound skeleton in rags,
she was a vibrant, modern young woman, not wealthy, but elegant, with all the accoutrements of a
middle class, cultured life in the thirties, in a small city in Central Europe.
I have her monogrammed wedding napkins, from her first marriage, in 1938. I use them every year on
Passover, along with the gold trimmed china, from Prague. I kept a number of pairs of her kid gloves,
some from Europe, some from Montreal in the 1950's. I tried to print my digital collages on each of
these. The experiments mostly were technical failures; the leather burned, or the image transfer
partially failed. I imagined tattooing, burning flesh, and crematoria. My mother talked about that
smell.
I did not find a solution which allowed direct printing on the napkins of larger images. My best effort
to date in terms of the clarity of the printed image has been to use an ordinary hobby store T shirt
transfer, but I do not care for the surface of the image, the shiny quality of the transfer as it appears to
sit on top of the fabric, and not as part
of it. I am not satisfied. I have tried
the transfers on silk, on cotton, on
linen and on leather. I have looked for
a 1930's glove box, to display the
gloves as objects, individually, or
collectively.
Image 6 Gloves Arado II The
German organizers have decided that
this will be the lead image for the
exhibition. They are printing it at
40x60 inches, on canvas. It is a pair of
Klara’s gloves, scanned, with an
overlay of a letter dated May 4, 1944,
that I got from Michael Duesing, from
one of his books, from the Arado
Flugzeugwerks, letting Berlin know
that the factory would henceworth be
known under the code name, Freia,
G.m.b.H. It is signed, “Heil Hitler!” The 1000 Jewish slave workers arrived from Auschwitz in
October, 1944.
I think I will continue to work with these objects, but it became impossible to include them in the
Freiberg Exhibit; the organizers did not have the capability to deal with them in the venue, which is a
renovated 13th century church/now conference center. I have sent them to the curators as digital
images, and am trusting them to print them, giving them leeway to find the size and the medium that
works best in the church space. This involves a necessary level of trust, and another way to collaborate
with Stefanie Busch, the young German artist, and the organizers. As part of the commemorative
events, they have included in the catalogue written interviews with the artists, in which they asked me
questions about my relationship to Freiberg, how this exhibit came about, and my feelings about it and
about the town. This has been a constantly evolving and expanding journey between word, text, and
object. I make collage, I transfer to object, or rescan the object, and so on. There are Michael’s three
books about Freiberg, which contain fragments of my mother’s narrative. And where he published a
note I left at the entrance to the factory in 2007 as the Epilogue. And now there is yet another book by
a British author, about three women from Freiberg who were pregnant in the camp, and gave birth as
prisoners. The three babies survived. One of the women is mentioned in my mother’s narrative as her
friend, Anka, who gave birth to Eva at the gates of Mauthausen. Last week I found an image in a
forthcoming book on the three babies– for which I provided fragments of my mother’s narrative-- of a
prisoner registration document including the name of the second woman, Piri (Priska) Lowenbein. My
mother’s name, Klara Loeff appears directly above hers. And their prisoner numbers, which they
received in Auschwitz, are sequential.
So I have played out the obsession with the gloves. Some are digital collages of scanned gloves and
text overlain, as here.
Image 7 Opera Glove Full Length
This glove has multiples of the same
image of Klara, transferred to the
leather, with elements of her writing:
“they didn’t know about it/they didn’t
know about it/they didn’t know about
it”. Of course, they did know about it.
So the nights that the sky turned red
over Freiberg (it was only 25 km from
the firebombing of Dresden) were
remembered by Klara as “my happiest
since the war started”. The destruction
of Dresden was the key to her survival.
Image#8 : Untitled Two
applications of collage onto
gloves. Both burned the gloves,
and altered/destroyed the image in
the attachment process. I cannot
remember where in the process I
added the black background. The
third Reich colors predominate
here. And the color of the brown
leather glove of the SS guard who
slapped my mother to the ground
in Freiberg, the night of the
firebombing of Dresden, when she
saw the red sky and said to her
friend Hedy, as they marched
along, “This is what we have been
waiting for!”
Image #9. Prisonieros de Guerra This image was made about three years ago, before I knew
about this exhibit in Germany. But it will be included because it connects several themes. The text is
from a document from Tangier, Morocco, involving packages sent by a Hungarian refugee named
Renee Reichmann, through the Spanish Red Cross to prisoners in concentration camps in Europe in
1943. One of them arrived to my mother, in Terezin, anonymous, with the postmark Tangier. It
contained chocolates. She learned who was responsible for sending it fifty years later, by accident, and
also realized that she had met this women in Montreal, in the 1960's, but no one talked about the war
then, so they did not realize the previous connection.
My mother also wrote in her narrative that she was treated by a Spanish surgeon at the end of the war,
a prisoner in Mauthausen. I only learned what a Spanish surgeon might be doing as a prisoner in
Mauthausen when I visited the Museum of Exiles, on the French/Spanish border, last year. That
Museum is dedicated to mostly leftist refugees from the Spanish Civil war who fled across the French
border in 1936, and were subsequently deported in 1939 from the French camps like Gurs, to
Mauthausen, and somehow survived six years there.
Image 10 The Note When I had my art exhibitions in Prague and in Terezin in 2007, my
cousin, Peter, who was a survivor of Terezin, asked us to meet him in Berlin, and to go to
Freiberg together to find the factory. Peter’s wife was also a daughter of survivors. We
visited the synagogue in Dresden, but did not feel at all comfortable in the city, where all
attention to history was on the suffering of the people there in the bombings. It was very
different from Berlin, where acts of commemoration of the Shoah were in evidence
everywhere.
We came to the Freiberg memorial on a Sunday, and no one was anywhere around. The taxi
driver who brought us there from the train station appeared suspicious of our motives. I
brought the roses from Dresden, because my mother loved roses, and added the note with the
‘family tree’ and picture of my twin grandchildren on an impulse at the last minute. When I
left the note, it was with feelings of anger and defiance. I felt invisible in Dresden, and wanted
to show some evidence that we were not completely destroyed, that this small piece of my
family still exists. We thought at the time that whoever found the note and flowers on
Monday morning would just put them in the trash. Later, I was very surprised to find this
note reproduced in Dr. Duesing’s book, which he sent to me. I was extremely moved, and this
has helped to release my bitterness about the indifference of people during the war.
Image 11: Studebaker before Patronado Synagogue, Havana
I included this image for this exhibit in Freiberg to show that I don’t spend all my time thinking about
the Holocaust. This is a ‘miniprint’ that was shown in Hartford Connecticut in 2013. It is a digital
collage/monotype which includes an altered photo of the main synagogue in Havana, superimposed
with an altered photo of one of the iconic late 50's American cars in the city. I do tend to gravitate
toward the “Jewish”
connection wherever
I go that is new in
the world. And I
interpret that
broadly, not just to
include Jewish
themes per se, but
any image or
narrative that
includes exile,
memory and return.
I learn from every
visit- while in
Cambodia I read a
book by a child
survivor of the
Khmer Rouge, who
was inspired to write
her story by Elie
Wiesel, and we
visited a remote
Buddhist temple
complex on the
Mekong where
survivors addressed
their trauma through
meditation. I had
proposed to include
some images from Cambodia in the Freiberg Exhibit, to expand to consider other genocides, but they
wanted to retain focus on the Holocaust.
Image 12: Our Olive Tree
In 2009 I prepared an interactive exhibit, as
series of monotypes and digital prints about
Palestine/Israel. It was in response to an op-ed
in the L.A. Times from the propaganda minister
of Hamas ,which was chilling. My work was
about listening to each other’s narratives. I
think it was before its time, then, and may still
be.
Relating to the question of Israel has always
been difficult for me. I was raised on the
margins of the Jewish community in Montreal,
not feeling I belonged. Our “family” circle was
the Czech Jewish refugees and survivors, some
of whom were claiming to be Unitarians, so it
was confusing. I am from a mixed marriage in
the sense that while both my parents were
secular Jews, and Holocaust survivors, my mother was a life long Zionist, and my father had contempt
for the whole idea of a Jewish homeland. Even after Auschwitz, he believed that a Jew had to make his
home where he was, and would not hear of even visiting there. The first thing my mother did after he
died was to book a flight to Israel, where she took my son on his 18th birthday. Although I am
spiritually and emotionally tied to Jerusalem, and to the concept of a refuge state, I abhor the biblical
entitlement ‘theory’of expansion. Everyone claims the right of return: Jews, to Israel, to Europe, to
Spain, Palestinians, to what boundaries remains to be seen, and, if you look on the internet today, there
is a website for the “ right of return” of Sudeten Germans to Czechoslovakia. I saw a rather powerful
art exhibit on that topic in Prague last year. And so it continues.
The Interview: What the German organizers wanted to know...and the background to this
exhibit.
1) Ihr Vater, Ihre Schwester und viele Verwandte sind in der Shoah umgekommen. 2007 haben Sie in
Freiberg einen Zettel mit den Worten "We are still here!" hinterlegt. Welche Gedanken verbinden sich
damit für Sie?
Your father, your sister and many of your relatives died in the Shoah. In 2007 you left a piece of paper
in Freiberg saying “We are still here!”. Which thoughts do you have about this?
1. ( First, a correction to this question, please: My father, Josef Zimmer, survived. His first
wife, Katerina Thieben and my half sister, Marketa (Ritta) died in Auschwitz. He married my
mother, Klara Loff–( who was one of the Jewish slave laborers in Freiberg, and was liberated
with the Czech women from Mauthausen,) after the war, in Prague in 1946).
“We are still here”. I have complicated feelings about the note, which have changed over
time, thanks to the reaction of the people in Freiberg.. When I had my art exhibitions in Prague
and in Terezin in 2007, my cousin, Peter, who was a survivor of Terezin, asked us to meet him
in Berlin, and to go to Freiberg together to find the factory. Peter’s wife was also a daughter
of survivors. We visited the synagogue in Dresden, but did not feel at all comfortable in the
city, where all attention to history was on the suffering of the people there in the bombings. It
was very different from Berlin, where acts of commemoration of the Shoah were in evidence
everywhere.
We came to the Freiberg memorial on a Sunday, and no one was anywhere around. The taxi
driver who brought us there from the train station appeared suspicious of our motives. I
brought the roses from Dresden, because my mother loved roses, and added the note on an
impulse at the last minute. When I left the note, it was with feelings of anger and defiance. I
felt invisible in Dresden, and wanted to show some evidence that we were not completely
destroyed, that this small piece of my family still exists. We thought at the time that whoever
found the note and flowers on Monday morning would just put them in the trash. Later, I was
very surprised to find this note reproduced in Dr. Duesing’s book, which he sent to me. I was
extremely moved, and this has helped to release my bitterness about the indifference of
people during the war.
2) Bitte erzählen Sie uns von Ihrer Schwester, dem Mädchen, das in Auschwitz ermordet worden ist.
Please tell of your sister, the girl, who was killed in Auschwitz.
2. Margarethe/Marketa/Ritta: I know very little of the facts of Ritta’s life. What I know is
from my father’s life story, which he wrote in about 1980: she was born in Prague, 1932. She
was a good student, as we have her report cards from 1939-41 where she was marked
Excellent/”Vyborny” in all subjects. (I used this report card in the image, “Spazier 4"). I think
she was a typical middle class child in a secular Jewish family. Innocent. My father wrote that
she was excited to sew the yellow star with the “J” on her jacket, as she thought it was a
special gift. She was deported to Terezin at age 10, presumed gassed in Auschwitz with her
mother at age 12. I have one postcard that was allowed to be written from Terezin showing a
return address of Hamburger Kaserne No. 119, and with her transport number W921, dated on
November 25, 1942, to an uncle in Prague. It concludes, “Grusse Meine Freunde und
Freundinen und Denkt manchmal an mich. Euere, Ritta”. Ritta was in one of the art classes
organized by Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, and the Prague Jewish Museum has several of her
drawings. I have a long relationship to these drawings, which I saw for the first time in 1979.
My relationship to Ritta is about my feeling since early on that I have a responsibility to
replace her in the world. My father was emotionally very damaged by having failed to save
her, or the rest of his family. My mother also had told me that when she came ‘home’ in June
of 1945 and learned that no one else in her immediate family survived, she decided she would
either kill herself, or have a child. So, I am the child she had. My parents did not tell me
anything about Ritta (or the Shoah) when I was a child. I found a photo of her when I was
about eight, and asked my mother who she was. My mother always protected my father, so
she insisted that I never speak to him about Ritta. He had a weak heart, and I was terrified that
it would literally kill him if I tried to talk to him about the war.
When I was about twenty five, I wrote a poem about Terezin, and Ritta. But I wrote it in
French, so great were the psychological obstacles to speaking directly about the experience.
When it was published in a literary magazine, I sent it to my parents. The next time I visited
them, my father didn’t say a word, but brought me the same picture of Ritta I had found as a
child and handed it to me. Then he left the room in tears. And that was all.
When I visited Prague in 1979, I found one of Ritta’s drawings from Terezin at the Jewish
Museum, photographed it and gave it to my parents. Again, they said nothing, but kept the
photograph on their wall in a cheap frame until my father died. So I don’t really know
anything about this child, nothing about her personality. I study her drawings and to try to get
glimpses of her, but it is impossible. I sometimes still catch myself fantasizing that I will find
her. It is strange to know that I only exist because she doesn’t.
3) Ihre Mutter gehörte zu den aus Auschwitz nach Freiberg deportierten Zwangsarbeiterinnen. W elche Gedanken
und Gefühle verbinden sich für Sie mit dem Namen "Freiberg"?
Your mother is one of the forced laborers, who were deported from Auschwitz to Freiberg. Which thought and
feelings do you have about the name “Freiberg”?
3. Thoughts about Freiberg The first ‘contact’ I had with Freiberg was when my mother had
to decide whether to accept some small amount of reparations money for her time as a slave
laborer, or try to sue as an individual to get compensation for her losses that actually was more
than symbolic. She knew nothing about the factory other than it was in Freiberg, Sachsen. I
did research. On line I found the webmaster of Freiberg (this was about 1999) and inquired
about the factory. He was a young man, and wrote that he knew nothing of such a factory.
Sometime later I received another e mail from this man, Holger Gross, saying he had talked
with his father in law, who did remember it. He went on his own and found it and sent me a
photograph of the ruin. So this was the first feeling I had that people were willing to
acknowledge and take responsibility for remembering what happened there. My mother’s
anger about the denial of history, and of responsibility, is shown in my repetitive use in my art
work of her phrase “They didn’t know about it”.
My mother wrote about her experience in Freiberg, all the facts, but not much about her
emotions. She always referred to Freiberg as “the factory”, not as a concentration camp. It was
worse than Terezin, but not as bad as Auschwitz. She commented that the townspeople
complained that the sound of wooden shoes on the cobblestones awoke them as the laborers
were marched through the streets from the barracks to the factory at 4:00 a.m. (Diese Schuhe
Machten Eine Menge Larm). On the other hand she also noted when someone was decent to
her, such as the Freiberg dentist she was allowed to see in January, 1945. She and the other
‘Czech girls’- her friends Anka, Marta, Irma, Hedy, did their best to support and protect each
other, and to be as incompetent as possible in their “jobs” working on the airplanes.
4) Was hat Sie dazu gebracht, die Shoah, die Leiden Ihres Vaters, Ihrer Schwester, Ihrer Mutter in künstlerischen
Werken zu verarbeiten? Welche Rolle spielt Kunst heute in Ihrem Leben?
How did it come that you involve the Shoah and the sufferings of your father, your sister and your mother in your
works of art? What is the role of art in your life today?
4. I never had any formal art training, but always had a strong desire to create. Because it was
so difficult to talk about the past, even after my father died, I turned to art as a way of
communicating with my mother. I did it through the poetry that I wrote when I was young,
and the collages I started to make after my mother came to live with me in her last years.
Even though she is gone, I still need to mark her story, and other, similar stories about
memory, exile, and responsibility. It is a complement to seeking justice through the law, right
brain to left brain. I think this need for narrative is why I find it difficult to make images that
are purely abstract– I continue to need to try to tell a specific story that might touch the heart
or spirit of another person. As I get older I find I am more attached to the process of making
art, how I feel when I am absorbed in it, and the moment when I decide that an image ‘works’.
5. Sie zeigen Ihre Kunstwerke zum ersten Mal in Freiberg. Was möchten Sie den Besuchern der Ausstellung
vermitteln? Welche Botschaft verbinden Sie damit?
You exhibit your works of art in Freiberg for the first time. What is your message to the visitors of the exhibition?
5. I am most grateful to each person who chooses to come to this event and look at my art
work as part of this exhibition. I have great admiration for the continued effort in Germany to
teach about the past. I think that it must be difficult to be young and to carry the burden of
remembering what someone’s grandparents did or did not do. I just can say for myself that
this whole experience of my relationship to Freiberg, which began fifteen years ago as part of
a search for reparations for my mother, has helped me to move out of my own bitterness and
grief and toward compassion and peace. When I was young I could not comprehend how an
entire population could be indifferent to the evil of the Nazis. Now I find myself focusing my
attention on the small acts of decency, of individuals doing what they could. I would like to
think that somewhere in Freiberg is the son or granddaughter of the dentist who treated my
mother’s tooth infection in January, 1945. I wish I could say thank you for disobeying the
order of the Lagerkommandant not to waste anesthetic on her, and for letting her sit in a warm
room for an extra hour. This act of kindness restored her human dignity, and might have saved
her life. The Talmud says: “Whoever saves one life, is considered to have saved the world.” I
have to believe this is true.
6) Die Anschläge in Paris haben auch jüdische Opfer gefordert. Sie sind einzig und allein wegen ihres jüdischen
Glaubens ermordet worden. Keine Karrikatur, keine politische Äußerung hat sie ins Visier der Mörder gebracht.
Was denken Sie über den gegenwärtigen Antisemitismus?
The attacks in Paris also claimed Jewish victims. They have been killed only for the reason of being Jewish, but no
caricature or political statement put them in the crosshairs of the murderers. What do you think about the current
anti-semitism?
6. When I was younger, I believed that the Shoah was so horrible, that nothing like that could
be allowed to happen again, to anyone. The current state of affairs in the world generally is
quite terrifying, and in Europe it is especially complicated because the anti semitism appears
to be a new mutation of an old virus, now all mixed up with anti-zionism. There is always anti
semitism- in some generations it is in remission, and in some places it is less virulent, but the
virus remains. As Sartre said, “If Jews did not exist, anti-semites would invent them.” For
myself, I must admit that feeling drawn back to Europe, as part of a completion of my own
personal work on this topic, just at this time when the arc of history seems to be bending
backwards, makes me wonder. My family tried unsuccessfully to escape from Europe in
1939, and now I am coming back, voluntarily, and to Dresden of all places? My twin
grandchildren chose, last year, with my encouragement to become Bar and Bat Mitzvah. They
are the first in four generations in my family to affirmatively and publicly identify as Jews. I
think my father, who was a cynic, and an atheist, would say I am an idiot. But my mother
always held, even in her constant state of anxiety, to optimism, and always pushed me into the
world to stand up for what is decent and right. So, we are still here.
7) Was bewegt Sie angesichts der Tatsache, dass die Ausstellung in Freiberg W erke von Künstlerinnen aus drei
Generationen und aus drei Länder, einer Überlebenden des Freiberger Lagers, der Tochter einer Überlebenden
und einer jungen Deutschen zeigt? Was kann Kunst bewirken?
What are your feelings about the fact, that the exhibition in Freiberg shows works of art of artists of three
generations and from three countries, among them a survivor of the Freiberg camp, a survivor’s daughter and a
young German? What can be achieved by art?
7. I am so honored to be part of this, especially with Mrs. Hoskova and Ms. Busch. I feel
very much part of a ‘bridge’ generation, between the survivors, and the future. Art is very
powerful. It can sustain us and heal us. It helps us make sense of our memories. My mother,
like me, had no talent for drawing. Once I took her to an “art therapy” workshop when she was
about 85, where we both did simple tracings of our hands, and colored them with water colors.
She looked at mine, which was shades of brown, and said, “That reminds me of the glove
worn by the SS man in Freiberg who slapped me.” Later, she said about hers, which was the
color of dawn, “I wouldn’t say this in front of them, but mine reminds me of the color of the
sky over Dresden during the firebombing. I knew when I saw that sky that I would survive. It
was the happiest day of my life since the war began.”