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 "It was a light bulb moment," said Morris, who put together an
exhibit of art created by some of the 6 million Jews killed by
the Nazi regime.
"Rendering Witness: Holocaust-Era Art as Testimony," which opens
this week at the lower Manhattan museum, comes at a time when
U.S. anti-Semitic hate crimes have spiked and memories of the
horrors of the Holocaust are fading.
“This exhibition stands against and educates about the dangers
of anti-Semitism, racism, bigotry of any kind,” said Morris,
describing the 21 powerful depictions of the Holocaust, mostly
by Jewish prisoners.
It all started with another institution's request to borrow some
of the pieces in the museum's collection. As Morris reviewed the
dozens of works in its vaults, he knew immediately that it was
high time for the museum to mount an exhibition of its own.
“Behind the statistics, and behind the numbers and behind the
scenes where we see hundreds of thousands of people in
concentration camps, these are actual people who had
multi-faceted lives,” Morris said.
Among them was a 12-year-old girl, Helga Weissova, who brought
art supplies with her when she was sent to Terezin Ghetto and
concentration camp, about 30 miles (48 km) north of Prague in
the Czech Republic, in October 1944. Before Weissova was
deported from Terezin to Auschwitz, the infamous slave-labor
camp in southern Poland, she gave her drawings to her uncle, a
fellow prisoner who hid them behind a wall.
The show features her 1943 work in colored pencil on paper,
"Transport Leaving Terezin," which shows gun-toting guards
ushering a huddled group of prisoners carrying suitcases.
Weissova is now in her 90s and living in Prague, but many of the
artists never made it out of the deadly camps.
Peter Loewenstein of Czechoslovakia was deported in 1941 to
Terezin. He gave the 70 drawings to his mother before he was
then deported in 1944 to the notorious Auschwitz camp.
His mother and sister would soon be deported to Auschwitz as
well, but not before turning over the art to a family friend.
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His sister, the only family member who survived the camp, recovered
the portfolio after the war, including "Eight Men in Coats with
Stars," a 1944 ink on paper depiction of Jews forced to wear
identification badges.
Equally powerful is a watercolor by Marvin Halye, a member of the
104th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army, who liberated Nordhausen
concentration camp in Germany in 1945.
After seeing the few surviving prisoners tending to thousands of
bodies, he rushed to paint "Liberation of Nordhausen, Civilians
Covering Corpses."
The show, which runs Jan. 16 through July 5, opens amid a spike in
anti-Semitic hate crimes across the United States and particularly
in New York City, home to the largest Jewish community outside of
Israel.
Anti-Jewish hate crimes in New York in 2019 were at a 28-year high,
according to professor Brian Levin, director of the Center for the
Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San
Bernardino.
In the most recent attack, a machete-wielding man wounded five
people gathered last month for a Hanukkah celebration at a rabbi's
home in the New York City suburb of Monsey.
Just weeks earlier, a shooting at a kosher supermarket in nearby
Jersey City, New Jersey left two Hasidic Jews dead.
Hate crimes are escalating at a time when many American adults lack
basic knowledge of the Holocaust.
The greatest gaps in understanding are among U.S. millennials -
people in their 20s and 30s. Two-thirds of them do not know what
Auschwitz is, said a recent survey by the Conference on Jewish
Material Claims Against Germany.
(This story corrects timeline in paragraph 10)
(Reporting by Barbara Goldberg; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
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