The yoke of memory is borne by Holocaust survivors day in and day out. Over the years, they have unburdened themselves piece by piece: some by writing, some by the spoken word and some by means of the visual image, in art and in film. Each one has found a personal path to share his or her experience with immediate family, fellow Jews and others, wherever they may be. The unique commandment they were given – not on the peak of Mount Sinai, but in the depths of the abyss – is that of telling their story, as stated in Exodus 13:8: “On that day you shall tell your child” – the sons and daughters of the human race.
The testimonies of the survivors first entered the public discourse during the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. That is when we learned to listen to their personal accounts. The annals of each survivor became interwoven, in a dense fabric of warp and weft, with each other – and the texture of the Holocaust’s collective memory slowly took shape. Since then, a supreme effort has been made to gather testimonies in every place where survivors live, turning each into a witness in the trial of history.
However, the word in whatever form – in writing, in speech – is not the only instrument to guarantee memory. What happens to those for whom the word is not the appropriate vehicle for expression, who committed their memories to canvas, or by chiseling or carving in wood – a language whose syntax is visual?
Since its inception, hundreds of artworks, the fruit of paintbrush and chisel, have been collected at Yad Vashem in nothing less than a wondrous fashion. This is a tremendous body of visual testimony, that with the printed and uttered words jointly give a voice to the survivors. This corpus has yet to be comprehensively studied in a manner that does not examines each individual work, but how the individual remembers by means of expression and bequeaths the legacy of remembrance to others.
The Yad Vashem exhibition “Virtues of Memory: Six Decades of Holocaust Survivors’ Creativity” opens up this corpus of artistic expression, enabling us, those who were not there, to touch a reality through visual aspects. It presents a language of powerful signs and symbols, stemming from the directness of the expression, and the urgent need of the one who remembers to delve into the depths of memory, bleak and unadorned. It is not an attempt to recreate reality, but rather reality itself, both external and internal, tinted in the hues of personal experience.
The exhibition is arranged by thematic or visual categories of the works. Survivor testimonies, echoing the impetus of their creative expression, complement the unity of the exhibition’s presentation.
These "virtues of memory" thus take their shape and form in a multi-faceted visual puzzle. Each work is the voice of an individual; combined they form a multi-voiced choir, powerfully reverberating throughout the exhibition space.
“Virtues of Memory: Six Decades of Holocaust Survivors’ Creativity” opened at the Yad Vashem Exhibitions Pavilion on 12 April 2010. The exhibition was supported by: Anonymous, Switzerland; the Jewish Community of Tessaloniki, Greece; in memory of Hanna Strauss Ricardo z"l, The Netherlands; the Jerusalem Municipality, Israel; Ron and Dina Goldschlager, Australia; the Centre of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel; and Miriam Gertler, Germany.
First published in Yad Vashem Jerusalem magazine, #57, April 2010
