The Last of the Unjust

Source: Judy Maltz, Haaretz, April 11, 2013.

The very first interview Claude Lanzmann recorded for his groundbreaking nine-and-a-half hour documentary “Shoah” ended up on the cutting-room floor. It was an interview he conducted almost 40 years ago in Rome with Benjamin Murmelstein, a Viennese rabbi and intellectual who served as the last head of the Jewish Council in Theresienstadt. Although the question-and-answer session went on for an entire week, generating hours upon hours of tape, Lanzmann never found an appropriate place for it.

Until now.

These outtakes from “Shoah” form the basis of Lanzmann’s soon-to-be-released film, “The Last of the Unjust” (a play on the title of Andre Schwarz-Bart’s classic French novel), a three-and-a-half hour documentary that reveals, in his words, “the height of Nazi cruelty and perversity.” Lanzmann promises that the testimony featured in his latest cinematic work is the ultimate rebuttal to the “so-called banality of evil” theory popularized by Hannah Arendt – whom he disparagingly refers to as “Frau Arendt” – by demonstrating just how corrupt and conniving a man was Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann.

In addition to Murmelstein, the film has two other protagonists: Claude Lanzmann of today and Claude Lanzmann of 40 years ago.

“Yes, I am also an actor in this film,” the world-renowned filmmaker tells Haaretz. “You can see me at two very different ages, and one certainly needs courage to do something like this.”

Lanzmann is in Israel this week as a guest of the Jerusalem Cinemateque, where he presented “Shoah,” his 1985 landmark film, as part of a month-long retrospective on his cinematic work, all of which focuses on the Jewish and Israeli experience.

The editing on his latest film, says the 87-year-old, was extremely draining. “For two years, I edited for 10 hours a day,” he says. “I’m blind by now.”

And where does someone his age find that sort of energy? “I have no age, and this is my problem,” says Lanzmann. “I have a very strange relationship with time, because to be able to work 12 years on a film, as I did on ‘Shoah,’ you cannot do it if time is a normal thing in your life. For me, time stops. It does not pass by.”

Lanzmann is pacing around, conducting business in French over the phone, as we enter his suite at the Jerusalem King David Hotel. When he eventually sits down, he makes a point of letting us know he was not at all happy with a certain story that appeared on the front page of Haaretz the previous day. It was a story about European film archives profiting from their collections of Holocaust footage. What angers him is not that anyone would be making money off of images of genocide, but rather, that anyone would dare suggest that any such images exist.

“They don’t,” he says categorically. “The core of the story is the gas chambers, and there is no footage from inside the gas chambers. All other sorts of footage are side things.”

When “Shoah” was broadcast in weekly TV segments in Iran two years ago, Lanzmann took the opportunity to write an open letter to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the world’s most notorious Holocaust denier, reassuring the national leader he had nothing to fear.

“I said ‘If you want to find proof in ‘Shoah’ that the Shoah really happened, you will not find this proof. Why? Because there is not one single corpse in ‘Shoah’. And that’s because there were no corpses. People who arrived in Auschwitz were gassed within the first two hours. Their bodies were turned to ashes, and these ashes were dumped in sacks in the river or allowed to blow away in the wind.”

Indeed, “Shoah” was considered revolutionary in its time not only because of its length but because it relied entirely on first-person testimony and did not incorporate any archival footage. As Lanzmann explains his approach to filmmaking:

“The voices of the Sonderkommando [the Jewish prisoners in the death camps forced to dispose of the bodies], the people who got as close as was possible to the actual killing, and the voices of the killers are much stronger than any image.”

Two months ago, when he was awarded the Honorary Golden Bear Award for lifetime achievement at the Berlin International Film Festival, Lanzmann had the opportunity, after quite a long time, to watch “Shoah” again. “It was difficult,” he acknowledges. “It’s a powerful film, even for me.”

Before beginning work on his latest film, Lanzmann had taken a break from filmmaking for a few years to complete his memoir, “The Patagonian Hare,” recently translated into Hebrew. Meanwhile, he continues to serve as chief editor of Les Temps Modernes, a journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Does he prefer one form of storytelling to another? “There’s not much difference between them,” he responds. “To make a film is a way of writing and in the book ‘The Patagonian Hare,’ there are many films, in fact, very beautiful films, but I will not be the one to make them.”

Lanzmann is surprised to hear that so many Jews from his native France have relocated to Tel Aviv in recent years. “Tel Aviv – really?” he asks. “I thought they liked Netanya.” When we discuss whether they are justified to feel threatened by anti-Semitism in France, Lanzmann is skeptical.

“I think it’s exaggerated. One cannot blame the institutions or the government in France – they are very vigilant. One never knows, but I don’t think it will develop in an unbearable way.”

Known around the world as a staunch defender of Israel, Lanzmann hesitates to say anything critical about the country or its leaders.

“I have always cared more about what unites Israelis than what divides them,” he says. “Whether they’re leftists or rightists, no leader has ever said a word about Israel’s nuclear weapon. They know to keep a secret. When they are abroad, they also speak the same language. Even Haaretz does.”

When asked to weigh in on Culture Minister Limor Livnat’s request that Israeli filmmakers exercise more self-censorship, he offers a nuanced distinction.

“Sometime there are people who make films not for Israel but for abroad – they think that people will like these films because they are critical of Israel,” he says. “But there are also those who criticize Israel out of sympathy and compassion – these are the best ones. I think the people we’re talking about – they can be critics of Israel but they do it out of sympathy. “

Lanzmann says he’s extremely impressed by many of the films coming out of Israel in recent years.

“There are very gifted filmmakers in this country,” he says. But no, he hasn’t seen either of the two Israeli documentaries – “The Gatekeepers” and “Five Broken Cameras” – that were candidates for the Oscar this year. Referring to the former heads of the Shin Bet, interviewed in “The Gatekeepers,” he notes half-joking, “I know some of them, and I know how they were and how they talk when they retire. They become ultra-lefties.”

No, he has no plans at the moment for another film, but yes, definitely another book. Is he willing to give a hint about its subject?

“It’s still too fresh, but there are not many subjects worthy of interest,” he says. “You have life or death – that’s all. And they’re connected.”

50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. and Mrs. Kraus

50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. and Mrs. Kraus tells the story of Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus, a Jewish couple from Philadelphia who traveled to Nazi-controlled Vienna in spring 1939 to save a group of children. Amidst the impending horrors of the Holocaust, they put themselves in harm’s way to bring what would become the single largest-known group of children allowed into the U.S. during that time. Narrated by Alan Alda, with Mamie Gummer reading from the memoir of Mrs. Kraus, this documentary, co-presented by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, debuts on Holocaust Remembrance Day, Monday, April 8, on HBO.

Several years before he began filming in 2010, first-time filmmaker Steven Pressman received Eleanor Kraus’ unpublished memoir from his wife, Liz Perle, who was the Krauses’ granddaughter. Written decades earlier, the manuscript spelled out in rich detail the Krauses’ amazing mission. 50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. and Mrs. Kraus weaves together excerpts from Eleanor’s journals, archival footage of Vienna and Berlin under Hitler’s rule and rare photographs of the children who would be rescued. In addition to interviews with Holocaust historians, including Paul Shapiro, director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Krauses’ granddaughter, much of this bittersweet tale is told by some of the surviving children, who are now in their 70s and 80s. Watch the trailer.

Source: HBO.

The Jew in the Glass Box

Source: Haaretz, March 30, 2013.

Nearly 70 years after the Holocaust, there is no more sensitive an issue in German life as the role of Jews. With fewer than 200,000 Jews among Germany’s 82 million people, few Germans born after World War II know any Jews or much about them. To help educate postwar generations, an exhibit at the Jewish Museum features a Jewish man or woman seated inside a glass box for two hours a day through August to answer visitors’ questions about Jews and Jewish life. The base of the box asks: “Are there still Jews in Germany?” ”A lot of our visitors don’t know any Jews and have questions they want to ask,” museum official Tina Luedecke said. “With this exhibition we offer an opportunity for those people to know more about Jews and Jewish life.” But not everybody thinks putting a Jew on display is the best way to build understanding and mutual respect.

Since the exhibit — “The Whole Truth, everything you wanted to know about Jews” — opened this month, the “Jew in the Box,” as it is popularly known, has drawn sharp criticism within the Jewish community — especially in the city where the Nazis orchestrated the slaughter of 6 million Jews until Adolf Hitler’s defeat in 1945. ”Why don’t they give him a banana and a glass of water, turn up the heat and make the Jew feel really cozy in his glass box,” prominent Berlin Jewish community figure Stephan Kramer told The Associated Press. “They actually asked me if I wanted to participate. But I told them I’m not available.”

The exhibit is reminiscent of Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann sitting in a glass booth at the 1961 trial in Israel which led to his execution. And it’s certainly more provocative than British actress Tilda Swinton sleeping in a glass box at a recent performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Eran Levy, an Israeli who has lived in Berlin for years, was horrified by the idea of presenting a Jew as a museum piece, even if to answer Germans’ questions about Jewish life. ”It’s a horrible thing to do — completely degrading and not helpful,” he said. “The Jewish Museum absolutely missed the point if they wanted to do anything to improve the relations between Germans and Jews.” But several of the volunteers, including both German Jews and Israelis living in Berlin, said the experience in the box is little different from what they go through as Jews living in the country that produced the Nazis. ”With so few of us, you almost inevitably feel like an exhibition piece,” volunteer Leeor Englander said. “Once you’ve been ‘outed’ as a Jew, you always have to be the expert and answer all questions regarding anything related to religion, Israel, the Holocaust and so on.”

Museum curator Miriam Goldmann, who is Jewish, believes the exhibit’s provocative “in your face” approach is the best way to overcome the emotional barriers and deal with a subject that remains painful for both Jews and non-Jews. ”We wanted to provoke, that’s true, and some people may find the show outrageous or objectionable,” Goldmann said. “But that’s fine by us.” The provocative style is evident in other parts of the special exhibition, including some that openly raise many stereotypes of Jews widespread not only in Germany but elsewhere in Europe. One includes a placard that asks “how you recognize a Jew?” It’s next to an assortment of yarmulkes, black hats and women’s hair covers hanging from the ceiling on thin threads. Another asks if Jews consider themselves the chosen people. It includes a poem by Jewish author Leonard Fein: “How odd of God to choose the Jews. But how on earth could we refuse?” Yet another invites visitors to express their opinion to such questions as “are Jews particularly good looking, influential, intelligent, animal loving or business savvy?”

Despite the criticisms, the “Jew in the Box” has proven a big hit among visitors.

Read the full article.

Maximilian Schell in The Man in the Glass Booth

 

Room 237. Is “The Shining” about the Holocaust?

Source: J. Hoberman, Tablet, March 28, 2013

Even people who haven’t seen it know that The Shining, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of the Stephen King novel, is the scarific tale of a stir-crazy caretaker—Jack Nicholson, no less—driven mad by the ghosts haunting an isolated, off-season hotel to murder his wife, played by Shelley Duvall, and their small son, who happens to be psychic. But, was this contribution to the horror cycle of the late Carter era also Kubrick’s meditation on the Holocaust?

That’s one theory advanced in the new essay-film Room 237 by Rodney Ascher, an engaging survey of the various exegeses that have attached themselves to Kubrick’s horror film in the 30-odd years since its original release (and especially since the introduction of DVDs and development of the Internet). Other, not necessarily related, takes: The Shining, as revealed by Kubrick’s co-scenarist Diane Johnson, literalizes Freud’s notion of the unheimlich [uncanny] in making the familiar strange; the movie is a coded admission that, at the behest of the federal government, Kubrick faked the Moon landing photos; The Shining is an updated version of Theseus and the Minotaur, or an exercise in subliminal advertising techniques, or an exposé of what film historian David A. Cook termed “the murderous system of economic exploitation which has sustained the country since, like the Overlook Hotel, it was built upon an Indian burial ground.”

Room 237 revels in all of the above interpretations and lets them ricochet off each other at crazy angles. One theory never bruited is Kubrick’s own bland disclaimer that “a story of the supernatural cannot be taken apart and analyzed too closely.” As Warner Bros. was telling reporters back in November 1978, “Stanley’s trying to make a movie that will really scare people,” to which Diane Johnson added, “Stanley wants to make the best horror film ever made.” That’s one reason why, 18 months, two endings, and many trailers later, The Shining was seen as an anticlimax when press-previewed only days before its May 1980 opening.

I well remember the disappointed WTF response among critics who were mainly impressed by the movie’s fluid SteadiCam and swooping helicopter shots. (Pauline Kael began her review by noting that if The Shining “was about anything that you can be sure of, it’s tracking.”) People were amused by Nicholson’s over-the-top performance as well as Shelley Duvall’s not-unjustified hysteria, but even New York Times critic Janet Maslin, who liked the movie, had to admit that the panoply of ghosts, ghouls, and guys in bear suits uncorked, along with a gore-gushing elevator, for the grand finale were “preposterous,” if not risible. The Shining was panned by many reviewers (and received not a single Oscar nomination), although audiences made it a hit—the biggest, by some accounts, of Kubrick’s career.

More conventionally entertaining than the movie it parses and certainly the recipient of far better notices, Room 237—which is named for the Overlook’s most sinister suite—embeds scenes from The Shining in a humorous montage that encompasses everything from F.W. Murnau’s Faust to the 1940 Thief of Bagdad to Hitchcock’s Spellbound to a late-night-TV favorite like The Brain From Planet Arous (an alien-possession flick from 1957) while cross-referencing the Kubrick oeuvre, thus commenting on the comments made by a quartet of exegetes.

Do the Kabbalist readings or wild free associations that Room 237 celebrates improve The Shining? Let’s say that they create a parallel text: Lost in the Overlook, in search of the overlooked. (After sitting through 100 minutes of reasonable and outlandish analyses, I found myself inclined to agree with Nicholson when he tells the phantom bartender with whom he’s been schmoozing in the Overlook’s elaborately haunted ballroom, “Anything you say, Lloyd. Anything you say.”) Room 237 raises questions beyond The Shining and even Kubrick’s intent: Are movies meant to be solved like crossword puzzles or decoded like ancient hieroglyphs?

The Shining has evolved into something like the egghead Rocky Horror Picture Show. Put another way: Is this sort of over-interpretation intrinsic to movies in general or was Kubrick practicing a radically different sort of filmmaking that would make it intrinsic to his work in particular? The Surrealists delighted in the ultra-subjective, if not paranoid, elaboration of their favorite movies, calling the practice of imagining material beyond or hidden within the film “irrational enlargement.” It’s the main factor in the making of a cult film—something that only an audience can do, seizing upon and emphasizing aspects of a movie that, intentional or not, transcend the narrative framework. The truism that no one quite sees the same movie is here made literal.

Read the full article.

Hologram Survivors

Source: Katie McDonough, Salon, February 5, 2013

A research team at the University of Southern California is working to create holograms of elderly Holocaust survivors that could be used by museums as part of an interactive, oral history exhibit. Once developed, these holograms could be projected into the air so that museum visitors can approach them and ask them questions, according to the Associated Press.

Each hologram will be accompanied by a voice-recognition program, that will “hear” what museum-goers ask and provide answers.

Pinchas Gutter, who was incarcerated in a Warsaw ghetto for more than three years before being moved to the labor camps, including Buchenwald, was one of the first Holocaust survivors to participate in the digital archiving program. To create his hologram, Gutter answered nearly 500 questions from researchers over a five day period. To ensure high-fidelity playback, he was filmed with 3-D cameras from every possible angle on a light stage. The lights are hot, the work taxing, but many aging survivors are willing to withstand the discomfort to provide their testimony. Or as Gutter’s digital likeness told the audience during a recent demonstration, “I tell my story for the purpose of improving humanity.”

On this story read also The Huffington Post

Teaching the Holocaust in Tehran

Source: Fox News, January 26, 2013.

Hardline clerics in Iran who deny the Holocaust had their chance Friday night to tune in and confront their ignorance of history.

On Friday, an opposition Iranian satellite channel based in London aired “Genocide,” an Academy Award-winning 1980 documentary on the Holocaust produced by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The sobering film, aired with subtitles in Farsi, was shown in order to combat the Iranian regime’s frequent denial of one of history’s most tragic events.

The Wiesenthal Center, a global Jewish human rights organization which also is home to the Museum of Tolerance, Holocaust museums in Los Angeles, Jerusalem and New York, coordinated the showing to coincide with International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27.

“Genocide,” or “Nasl Keshi, in Farsi, has been aired around the world, but Friday’s viewing was the first time Iranians have been able to see the film. The film aired on Iran’s NTV Simay Azadi, on satellite and streaming online.

Read the full article.

Cartoonists Against the Holocaust

Source: Sylviane Gold, The New York Times, January 18, 2013

It may take a village to raise a child, but what does it take to ensure that that child grows up to respect people raised in different ways by other villages? “Cartoonists Against the Holocaust,” an exhibition combining the efforts of a Westchester County high school and two nonprofit organizations, in White Plains and Washington, suggests a history lesson.

Created in Washington by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, brought to Westchester by the Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center and installed at the Museum of Arts and Culture in New Rochelle High School’s new wing, “Cartoonists Against the Holocaust” merits its subtitle, “Art in the Service of Humanity.”

The title itself, however, is a bit of a misnomer. The cartoon reproductions in this small, eye-opening show are not decrying the crimes of the Third Reich. And let’s face it: Holocaust deniers notwithstanding, most of us, even the students who will be visiting the exhibition as part of their course work, don’t need to be told that the Nazis were evil. The cartoonists represented here were, rather, using their art to cajole, embarrass and pillory the politicians in London and Washington who failed to help save Jewish lives when they had the opportunity.

There was the infamous episode of the St. Louis, the stranded German passenger ship whose 900-plus refugees had to return to Europe after being refused entry to the New World, first by Cuba and then by the United States. There was Britain’s unrelenting opposition to opening Palestine to fleeing European Jews. There were international conferences about the Jewish plight that resulted in much talk and no action.

These cartoonists took umbrage. Some, including The New York Post’s Stan MacGovern, responded with simple, scathing images, like the one he drew in 1944, after the Nazis started deporting Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. With the walls of Jerusalem in the distance, a pathetic figure on all fours representing “500,000 Jews in Hungary” reaches desperately for the Palestine visas in the pocket of John Bull’s tailcoat, while a ribbon marked “Delay” drapes the Englishman’s wrists and he says, “Sorry, my hands are tied.”

Other examples are equally blunt but display more finesse in the drawing. In Fred L. Packer’s “Ashamed,” published in The New York Daily Mirror in June 1939, as the trapped passengers of the St. Louis were making headlines, the Statue of Liberty averts her gaze from a refugee ship steaming away from the New York skyline, turned away by the enormous “Keep Out” sign hanging from her torch.

There are also cartoons that serve not just to make a political point but also to display the academic training and sheer artistry of the draftsman, like Arthur Szyk’s “Palestine Restricted” (1944). With a crowd of Jews trapped in front of a locked gate as a Nazi vulture attacks, it isn’t that different in content from the Packer and the MacGovern cartoons. But visually, its ornate composition, rich detailing and haunted faces have more in common with a Rembrandt etching.

Another exquisitely drawn work by Szyk, who arrived in the United States from Poland in 1940, shows Hitler meeting with Himmler, Goering and Goebbels to complain that they are running out of Jews to murder. In a heart-rending postscript, Szyk penciled in a dedication to one of the Polish victims of the genocide: his mother.

Both Szyk cartoons appeared in the New York newspaper PM, a reminder that once upon a time in America, publications like PM and Ken magazine proudly proclaimed their leftist politics in words and pictures. Eric Godal’s sharp line found its way into both journals, deriding oblivious bureaucrats in the State Department in PM in 1943 and, in Ken in 1938, evoking the long history of anti-Semitism with an overhead view of an itinerant Jew straddling a map of Europe.

But mainstream publications could be just as vociferous; The Christian Science Monitor’s Paul Carmack reacted to the 1938 Kristallnacht attacks in Germany with “Best Answer to Race Persecution,” making the case early and clearly for “Assistance.”

In a world where the term “ethnic cleansing” no longer elicits shock, the show offers another answer: education. Assembled by the Holocaust scholar Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute, its cartoons are part of a larger project that will present some 100 similar works in a book to be published in spring. The Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center plans to distribute the text to schools in Westchester and to train local teachers in using the cartoons in their classrooms. But the 16 cartoons in this show, open to the public during school hours whether or not the security guards at the front desk know it, are eloquent enough on their own.

Cattelan’s Hitler in Warsaw Ghetto

Source: The Guardian, December 28, 2012

A statue of Adolf Hitler praying on his knees has sparked controversy after going on display in the former Warsaw ghetto.

The artwork by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, titled Him, has been installed in the Polish capital where thousands of Jews were killed or sent to their deaths by the Nazi regime.

The statue has attracted large numbers of visitors since its installation last month, but some organisations have criticised the decision to erect it in such a sensitive area.

One Jewish advocacy group, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, described the statue’s placement as “a senseless provocation which insults the memory of the Nazis’ Jewish victims”.

“As far as the Jews were concerned, Hitler’s only ‘prayer’ was that they be wiped off the face of the earth,” the group’s Israel director, Efraim Zuroff, said in a statement.

The Hitler statue is visible from a hole in a wooden gate and viewers can only see the back of the small figure praying in a courtyard.

Cattelan has not made it clear what Hitler is praying for, although organisers of the exhibition in which it features claim the statue is meant to make people reflect on the nature of evil.

Fabio Cavallucci, director of the Centre for Contemporary Art, which oversaw the installation, said: “There is no intention from the side of the artist or the centre to insult Jewish memory.

“It’s an artwork that tries to speak about the situation of hidden evil everywhere.”

It is estimated that about 300,000 Jews who lived in the ghetto either died from hunger or disease or were sent to their deaths in concentration camps under the Nazi rule.

Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, said he was consulted on the installation’s placement but did not oppose it because it conveyed a strong moral question by provoking the audience.

He said he was reassured by the organisers who told him the statue did not aim to rehabilitate Hitler but instead show that evil can present itself in the guise of a “sweet praying child”.

“I felt there could be educational value to it,” Schudrich added.

 

The Girl in the Red Coat

The girl in the red coat is the most famous symbol in Schindler’s List, and has become one of the popular icons of Holocaust visual culture. But what is its meaning? According to director Steven Spielberg the red coat – the only color image in the film, apart from the Shabbat candles in the opening and the final scene at Schindler’s grave in Jerusalem – evokes the “red flag” the Jews waved at the Allied powers during World War II as a cry for help.

The red coat detail is described by Thomas Keneally in his novel Schindler’s Ark (the book on which the film is based). It comes from the true story of a little girl named Gittel who was well-known in the Kraków Ghetto and actually used to wear a red coat (she was killed in the liquidation of the ghetto on March 13th, 1943).

So, in the ghetto massacre sequence, this symbol stands for the innocence of the Jews murdered by the Nazis and directly speaks to Schindler’s conscience turning a war-profiteer into a hero. But how?

Few spectators noticed that the red coat turns into b/w when Schindler isn’t able to perceive the girl anymore (she escapes and hides under a bed).

This is a turning point in the film and in its melodramatic structure. What we have here is the visualization of Oskar Schindler’s psychological process. The viewer of the film is asked to identify not only with Schindler’s gaze but with his sudden awareness that the gray, anonymous mass of people murdered by Nazis is composed in fact of innocent individuals. This affective personalization is the ultimate attempt to conceive the immensity of genocide in terms of individual human life, dismissing its abstract, unintelligible dimension. That’s why the child is visually set apart from the crowd through the red color. But this color only exists in Schindler’s gaze, in a sort of dreamish sequence.

The sequence that follows is figuratively linked to the ghetto massacre scene. Now we see Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) on the balcony of his house in Plaszow Camp randomly shooting at the prisoners. As in the ghetto sequence, the point-of-view shot invites the spectator’s identification with Goeth’s gaze. But the target of the shooting is now anonymous, almost abstract and stylized.

A sort of routine is suggested here, the everydayness of evil and murder. But, what is most important, the sequence portrays dehumanization as a psychological process, through which moral inhibitions are removed and the enemy is perceived as less than human.

The red coat, as we have seen, stands for the exact opposite process.

Ashes and Painting

Source: The Jerusalem Post, December 7, 2012

Sweden has launched an investigation into an artist who made a painting out of Holocaust victims’ ashes, AFP reported Friday.

Police said the prosecutor’s office would investigate the case and was considering pressing charges against artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff. Police inspector Annika Johansson told AFP that authorities launched the investigation in response to a complaint filed by a member of the public, alleging the painting was “disturbing the peace of the dead.”

A Swedish art gallery owner has defended his gallery’s decision to show a painting made out of Holocaust victims’ ashes as “having no moral flaws.”

Martin Bryder, who owns a gallery in Lund, told Sverige Radio that he “sees no moral problem or flaw with exhibiting” a painting which the artist von Hausswolff made from ashes of Holocaust victims from the Majdanek extermination camp.

According to a local newspaper, Sydsvenskan, Von Hausswolff had collected the ashes more than 20 years ago. The exhibition is scheduled to open at the Martin Bryder Gallery in Lund on Dec. 15, according to the radio station.

Salomon Schulman, a teacher of Yiddish and member of Lund’s Jewish community, wrote in the same local newspaper that he found the display “disgusting” and called it “a desecration of Jewish bodies.”

He added: “Nowhere was the Third Reich more popular than among the educated academics. Today, the Holocaust and racism are still part of their salon talks.”

In a text published by the gallery, the artist is quoted as saying: “The ash has followed me, always been there … as if the ash contains energies or memories or souls of people … people tortured, tormented and murdered by other people in one of the 19th century’s most ruthless wars.”

The directorate of the museum at Majdanek is outraged by the art. “We are deeply shocked and outraged by the information that the painting allegedly was made with the ashes of Majdanek victims. This action is an artistic provocation deserving only to be condemned,” said a statement published on Wednesday by the museum staff.

“In addition, it is certain that the Swedish painter did not enter into possession of the ashes legally.”