Charles Fodor is a Minnesota Holocaust survivor, one of the survivors whose arrival to the Twin Cities came over a decade after the end of the war. While many of the Holocaust survivors that immigrated to Minnesota did so in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, it was not uncommon for survivors to attempt to return to their prewar homes or, in the case of Charles Fodor, remain in their homes after they were liberated.

Born Fodor Karoly Sandor in 1936, Charles was interned with his family in the Budapest ghetto during the German occupation of Hungary which began in 1944. Like other survivors whose stories are told through the Upper Midwest Jewish Archives (UMJA) collections, Charles’ time under direct Nazi occupation was relatively short, ending in January 1945 when Soviet forces liberated Budapest. Despite this, Charles’ mother was abducted while the family was in the ghetto: she was taken away by the Nazis to perform labor, but never returned. Charles and his father were able to survive.

After liberation, Hungary was annexed by the Soviet Union, becoming an early member of the Eastern Bloc. Charles said many times that the Russians “stayed too long.” Despite this, Charles continued living in Hungary after the war. Eventually, Charles was drafted into the Hungarian Army, being ordered to appear for duty on October 30th, 1956. One week before this date arrived, however, Hungarian students and anti-Soviet activists organized to topple the Russian occupation. This would become known as the Hungarian Revolt of 1956. 

As Russian tanks moved into Budapest to quell the uprising, Charles took the opportunity to escape the ensuing revolt. Along with two friends, they began to make their way westward. After nearly three weeks of traveling on foot to avoid Russian forces, the three reached Austria. From there they were able to make their way to the United States, where Charles arrived on December 24th, 1956. He lived in the United States for the rest of his life, primarily living in Minnesota.

The shirt that UMJA has in their collections belonged to Charles, and is the one that he wore while escaping Hungary after the Revolt, wearing it all the way to the United States. This shirt was one of the only possessions Charles had with him while he was making his escape, and he kept it with him all the way up until his passing in 2018, when his wife Victoria donated it to the UMJA archives for further stewardship and care.

This shirt is not only fascinating because of the story it tells, but because it is housed in UMJA’s archives at all. The vast majority of UMJA’s archival materials are written records, pamphlets, correspondence, and other forms of paper materials, because Elmer L. Andersen Library’s onsite storage facilities are climate controlled to best support paper-based objects. This is why they make up a majority of the collections; three-dimensional artifacts like textiles require more complex storage requirements and are less likely found in UMJA’s collections.

Charles Fodor’s shirt, then, offers a unique departure for UMJA from their usual collection mediums. The conditions needed to maintain textiles, fabrics, and other objects can often take different forms than conditions needed to maintain papers and books. Despite these possible challenges, UMJA accepted Charles Fodor’s shirt into the archives. The story behind the artifact justified any extra care that would need to be taken in order to preserve this piece of history, which accompanies the oral history testimony from Charles also at UMJA. This, along with Charles’ incredible story of survival, makes this collection one of the most unique housed within UMJA.

Ryken Farr is a junior undergraduate at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, majoring in History and Jewish Studies. He is currently the undergraduate student worker with the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and spent time in August 2024 as a student assistant with the Upper Midwest Jewish Archives.

I was able to work on one such project this summer with the Upper Midwest Jewish Archives (UMJA) in the Libraries: Jeanette Frank, born Eugenia Lewin, is a survivor of the Holocaust whose materials reside in the archives. Jeanette’s records contain extensive materials related to her time as a displaced person in the Landsberg am Lech Displaced Persons (DP) camp after the war. The collection includes vaccination records, records of employment, and, most interestingly, a scrapbook of the Yiddish theater troupe “Hazomir,” that Jeanette, (then Eugenia) was a member of during her time in the camp. Included in the records as well are later documents, including Jeanette’s United States passport and naturalization certificate.

Scrapbook page with image of the entire “Hazomir” theater troupe posing in front of a sign for their production of “Der Wilder Mencz” (The Unusual Person), with accompanying newspaper article about the production in Yiddish at right. Eugenia Lewin/Jeanette Frank pictured middle-row center. 
Source:
Jeanette and Kenneth Frank Papers, Upper Midwest Jewish Archives.

Eugenia Lewin/Jeanette Frank with future husband Kaufmann Frankowski, 
later Kenneth Frank, while performing in the “Hazomir” troupe.
Source:
Jeanette and Kenneth Frank Papers, Upper Midwest Jewish Archives.

What all these documents point to is that Eugenia Lewin survived the Second World War and the Holocaust. After spending time living and working in the Landsberg DP camp, she was able to immigrate to the United States, settle in St. Paul, MN, and live over 75 years as an American citizen before passing away in 2003. While an incredible story of survival and resilience, this story may seem similar to many others told within UMJA’s archives. So what makes Jeanette Frank’s story so impactful? The fact that within certain historical records, Eugenia Lewin is not believed to have survived at all.

The Yad Vashem database of survivors’ names lists a Eugenia Lewin, born on December 21st 1916, in Lodz, Poland as missing, presumed murdered after being interned in the Lodz ghetto under the Nazi occupation. Yad Vashem cites as a source a list published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) that includes names of Holocaust victims who perished in the Lodz ghetto. The records found in UMJA’s archives, however, do not presume murder but in fact show her surviving.

According to the UMJA records, Eugenia Lewin was born on December 21st, 1920, in Lodz, Poland. While it is of course possible that two individuals named Eugenia Lewin were interned in the Lodz ghetto, with one perishing and one surviving, UMJA’s research gives reason to believe that a coincidence like this is not the case.

Letter of Recommendation written for Eugenia Lewin by Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik (WMF) in July 1949. The letter reads: “Ms. Eugenia Lewin, born 21st December, 1920 (Prisoner number 38 834) was employed by us from 5th January 1945-8th April 1945 as a concentration camp prisoner.”
Source:
Jeanette and Kenneth Frank Papers, Upper Midwest Jewish Archives.

Within Jeanette Frank’s collection are various recommendation letters given to her after the war to show that she has skills, making her a good candidate for postwar employment. One of these letters came from Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik (WMF), a German manufacturing company which utilized slave labor under the Nazis. The letter states that Eugenia Lewin worked for WMF from January to April 1945, being labeled prisoner 38834, in the Geislingen an der Steige concentration camp. Upon further research, a Eugenia Lewin was listed on a memorial to slave laborers erected at the site of the Geislingen an der Steige camp, and a USHMM record confirms that a Eugenia Lewin was interned as prisoner 38834 in the complex. 

A screenshot of the ‘Namenstafel’ (Name Plaque) erected in memoriam of the female forced laborers interned in Geislingen an der Steige Concentration camp, who were forced to work for WMF between 1944 and 1945. The museum which now stands on the site of the former concentration camp erected this memorial to honor the various women who were sent to Geislingen to work: the circled name above right is Eugenia Lewin, confirming that she was a prisoner at Geislingen after her time in the Lodz Ghetto.
Source:
www.kz-geislingen.de

All of this led me and UMJA Archivist Kate Dietrick, my supervisor for this project, to believe that UMJA’s Eugenia Lewin had survived her time in the Lodz ghetto and was sent to labor in the Geislingen concentration camp. We were left with one more piece of her journey to uncover: how did Eugenia Lewin end up in Landsberg am Lech displaced persons camp, which was located on the other side of Germany?

As I dug further into the fates of forced laborers at Geislingen, I learned that ahead of the Allied forces coming through France, the Nazis sent many slave laborers east from Geislingen to Dachau concentration camp, and to the town of Allach, Germany. Both of these destinations are located just outside of Munich, in southeastern Germany, and are a stone’s throw from the former site of Landsberg am Lech displaced persons camp.

After compiling all of the above evidence, Kate and I sent a letter to Yad Vashem, the world’s Holocaust memory authority located in Israel, supported by scans of documents from Jeanette Frank’s records, to make our case. As of November 2024, Kate heard back from Yad Vashem. In the letter Kate received, Yad Vashem stated that the evidence we provided on Jeanette Frank’s behalf was enough to show her surviving the Holocaust and immigrating to Minnesota. While the revision process can take time, Eugenia Lewin will be removed from Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, reflecting the fact that she survived the Holocaust. We were extremely excited to hear the news.

This experience became one that spoke to me both personally and academically. I have been lucky enough to have spent time working both with CHGS and UMJA, two organizations that engage in crucial community-facing work. During my time with them I have seen what it means to do historical research that really affects the present.

Being able to work with Jeanette Frank’s Holocaust journey this summer, with the goal of giving her, effectively, her life back in the eyes of Holocaust remembrance, has shown me that the work that I do as a historian has a very real impact on people today, because history is a study of people and their lives. This hit me hardest when, after mailing the letter earlier in the day, Kate met me at Temple of Aaron Cemetery in St. Paul, where Jeanette Frank and her husband Kenneth, formerly Kaufmann Frankowski, are buried. We laid rocks on the headstone in honor of their memory, and decided to read aloud to them the letter we mailed to Yad Vashem in memoriam. 

This experience was a very personal one for me; while we were standing and paying our respects, I could feel the importance of completing this project. It was yet another experience that proved to me that it is this historical work that I want to spend my career doing, and that its effects are great. I am so fortunate to have been able to spend time working with UMJA over this past summer, learning how archival documents are not simply pieces of paper, but pieces of people’s lives. I cannot wait to embark on more projects like this, which educate about the Holocaust, and work to keep the stories of its survivors and victims alive.

Ryken Farr is a junior undergraduate at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, majoring in History and Jewish Studies. He is currently the undergraduate student worker with the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and spent time in August 2024 as a student assistant with the Upper Midwest Jewish Archives.

Crucially as a Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, we must also confront how gender always dictates the lived experience of victims and survivors of mass violence, both during the events in question and following. We are painfully aware of the ways individuals become targets in specific ways due to their gender. Furthermore, political decisions and humanitarian relief often fail to take gender into account, keeping women, genderqueer, and other non-male-identifying individuals away from negotiation tables and policy action. 

As activists both past and present push for equal rights across gender identities, while repressive regimes around the world continue to curb various rights with frightening success, it is important to understand how equal representation and a working understanding of gender justice are vital to memory politics. 

Below are links from the Center’s webpages, as well as third-party resources we encourage you to consult. 

Materials from the Center’s Archive:

• The portraits and interviews with artist Oscar De La Concha include: 
  • Edith Goodman’s interview and portrait
  • Lucy Smith’s interview and portrait
  • Dora Zaidenweber’s interview and portrait
• Voice to Vision, a collaborative project that captures the experiences of genocide survivors, victims of mass violence, as well as their descendants. Subjects (in dialogue with project participants) use oral testimonies to collaboratively create mixed media artworks. 
  • Voice to Vision Series V centers survivors of gender-based violence; also features survivors of the Cambodian Genocide; Genocide of Indigenous Peoples; the Holocaust; Rwandan Genocide and Sudanese Civil War
  • In Voice to Vision Series VI highlights the lives of descendants of genocide survivors 
  • Voice to Vision Series XVII features Professor Brenda Child, and Professor Child’s daughter, Benay McNamara, interweaving personal and collective stories  that recount their family’s forced removal from Anishinaabe lands in 1889 by the Nelson Act

Armenian Genocide: 

• The Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive contains approximately 600 interviews relating to the Armenian Genocide in a variety of languages covering various subjects; many have been fully indexed and are searchable through the Shoah Foundation’s website. The full database is available online to university users and the general public through on-site access in Wilson LIbrary (UMN West Bank)  

 Bosnia and Herzegovina – Massacres in Srebrenica and Visegrad: 

• Facing History and Ourselves includes lesson plans and other materials including: 
  • Photography from Aftermath: Bosnia’s Long Road to Peace (from Facing History’s Aftermath Project)

Indigenous Peoples in North America

• Facing the Realities of Native American Women 
• Library Guide developed by UMN Librarian Kat Nelsen with vital resources, particularly for American Indian Studies research
• Open Rivers Project – a multi-vocal journal publishing clear and accessible content within and beyond higher education

Jewish Life prior to and following the Holocaust:  

• Irene Klepfisz, born in the Warsaw Ghetto, discusses with the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project: 
•  “The History That’s Never Taught” (i.e., the role of women in Jewish cultural activism, a cultural activisism destroyed by genocide). 
• As an out lesbian and ardent feminist, Klepfisz speaks to being a Jewish lesbian and feminist, and the queerness of contemporary Yiddish culture

Meyer Weinshel is a Ph.D. candidate in Germanic studies at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, where he is the educational outreach and special collections coordinator for the UMN Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. In addition to being an instructor of German studies, he has also taught Yiddish coursework with Minneapolis-based Jewish Community Action and at the Ohio State University.

The works on display serve as important reminders, best summed up in Feinberg’s own words: 

“All art comes from the unconscious. The unconscious makes connections between the past and the present. Truth has to be found, not contrived or preconceived. Seeking truth is the way to originality. The only true thing a person has is their unique perception of the world.” 

The exhibition, Divide Up Those in Darkness from the Ones Who Walk in Light, consists of two collections: Voice to Vision and a collection of Feinberg’s earlier works. Upon walking into the gallery, one first sees several of these early pieces on display, encouraging visitors to immediately engage with an overarching theme of the retrospective: the role of art for the individual—not only to shape public consciousness but also larger arcs of history. Subjects of these early pieces include partisans active during World War II, the 1956 explosion at the Brooklyn piers, the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and the “Day the Music Died” to name a few. 

The multimedia pieces in the exhibition include wood construction, collage, and other materials from photographs, news sources, etc. Extraordinary 2D/3D works depicting interior spaces, along with pieces that echo surrealist trends from the 20th century, stand alongside Feinberg’s “Kaddish for the Immigrant’s Son.” At 82 x 148 inches, the painting prominently features New York landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty, with its head and torch trailing throughout the painting, and containing the transliterated words of the Kaddish (one of the central elements of the Jewish liturgy). 

Over half of the retrospective is devoted to Feinberg’s Voice to Vision, a groundbreaking “memory project” focused on collaboration with survivors of genocide. Voice to Vision uses painting, drawing, collage, and mixed media to center individual survivors, who can often be lost in narratives dominating textbooks and public consciousness. Oral and visual testimony also takes a central role in the Voice to Vision artwork, which is clear as one walks through the gallery spaces. 

For example, genocide survivors from different parts of the world first share their stories through dialogue, and the stories, in turn, transform into works of visual art produced by the survivors themselves and a larger collaborative team. According to the exhibition program, approximately 200 people have been involved with Voice to Vision. 

Various series from the Voice to Vision Collection also put into dialogue different episodes of genocide and mass violence, thereby emphasizing that individual experiences—even if disparate—can illuminate rather than obscure human rights abuses as they continue to occur across time and space. In one particular piece from Voice to Vision III, “Romania 1941/Rwanda 1994,” draw on memories and sounds of survivors’ pasts that then appear in the multimedia artwork itself. Descriptions beside each work provide background information as well as the forms of collaboration that took place between survivors and artists to make each piece possible. 

Each art piece emerged through close collaboration between artists and genocide survivors, all of whom exchanged ideas and made creative decisions together. The accompanying documentaries also feature original scores. This additional level of collaboration with musicians helps to shape the sound surrounding the survivor’s stories. As I walked through the exhibit, it is certainly clear from the screens playing the accompanying documentaries that sound (as well as the visual) plays an important role in public memory. 

The audiovisual recordings of the testimony produce another important effect for the viewer; the convergence of each voice involved in the project becomes part of an interactive journey through the gallery. The video documentaries will allow survivors, respective communities affected by genocide, and future generations to experience crucial aspects of the project beyond the artworks produced. These videos are also available on the CHGS Elevator site. 

Feinberg’s goal of the Voice to Vision project was to inspire others and to use the tools of dialogue and the visual arts to investigate, recover, and protect the narratives and emotional experiences of genocide survivors. The combination of physical art pieces and video documentaries can connect audiences to life-changing moments in history, and will stimulate discussion and education surrounding the events in question. 

The exhibition, Divide Up Those in Darkness from the Ones Who Walk in Light runs until December 11, 2021.

Olivia Sailer is an undergraduate student working for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Sailer is currently a junior and is majoring in Anthropology, with a focus on the sociocultural and linguistic subfields.

Meyer Weinshel is a Ph.D. candidate in Germanic studies at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, where he is the educational outreach and special collections coordinator for the UMN Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. In addition to being an instructor of German studies, he has also taught Yiddish coursework with Minneapolis-based Jewish Community Action and at the Ohio State University.

Although this rich set of materials is used by faculty, students, researchers, and K12 teachers alike, there are obstacles to managing the collections. Arguably central, and accessioned at various points over time, are under-utilized parts of the collections that include artworks, photographs, materials from Center-sponsored exhibitions, and rare items from private donors. Two such collections are the focus of this blog post. 

One of the Center’s most prolific photojournalist collections is that of the images captured by Maxine Rude for the UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration). Although the images are available on Elevator, and some are also available via the UMN LIbraries through their digital conservancy platforms, the images are in the process of being rescanned. Furthermore, a lack of item-level descriptions and cataloguing reflects the challenging curatorial decisions at play. Does one strive for clearer distinctions between disparate collections and media (thereby preserving as much as possible about the items’ materiality and provenance), or should one try to thematically link various materials at the risk of overdetermining their relation to one another? And most importantly: if similar materials are found elsewhere through larger archival and library databases, how to best link these materials together and make them accessible to larger audiences?

These dilemmas emerge in Rude’s photographs. Although most of Rude’s subjects appear only once, there are a few exceptions. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who visited the Zeilsheim DP (“Displaced Person”) Camp in the American Zone of occupied Germany, appears in three separate photographs, and each photo reflects different geopolitical phenomena present in the camp. 

In one photo, Roosevelt and GIs can be seen listening to a male figure, perhaps a DP, although we are unsure based on the limited captioning of the photograph. Professor Alejandro Baer, CHGS Director, has also written about the challenges prior curators faced with this collection, namely: what subject(s) appear? What should viewers glean from an image, and when photographs themselves are incomplete snapshots of a larger scene? One can glean a lot from Roosevelt’s body language as she earnestly listens to her subject, as well as members of the Allied forces looking on, especially as they played outsized roles in the postwar German landscape for decades.

In another photograph (that is currently only available through the Center’s Elevator site) Roosevelt walks past what is presumably the Polish repatriation center that operated in DP camps. A notable early tension between Soviet and American forces was the question of DP repatriation to the Eastern Bloc; should repatriation be forced or voluntary? In this mediated, stylized snapshot, larger political moments are taking center stage, and become part of a larger discussion of world history. 

There is one other photo of Roosevelt that caught my eye as a Yiddish speaker. Barely recognizable in the left background, Roosevelt is part of a larger, chaotic scene. Almost in the center of the image is a post with the name of the port city of Jaffa (Hebrew: יפו) and in the background: a banner in Yiddish and English.

Why in English? Certainly, the American lingua franca was ever-present in the DP Camp within the American Zone and among GIs who did not usually have language skills beyond that of English. But more notably, the propagandized English appears alongside Yiddish, which was the lingua franca of 10-12 million Eastern European Jews worldwide prior to the Holocaust and spoken by roughly 4.5 million of the 6 million Jews murdered. The Yiddish (מיר װילן גײן! מיר מוזן גײן! און מיר װעלן גײן קײן אַרץ־ישׂראל /  Mir viln geyn! Mir muzn geyn! Un mir veln geyn keyn Erets-Yisroel!) matches the English: We want to go! We have to go! We will go to Palestine! 

Much of this information is irrelevant to the average viewer of this photograph, and especially within the larger context of the dozens of photographs taken by Maxine Rude in the collections. And too much curation leads to overdetermined description and information. I can’t help but ask: what do I glean from this photograph? There is certainly too much to say within the span of one blog post, and more importantly: others will have different readings of this image. But my first reaction upon seeing the Yiddish: can I take the banner at its word? Does this image represent DPs’ mass exodus to Palestine following World War II?

It is certainly true that life in DP Camps was not easy, and it took years for foreign governments to allow DPs to be resettled in other parts of the world. For many Jewish survivors from Eastern Europe, many simply waited to go to the British Mandate of Palestine (either with or without the British government’s permission), even if for political reasons, not all wanted to go, according to survivors and children of DPs recounting their postwar journeys out of Europe. 

In fact, many personal accounts point to the complicated feelings DP’s had for the destinations in question. Many certainly believed anything was better than languishing in camps on German soil. But as was the case with resettlement in Palestine, many were uncertain of their prospects in the US, having been active in Yiddishist or leftist politics in the interwar years.

What we do know, however: DP resettlement was often arbitrary, and it echoes various trends that continue to play out today in harsh refugee policies playing out globally.

These photos, taken by Rude, are just a few examples of the rare historical images in the Center’s archive. In addition, the digitizations, descriptions (or lack thereof) etc. I have included in this blog entry represent insights as well as challenges for community archives when permanently preserving and curating these collections for in-person and online use.

Usable item descriptions (or even a lack thereof) can, however, lead to additional problems with categorization. As a Yiddish speaker interested in any other Yiddish artifacts I could find, I was thus surprised to find a photo album, out of place among various materials related to the Third Reich. The photo album did not appear to have been donated with the Nazi-related items in question.

The album was a personal item from Kenneth and Jeanette Frank, two donors who lived in Saint Paul, Minnesota. They had been active in Yiddish theater in the Landsberg am Lech DP Camp after having survived the Holocaust. The two did not have any children, and at some point in the 1990s prior to their deaths had donated the object to the Center or its former director, Stephen Feinstein. Kenneth Frank is in several of the pictures, cast as the Maharal of Prague (Rabbi Loew) in H Leyvik’s well-known play, Der Goylem (The Golem). The troupe also produced Yankev Gordin’s “Der vilder mentsh” (The Wild Man). 

Other materials with the photo album that are equally important to contextualize and preserve for educators and researchers: handwritten notes (it is unclear by whom, presumably to detail images and documents in Yiddish that are difficult to decipher without someone fluent in the language), and a large pamphlet given to passengers onboard the USS Muir, a navy transport ship used for a time in the fifties to transport DPs to various corners of the globe. 

Also included were announcements from the U.S. Displaced Persons Commission in Frankfurt (am Main), translated into Yiddish for passengers on board the ship regarding U.S. Customs regulations.

Also available are laminated scans of Yiddish newspaper clippings from the DP Camps published in transliterated Yiddish, reflecting the lack of Yiddish typesets available at the time. Many of the typesets were “unavailable” (i.e., they had been destroyed during the war), and Yiddish journalists had to resort to transliteration for publications. Although some of the materials inserted into the photo album use Yiddish orthography, many use Latin fonts, which reflect this reality. 

Apart from the find itself (i.e., that this photo album existed in the collections in the first place), I can’t help but note what it depicts: the memory of genocide survivors who, even after losing their homes and much (if not all) of their extended family, a continued act of resistance came in in the form of cultural production (i.e., staging masterpieces of Yiddish theater. The photo album, initially categorized as restricted, is now publicly available on the Center’s collections site.

Meyer Weinshel is the center’s educational outreach and special collections coordinator, and a PhD candidate in Germanic Studies. He is completing a dissertation on translations of German poetry into Yiddish before and after the Second World War. In addition to teaching German Studies coursework at the University of Minnesota, he has also been active in Yiddish language pedagogy and revival. He helped pilot the Yiddish Book Center’s new language textbook in Twin Cities, and worked for the Yiddish Book Center’s intensive summer language program for undergraduate students in 2020. In addition to working for CHGS, he was also a visiting lecturer of Yiddish Studies at the Ohio State University in 2021.

Speakers included Dean Coleman from the College of Liberal Arts, CHGS Director Alejandro Baer, graduate student Wahutu Siguru, Program Coordinator Jennifer Hammer, and Dr. Rebecca Feinstein, daughter of founding director Steven Feinstein. Many spoke of the interdisciplinary strength of CHGS, which works with faculty and students from a number of departments across campus. Others discussed the wide variety of CHGS initiatives, from outreach events to past symposiums, as well as future course offerings.

Guests left with a copy of the annual report, news on upcoming events, and pages from the first-ever CHGS newsletter 20 years ago. Overall, the event provided an opportunity to reflect upon 20 successful years of CHGS, as well as the chance to look ahead at what is to come.

This was my first encounter with a Hirschberger painting in its physicality. Five feet tall, painted in translucent layers of bright oils, there, before me, stretched a saturated orange and purple canvas filled with the a war horseman brandishing deadly weapons. Hirschberger chose the Fifth Horseman precisely because it could not be discerned through physical senses,* yet here in my first encounter seeing this piece in person, it was arresting precisely because of its physical nature.

Weeks later, the paintings were installed and ready as part of [Re]Telling, an exhibition of Holocaust art, narrative, and contemporary response, held in the Tychman Shapiro Gallery at the Sabes JCC. Yehudit Shendar, retired Deputy Director and Senior Art Curator of Yad VaShem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and museum, gave remarks at the opening reception of [Re]Telling featuring seven paintings by survivor Fritz Hirschberger selected from the CHGS permanent collection.

Shendar described Hirschberger as an artist of strong conviction, who painted in response to his experiences and his later historical research into the events of the Holocaust. Hirschberger was a Jew born to Jewish parents in Dresden, whose personal narrative during the Holocaust included forced expulsion, imprisonment in the Soviet Gulag, and military service fighting against the Nazi army. Hirschberger’s personal tragedies and losses led to further historical research, all of which played a role in painting on the subject.

His first Holocaust series is called “Sur-Rational,” precisely because the magnitude of the events of the Holocaust seemed to exist outside of rational explanation. Like many artists responding to the Holocaust, Hirschberger uses religious imagery to further provoke the idea that the Holocaust, a human atrocity, transcends what a human can understand (such as in the “Fifth Horseman,” and “The Same Fire”). This is the cognitive dissonance of Hirschberger’s paintings: they attempt to convey something that evades rational comprehension, and are objects that display the physical crime of the Holocaust. In the corner of the Horseman’s saddle, Hirschberger painted the clearly legible word “Dora,” the name of the labor camp in which his father died.

In the words of Stephen Feinstein, Hirschberger’s work attempts to “bequeath [this] knowledge and visual representation to another generation.” Hirschberger uses concrete historical references to strike an uneasy balance between the incomprehensible magnitude of the Holocaust and the real need to explain, communicate, and teach a historical event. Besides occasional words painted on the canvas, many of his paintings directly reference poetry or other texts that drive lessons and morals home to the viewer (such as “Indifference”). Some of these texts are well-known, but when juxtaposed against the disjointed and naive figures in Hirschberger’s canvases, contribute to a sense of alienation from history.

[Re]Telling showcases this process of handing-down visual representation to another generation by asking local artists and teens to create work in response to his chosen poetry or visuals. In the Tychman Shapiro Gallery, each Hirschberger painting is installed with the works of eleven local artists. Some of the artists made art in response to the literature that Hirschberger himself selected, or were directly inspired by his paintings or their themes and subject matter. In a later post, we will look at these artists’ work in juxtaposition with Hirschberger’s own.

This reflective artistic transmission represented the process of carrying personal narratives forward through generations. No artist replicated Hirschberger’s work, but each valued his testimony through the lens of their own expression. Shendar referred to this reflective process in her remarks, asserting that the past has meaning only when carried forward into the future. At its core, [Re]Telling shows how we give the past meaning, in this case in an artistic process.

In CHGS’ 20th year, this is an appropriate recognition of CHGS’ legacy, and a visible reminder of our mission to further the study of genocide through remembrance, responsibility, and progress.

[Re]Telling was presented by CHGS and the Sabes Jewish Community Center, made possible with support from the Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Endowment Fund for Justice and Peace Studies of the Minneapolis Foundation, and the Howard B. & Ruth F. Brin Jewish Arts Endowment, a fund of the Minneapolis Jewish Federation’s Foundation. Please explore these images of the exhibition that continue the life of this art beyond the physical exhibition, and check out CHGS’ entire collection, including past exhibitions.

* Stephen Feinstein further explained Hirschberger’s use of the symbol: “…The four horses are white, red, black, and pale. The name of the Fifth Horseman is said to be Hades or Hell. The Fifth Horseman operates in the shadow of the Fourth. It was common belief, especially during the Reformation, that one could not defend oneself or one’s faith against those things that one was unable to discern with one’s physical senses. The war predicted to be waged by the Fifth Horseman will occur on a different plane. It is a plane that the physical senses are not able to discern.”

Demetrios Vital is Outreach Coordinator for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. In this role he is responsible for the care and promotion of CHGS art and object collections, as well as working with the community in the development of programs, activities, and events.

The exhibition included a video of Judith Brin Ingber’s choreography for “I Never Saw Another Butterfly” (the poem by Pavel Friedman) performed by Megan McClellan:

These images of graffiti in Aleppo depict stories of love. Graffitied, above, is “To the woman who shared the siege with me: I love you. 15/12/2016.” Getting ready to flee Aleppo in the wake of violence between Bashar al Assad and opposition, Marwa and Salih took up graffiti to document their love for each other on buildings destroyed by the war. However, love is not just reserved to their romantic relationship, but extends to their homeland. Below, sprayed on the walls of a fallen building they wrote, “We shall return, love. 15/12/2016”. These words are from a song by Lebanese singer, Fairouz, who sang to Lebanon in the wake of years of Civil War. Thus, illuminating the ambiguous “love” to evoke Aleppo, their home.

We have seen such images before. CHGS has in its collection 69 original photographs taken by Maxine Rude of the daily life of survivors in Displaced Persons camps established in Germany and Austria at the end of World War II. Here, we see Henryk Michinek, a displaced person, painting a mural at a Children’s Center in Germany. Maxine elaborates, “It was always such a revelation seeing the art done by those in the camps. So much was dark and heavy, often reflecting the justice that had vanished from their lives.”

Art has the profound capacity to document and depict the devastating consequences of war and conflict: whether it’s through song, or graffiti, or murals. But art also has the ability to highlight what is important for people to dwell on, and photographs that capture such moments are capable of portraying everyday life during conflict. Perhaps it is precisely this contrast that has the power to illustrate the extent of suffering, but also the ways in which art is a form of coping, resistance, and resilience.

Miray Philips is a Ph.D. graduate student in Sociology with a focus on conflict, identity, and collective memory in the Middle East and North Africa. Miray’s current research is focused on how Copts in the diaspora make sense of and respond to current events in Egypt. She is also the 2016-17 Badzin Fellow. 

Wahutu Siguru contributed to this post. Wahutu is a PhD Candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of Minnesota. Wahutu’s research interests are in the Sociology of Media, Genocide, Mass Violence and Atrocities (specifically on issues of representation of conflicts in Africa such as Darfur and Rwanda), Collective Memory, and perhaps somewhat tangentially Democracy and Development in Africa.

A curator also makes influential choices, deciding how and what to include in an exhibit, and what to exclude. In putting pieces of art or photography together, these works may take on new and unexpected meanings in a visitor’s mind that were never intended by artist or curator, but are a result of the exhibition nonetheless. Or, a curator may intentionally be drawing comparisons that were not in the original artist’s mind.

In presenting Maxine Rude’s work, we take note of her portrayal of children and families, asking questions of the viewer about their response to seeing these victims of World War II and the Holocaust.

The photo below, “UNRRA Czechoslovakian Nurse with Orphans,” is an arrangement that could be mundane: a row of children and their parent sitting together. The title, however, reminds us that this is not a photograph of a family. These children do not have parents, and the nurse – working in Kloster Indersdorf, a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration center for displaced persons children – is a Jewish nurse from Czechoslovakia, and not Germany, where Kloster Indersdorf is located. We know who the nurse is: Greta Fischer. She appears in other Maxine Rude photographs, and has a collection of documents in the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum. You can see and hear her filmed oral history.

Fischer and these children were all affected by World War II and the Holocaust, and are together not as a family, but as DPs, not in their homes, but in a monastery that was used to house these children lacking homes.

The displacement of people is a contemporary global issue. In a panel in our Maxine Rude exhibit, we discuss photojournalism of what is today called the “refugee crisis.” Popular media have drawn comparisons between victims of the Holocaust and migrants (not without controversy). Our exhibition places two particular photographs together in the same room, and we are self-consciously asking how they compare:

The first photo is from Maxine Rude, taken in 1945. The second is by photographer Dario Mitidieri, taken in 2015. Mitidieri was awarded third prize in the World Press Photo 2016 photo contest.

Both Rude’s and Mitidieri’s photographs place their subjects in a similar arrangement. In Rude’s photo, they are not a family by relationship, but are posed like a family, smiling for the camera, though they have come together as a result of war and violence. One might note that the adult in the picture (Fischer) is dressed in a military uniform, rather than casual attire. In Mitidieri’s photo, this is indeed a family, but their arrangement includes an empty chair to represent the loss of a specific family member. They are not smiling. This family’s loss is also because of war and violence.

In his photograph, Mitidieri made a notable choice in framing: the edges of the picture extend past the dark backdrop, and you can see the artificiality of this arrangement: they are not posed in a studio, but the photo was taken in a refugee camp. By extending his photo beyond the backdrop, Mitidieri has given the viewer a hint of a much larger context.

We know that the use of imagery depicting victims and suffering is nuanced and often problematic. The curatorial decision to juxtapose these photos – two scenes separated by seventy years – will hopefully be interrogated for meaning and worthiness, given that the presentation of historical and contemporary suffering of this magnitude could potentially overwhelm a viewer into numbness, let alone dehumanize the individual subjects of the photo.

Optimistically, however, exhibiting these photos together may fulfill an educational as well as humanistic purpose: Having seen that Mitidieri’s subjects live in a context wider than the photograph may be a necessary reminder to the viewer of a greater historical context of Maxine Rude’s photographs. Her subjects’ lives extended beyond the moment of each photo; indeed they may still be living. In turn, we hope that, in comparing the individuals in Mitidieri’s photo to victims of WWII, that the Syrian family may elicit more empathy. Their situation is current, their historical context is now, and their future is unknown.

Demetrios Vital is Outreach Coordinator for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.  In this role he is responsible for the care and promotion of CHGS art and object collections, as well as working with the community in the development of programs, activities, and events.

Wahutu Siguru contributed to this post. Wahutu is a PhD Candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of Minnesota. Wahutu’s research interests are in the Sociology of Media, Genocide, Mass Violence and Atrocities (specifically on issues of representation of conflicts in Africa such as Darfur and Rwanda), Collective Memory, and perhaps somewhat tangentially Democracy and Development in Africa.

The ways displaced people are presented through visual media can bring awareness to the situations of victims of atrocities. As discussed on this blog recently, picturing a victim in a photograph carries with it a host of important considerations, including whether and how the voice of the subject is taken into account in distributing their image. The voice, as it were, of the photographer may not be apparent when one glimpses a photograph. Photography can mask the intent of the photographer by creating what is a seemingly objective snapshot of real events (unlike the hand of a painter whose brush strokes reveal their subjectivity).

CHGS has in its collections a series of photographs taken in 1945-1946 by Maxine Rude, photographer for the US Army and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). These photos were part of an extensive collection organized by Stephen Feinstein, the Center’s founder, entitled, “Displaced: Europe 1945-1946,” which is available as a catalogue from a previous exhibition.

CHGS is pleased to present a newly curated exhibition, entitled “Displaced: Photos and Remembrances of Maxine Rude, 1945-1946,” selected from this larger series. On display in the Eiger-Zaidenweber Holocaust Resource Center at the Sabes JCC, this exhibition is open and available for visitors.

The more than forty photographs currently on display have been grouped by apparent theme and photographic subject, including photos of politicians visiting DP camps, the camps’ structure and function, and evidence of daily life lived by displaced persons, all as captured by Maxine Rude.

As curators of another person’s body of work, we are intentionally aware that our decisions affect the viewer’s experience. By choosing to arrange works according to the subjects within the images, we are like any visitor to the exhibition, acutely aware that we don’t have the curatorial input of Maxine Rude herself. We are fortunate to have some commentary written by her, and this important contextualizing information is presented online (in the description field of associated photos), as well as being included in exhibition materials onsite in the Eiger-Zaidenweber Holocaust Resource Center.

In related upcoming posts, we’ll delve deeper into some of the subjects in the photos, as well as learn more about the experience of displaced persons following World War II and the Holocaust.

Demetrios Vital is Outreach Coordinator for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.  In this role he is responsible for the care and promotion of CHGS art and object collections, as well as working with the community in the development of programs, activities, and events.