Art of Insurrection and Resurrection

On a large grassy square between Karmelicka and Zamenhofa streets, in the centre of Muranow,in Warsaw is the Ghetto Heroes Monument. One of the most desperate battles in human history took place.Nathan Rapaport is the sculptor  created the monument  and it is sometimes referred to as the Nathan Rappaport Memorial. The monument commemorates the tens of thousands who lost their lives  during the Ghetto uprising. It is made of granite which the Nazis imported from Sweden, ironically to build their own victory tower. The front of the monument has a bronze relief depicting a group of insurgents and the leader of the uprising Mordacai Anielewicz, who stands with a grenade in his hand. The back  side of the monument shows a group of Jews being marched to their death in a concentration camp. The photo below shows the back side of the monument. It depicts a line of Jews marching to their death in a concentration camp. In the courtyard where this monument is located, and at many other places along the route of Memory Lane, are black marble stones like gravestones in a symbolic cemetery, honoring those who died in the ghetto and in the extermination.

What is of note, is the survival of the arts within the walled ghetto. John Hersey’s masterpiece novel, The Wall, based on actual diaries ( Emanuel Ringelblum ), show the arts being practiced; theatre and music and fine art within a ghetto atmosphere mortified by repetitive eve of destruction. The record left by ghetto dwellers, camp internees, and displaced persons create snapshots of life and death under Hitler. Inmate drawings and paintings were legitimate articulations of man’s inhumanity and cruelty. The Nazis labeled this art “horror propaganda”.

David Olere, The Food of the Dead For The Living

 

Roman Kramsztyk ( 1885-1942) perished in the ghetto and was representative of the New Classicist movement of the 1920s and 30s.Kramsztyk was heavily influenced by the art of Cézanne. In his landscapes and still lifes, the artist emphasized structure built of geometric forms. He used light, short brushstrokes to shape vegetation, objects, and architectural forms, surrounding them with soft contour lines. Moshe Rynecki and Gela Sekstajn were also well known Warsaw ghetto painters who perished.

Felix Nussbaum’s case was especially hard, since he lived in hiding for years, painted in secret, and left his work in the hands of people who were often untrustworthy. He was a victim of the Nazis, killed at Auschwitz, but he was also a brilliant chronicler of the Holocaust.  ”His “Self-portrait with a Jewish Identity Card,” made in this period, often shows up in surveys of modern art, a desperate self-image, the artist drawn as a hunted animal, his face partly hidden by his trench coat. He displays a pass stamped “Juif-Jood,” which Nussbaum was never actually issued, since he was underground. He wears a yellow star, which in life he never wore, for the same reason.” ”In his last months Nussbaum painted “The Damned,” in which Felix and Felka are among Jews awaiting death. His last surviving picture, a modern version of a medieval dance of death, shows musicians playing in a shattered landscape representing the ruins of European culture.” ( Robert Fulford )  

Felix Nussbaum, Death Triumphant, 1944

 

 

His last painting dated Tuesday, April 18, 1944, Death Triumphant, is extensively prepared for with numerous sketches of various skeletal figures, each beautifully draped, playing or holding musical instruments. ”These drawings are arguably some of the most moving and devastating images of futility ever produced. The dead mock the living with mankind’s pathetic culture, music played with no one left to listen. The quest for life is snuffed out in the whirlwind of anti-Semitic hate.”( Richard McBee)

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Felix Nussbaum, In The Camp,

”The large number of Jewish artists posed a problem for the Nazi regime. If summarily deported to extermination camps, these internationally-recognized artists would have been missed, so they were sent instead to Theresienstadt. The Theresienstadt (Terezín in Czech) ghetto was publicized as a “gift” that the Führer gave to the Jews. Nazi propaganda made much of this special ghetto. The world was shown an artistic colony of happy, healthy residents. The reality was far different. For most, Theresienstadt was simply a crowded waystation between home and an extermination camp. Many internees had children who were transported with them. The children’s poetry, diaries, and art are the only record of their short lives. Of the 15,000 children transported to Theresienstadt, only 100 survived.”

Felix Nussbaum, Threesome,1944

From March 2, 1943, to January 19, 1945, David Olère was interned at Auschwitz.There he worked as a Sonderkommando, part of a special labor unit responsible for emptying the remains from the ovens of the crematory and for removing the bodies from the gas chambers.The work of David Olère ( 1902-1985 ) has important documentary value. No photographs were taken at Auschwitz of what went on in the gas chambers and crematoria. Only the memories of Olère, reproduced as art in his drawings and paintings, give an account of the reality based on his recollections.

A holocaust industry, is no doubt one of the most appalling off-shoots of  the second world war industry.Like an annuity, the revenue stream does not differentiate from clean water and that polluted by crass self-interest on embers of those cremated at Auschwitz. Sixty plus years later, Imagine This, a London musical has used the Warsaw ghetto as its central theme.

In Imagine This, a new musical about the Holocaust, a group of actors in the Warsaw ghetto stage a play. The play is about a community of Jews in Masada who, in AD73, are surrounded by the Roman army and, rather than surrender, choose to kill themselves en masse. “With rumours of the Final Solution in the air,” the press release says, “their play merges with the reality they are trying to escape and a dramatic love story unfolds.” ( Tanya Gold, Guardian )

 ”This,” she says ( Beth Trachtenberg, Producer, Imagine this ) in a creaking American accent, “is not a musical about the Holocaust. It does not take place in the camps. The Warsaw ghetto was the last great flowering of Jewish culture in Poland. There were half a million people surrounded by death, but even in the midst of this they laughed and they danced.” 

“Twenty-five years ago,” Beth says, “no one would have thought that a man stealing a loaf of bread would become the subject of the most beloved musical of all time – Les Misérables. This will live on in people’s minds and people’s hearts.” She sounds as if she might at any moment break into song. I look around. On the wall is a rehearsal schedule. It says: “10.15: Mr Neal and Mr Serlin into crucifixion costumes.”

Glenn Berenbeim who wrote the book for the show:

Seven years ago, Glenn heard a musical score about the Jews of Masada. He didn’t think it was commercial enough, so he relocated it to the Warsaw ghetto, as a play within a play, like a Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney, let’s-put-on-a-show piece, only with a slightly higher body count. Glenn taps his fingers on the script and talks about The Sound of Music. The cast and crew talk about The Sound of Music all the time, because it’s The Other Nazi Musical, and it was a hit. “No one remembers the Nazis in The Sound of Music,” Glenn says. ( Tanya Gold , Guardian )

David Goldsmith, lyricist, Imagine This:

 ”We have quite a lot of dead Jews, and it is the last thing you would do if you wanted to make a killing in musical theatre. But we believe in it.”

Finally I force myself to ask the question I have been putting off since I arrived: do the Nazis sing? Do they sing: “Don’t be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi party!” ( Tanya Gold, Imagine This )

Marek Adelman, the last living commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising passed away last week at age 90. Truly a poetic figure. Have added a video interview of him ( in Polish ) the images are  of his book are well presented and there is footage of the Rapaport monument. Fittingly, his funeral procession included New orleans Jazz music played by a Polish band: