Representing the Holocaust Through Art

HELEN K: Sometimes at night I lay and I can't believe what my eyes have seen. I really cannot believe it. I was in Auschwitz. Whenever I got up in the morning, the lines were unbelievable. The kids used to come in waiting to be cremated. I just wanted God should strike me dead. I couldn't bear. I have nightmares about those lines.

LAWRENCE L. LANGER: And it seems to me that's where literature and art come in. And they can help us to convey to people who are not there an ability to imagine what it may or must have been like. My first book was called The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination. At the time, I believed that historians were unable to convey the intrinsic nature of the Holocaust experience for individual human beings, because that's not what historians were interested in.

Historians were interested in the facts, the details, the places, the names. And I argued in that book that only the literary imagination could take us over the gulf, separating the historical fact into the implications of the historical facts. In a short story by a survivor of Auschwitz named Tadeusz Borowski. He has two of his characters discussing hunger, and one of them says to the other, Tadek, want to know what real hunger is. Real hunger is when you look at another human being as something to eat. And when I read that, it just blew me away and I said, historian couldn't say that. But in a short story, Borowski can have a dialogue about that, which for me evoked the nature of extreme and total starvation.

When I was introduced to Sam Bak's work, I mean, it opened up a whole new area of confrontation with Holocaust experience that I hadn't encountered before, because literature is not a visual encounter. Among the many things Sam Bak has done is to redefine the discourse about art. Bak's paintings don't offer us meanings, they ask questions. Move to painting called The sounds of Silence. It asks what kind of art could possibly exist after the Holocaust.

Here he's talking about music. He has a string quartet. Sitting in what I call the antechamber to hell. The first violinist on the left wears a mask. You can't see his face. The cellist is blindfolded. He has no bow. And the violist on the right is more stone than flesh. So it's an incomplete string quartet. Their spiritual heritage has been lost. They are survivors. The cellist is wearing still the striped garment of the camp.

The violist is sitting in some kind of a giant die, suggesting that they may be contained in some kind of random universe. And like most of his other paintings, one of the questions it asks is what happens to the identity of the self after having undergone the experience we call the Holocaust? You certainly don't emerge as the person you were when you went into the camp. You emerge always scarred or haunted by the nature that you were reduced to.

The fact that they're even playing music or trying to with these miserable instruments, means that there's a possibility for art to continue. The question isn't whether it will continue, the question is, how has it been changed by the fact of the Holocaust? One of the things Sam says in many of his paintings is that art will continue, but art will never undo what the Holocaust did, as life will have to incorporate what the Holocaust did.

SAMUEL BAK: There is something that is basically broken and put together again. And maybe for me, this breaking and putting back together in an incomplete form is the main subject of transmitting the memory of the Holocaust, because it is an impossible thing to transmit that memory. Impossible simply because there is no such thing as objective history. It is a continuously changing thing.

Art, I think, can transmit a much deeper layer of the human experience. A layer for which sometimes even words are not enough. At a certain level, when words are not enough comes in the music, and sometimes when the music is not enough comes the image. And then when the image is not enough, come the words, and it turns around and around and around.

LAWRENCE L. LANGER: In fact, many of his paintings, which draw on biblical themes, saying a parallel thing that if faith is to exist after the Holocaust, it has to incorporate into it the failures or betrayals of faith that occurred during the Holocaust. As an artist, Sam Bak believes that there is a future for life and a future for art. But he is also saying that we will not in the future create art as we created art before the Holocaust.