Holocaust Icons in Art: The Warsaw Ghetto Boy and Anne Frank 9783110656916, 9783110653168

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Batya Brutin Holocaust Icons in Art: The Warsaw Ghetto Boy and Anne Frank

Batya Brutin

Holocaust Icons in Art: The Warsaw Ghetto Boy and Anne Frank

ISBN 978-3-11-065316-8 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-065691-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-065321-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019957901 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston & The Hebrew University Magnes Press, Jerusalem Cover illustration: © Anne Frank’s photograph: Anne Frank’s diary at The Anne Frank House. © Warsaw boy’s photograph: General Jürgen Stroop’s report of 1943. Warsaw copy: Source Record ID: 238-IMT-1061PS-Box 21-22. NARA copy: Source Record ID: 4/202z-Inv.4498. Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Preface The trigger to my research about Anne Frank and the Warsaw Ghetto boy were two objects in my desk drawer. One is a yellow Star of David with the word “Jude” in the center that my mother Ruth (b. Fritz) Fersht was forced to wear by the Nazis during the Holocaust. The second object is an old, worn 1936 Polish passport shared by my father Zvi Fersht (in Polish Ferszt) and his parents Hinda and Aron. In preparation for an interview for the Center for Educational Technology for the program Second Generation Speaks, in 2007, I again came across my mother’s yellow Star of David in my desk drawer. It reminded me of a story my mother used to tell us about herself when my sister Nilly, my brother Aharon and I were children. She worked as a seamstress, under a fictional identity, in a small sewing workshop in Amsterdam on Prinsengracht Street where Nazi uniforms were sewn. One day an event occurred in front of the workshop which everyone went out to watch, including my mother. A Jewish family was taken out from its hiding place, put on a truck and sent to the camps. My mother noted that it was clear to everyone where the Jews were taken. The workshop’s manager, who was the only one to know that my mother was Jewish, asked her to quietly pick up her belongings and leave the place permanently. Along the way, a roundup of Jews took place and my mother happened to meet the son of Dutch acquaintances and asked him to help her get away. He took her to a hiding place on a boat his family owned, where she hid for several months. After reading the diary of Anne Frank, as an adolescent, I realized that my mother had witnessed the Frank family taken out from their hiding place. Right after the interview in 2007 I started to look for artworks referring to the image of Anne Frank. I discovered that in many artworks Anna Frank is portrayed with a yellow Star of David with the word “Jude” in German, in the center, just as my mother wore. Although the German Jews had been living in the Netherlands, they wore the German badge in order to distinguish them from Dutch Jews. Looking at Anne’s depictions with the badge, it reminded me of my mother’s photographs with the Star of David and it intensified my interest in researching the descriptions of Anne Frank in artworks. Very fortunately Beit Berl Academic College, where I worked for many years, financially supported my research on Anne Frank’s image in art. In the International Conference on Women and the Holocaust, Childhood and Youth Under the Third Reich – A Gender Perspective, in 2007, I already presented a paper on the image of Anne Frank in visual art. Based on this study, I, together with Avriela Amit, my colleague from the Curriculum Design Center at Beit Berl Academic College, published a learning program, In the Artists Eyes: The Story of Anne Frank, in 2007–2008, with the support of the Claims Conference. Following the success of these materials I felt confident to present it in two art exhibitions. The first one, Anne Frank in the Artists’ Eyes, was staged in honor of Anne Frank on her 80th birthday, in Rumbach Synagogue, Budapest, by Peter Wilhelm Art Projects, in 2009, with the generous support of the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110656916-202

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Israeli Foreign Ministry, Jerusalem, and the Israeli consulate, Budapest. In this exhibition we exposed the wide variety of subjects concerning Anne Frank’s image that have occupied artists from around the world, their thoughts, ideas and emotions using varied ways of expression. This exhibition was very special for me on the personal level. My mother was born in Germany, fled to Holland and lived in Merwedeplein, Amsterdam, exactly like the Frank family before going into their hiding place. They all thought that everything would be over quickly, and they would be able to go back home to Germany. But history told a different story of oppression, destruction and death. Unfortunately, Anne Frank, Edith her mother, and Margot her sister, did not survive, while my mother, her mother and siblings were very fortunate to survive. I dedicated this exhibition to my dear mother who honored me, together with my two daughters Michal and Yael, at the opening of the exhibition. The second exhibition took place at Yad Lebanim Gallery, Rishon Lezion, Israel, in 2010 on Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day. It presented only the artworks by Israeli artists depicting Anne Frank. The gallery organized all junior high schools in the city to attend my lecture about Anne Frank, and a visit to the exhibition which I guided. I was satisfied that I passed on the heritage of the Holocaust through the story of Anne Frank to the young generation, so it would not be forgotten. In 2002 I participated in a conference on The Holocaust and the Arts, in the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. There I met Samuel Bak, a Holocaust survivor artist, who lectured about his art influenced by the photograph of the little boy from the Warsaw Ghetto in short pants, boots, coat and cap with his raised hands, and a Nazi soldier pointing his submachine gun at him. I was very impressed by Bak’s paintings depicting the Warsaw Ghetto boy and started to search for other artworks with this image. I was very surprised to find that so many artists were influenced by the photograph of the little boy from the Warsaw Ghetto and relied on it in their artworks. Based on this exploration, Avriela Amit and I published in 2009 the learning program In the Artists’ Eyes: The Story of the Warsaw Boy, with the support of the Claims Conference and Beit Berl Academic College. In addition, in 2015 I published the article “The Boy from the Warsaw Ghetto as Holocaust Icon in Art.”1 Anne Frank’s photographs of herself as a young girl whose life story is known through her diary and the Anne Frank House and the unknown Warsaw Ghetto boy’s photograph fascinated me, so I did not stop researching the use of these two children’s images in artworks. My study extended to the six chapters of this book. I thank The Hebrew University Magnes Press, Jerusalem, Israel, especially Mr. Jonathan Nadav, the general manager, and the De Gruyter Publishing House, Berlin, Germany, in particular Dr. Julia Brauch, acquisitions editor for Jewish Studies, for 1 Batya Brutin, “The Boy from the Warsaw Ghetto as Holocaust Icon in Art,” Ars Judaica 11 (2015): 55–78.

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believing in me and mainly for understanding the need to publish an art book connected to the Holocaust. I am also grateful to Beit Berl College and the Claims Conference for financially supporting my research and publishing the learning kits about Anne Frank and the Warsaw Ghetto boy, which are the foundation for this book. I sincerely thank my editor, Ms. Joan Hooper, for her professionalism and sensitivity in handling the manuscript. I deeply thank the individual artists for allowing me to use their artworks and for sharing with me their ideas, thoughts and emotions about the meanings of the images of Anne Frank and the boy from the Warsaw Ghetto. I thank my colleague and friend Dr. Rochelle G. Saidel for reading parts of the manuscript and making wise and constructive comments. I cannot imagine the final product of the study without the special contribution of my colleague and friend Dr. Sonia M. Hedgepeth who read the manuscript in full and commented with intelligent, scholarly and enlightening remarks. I, from the bottom of my heart, thank her for that. I dedicate this book to my late parents, Ruth and Zvi Fersht, and in memory of my beloved friend, the late Sara Lea Laizerovich. I thank my husband Jacob, for his patience, support and assistance he has lovingly provided me all along the entire process of research and writing this book. Many thanks to my daughters Michal and Yael who have been fully involved in this book, especially to Yael for reading the manuscript and for her sensitive and intelligent comments.

Contents Preface

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List of Illustrations

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Introduction: Icons of Loss 1 The Photograph as Testimony and Memory The Warsaw Ghetto Boy’s Photograph 3 About Anne Frank’s Photographs 7 About the Book’s Chapters 13

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1

Jewish Children’s Fate During the Holocaust 15 The Warsaw Ghetto Boy as a Symbol to Represent the Jewish Children’s Fate During the Holocaust 16 Anne Frank’s Face as an Icon to Describe the Jewish Children’s Fate During the Holocaust 33

2

It Could Have Been Me 56 The Generation of the Holocaust 56 The Generations after the Holocaust 69

3

Symbols of the Holocaust: Universal Imagery and Particularly Jewish Iconography 82 Universal Imagery 82 Particularly Jewish Iconography 105

4

Connection to the State of Israel 120 The Zionist Idea and the Establishment of the State of Israel The Western Wall 126 The Flag of Israel 128

5

Uniqueness of the Figures 131 The Warsaw Boy – Political Messages Anne Frank – The Secret Annex 153 Anne Frank with Her Diary 156 Anne Frank – Statues in Public Spaces

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Contents

Dissolving Memory 174 Facelessness of the Iconic Images 175 Disappearance of the Iconic Images 178 Fragmented Memory 185 Disintegration of the Iconic Image of the Warsaw Boy

Epilogue

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Bibliography Index

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List of Illustrations Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. 5 Fig. 6 Fig. 7 Fig. 8 Fig. 9 Fig. 10 Fig. 11 Fig. 12 Fig. 13 Fig. 14 Fig. 15 Fig. 16 Fig. 17 Fig. 18 Fig. 19 Fig. 20 Fig. 21 Fig. 22 Fig. 23 Fig. 24

Fig. 25 Fig. 26 Fig. 27 Fig. 28

Photograph from the Warsaw Ghetto. General Jürgen Stroop’s report of 1943 4 Anne Frank in Amsterdam, 1939 8 Anne Frank in Amsterdam, 1942 8 Anne Frank in Amsterdam, May 1942 9 Anne Frank in the fifth grade of the Montessori school in Amsterdam, 1940 9 Anne Frank in the sixth grade of the Montessori school in Amsterdam, 1941 9 Anne Frank in Amsterdam, 1941 9 Arnold Trachtman, A Boy, 1987, charcoal, 38" × 22". Courtesy of the artist 17 Yala Korwin, The Little Boy with His Hands Up, 1987, black ink on paper. Courtesy of the artist’s estate 17 Karl Stojka, Little Boy in Warsaw Ghetto, 1989. Courtesy of the artist’s estate 18 Samuel Bak, Study B, 1995, oil on canvas, 25 5/8" × 21 1/8", Private collection. Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA 20 General Jürgen Stroop Report of 1943, title page 22 Muriel Nezhnie Helfman, Ghetto Child – Stroop Report, 1982, tapestry, wool and cotton, 60" × 48". Courtesy of Dallas Center for Holocaust Studies 22 Aaron Morgan, Remember Us, 2006, computer generated art on fine watercolor paper, 96.5 × 96.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist’s estate 23 Avner Bar Hama, The Darkness of Europe 3, 2004, digitally manipulated photograph printed on canvas, 25 × 21.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist 25 Avner Bar Hama, Clean Job, 2006, digitally manipulated photograph printed on canvas, 70 × 50 cm. Courtesy of the artist 25 Ben Rotman, Shoah 1939–1945, 2006, mixed media, print on canvas, 80 × 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist 27 Michael Knigin, Warsaw Boy IV, 2009, montage. Variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist’s estate 27 Michael Knigin, Warsaw Boy V, 2009, montage. Variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist’s estate 28 Rolanda Teicher-Yekutiel, The Wooden Compassionate One, 1985–2001, montage, variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist 30 Maraja (Libico Romano Maraja) in Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio. Ramat Gan: Massada, 1963, p. 81 (Hebrew) 30 Avner Bar Hama, Hunger in the Ghetto, 2006, digitally manipulated photograph printed on canvas, 60 × 50 cm. Courtesy of the artist 31 Jacky Yarhi, a frame from page 9 in The Golden Necklace, 2017, illustration. Courtesy of Institute Sarei Zevulun, Israel 32 Judith Weinshall Liberman, Anne Frank’s Journey, Maps of the Holocaust, 1988, wall hanging, 81" × 127". Courtesy of the artist, The Temple Museum of Religious Art of The Temple Tifereth Israel, Beachwood, OH, USA 35 Samuel Kaplan, The Diary of Anne Frank, 2000, oil, tempera on canvas, 20" × 28". In possession of Mr. Julian (Yonatan) Rapaport 36 Susan Keeter, Anne Frank and Her Parents Going into Hiding, 1998, oil on paper, 15 × 28.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist, Syracuse, NY, USA 37 Susan Keeter, Anne Frank Going into the Secret Annex, 1998, oil on paper, 16.5 × 25.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist, Syracuse, NY, USA 38 Susan Keeter, Anne and Otto Frank Unpacking in the Secret Annex, 1998, oil on paper, 15 × 27 cm. Courtesy of the artist, Syracuse, NY, USA 39

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Fig. 29 Fig. 30 Fig. 31

Fig. 32

Fig. 33 Fig. 34

Fig. 35 Fig. 36 Fig. 37 Fig. 38 Fig. 39 Fig. 40 Fig. 41 Fig. 42 Fig. 43 Fig. 44 Fig. 45 Fig. 46 Fig. 47

Fig. 48

Fig. 49

List of Illustrations

Iris Anne Berger, Red Sky 1, 1982, oils on canvas, 92 × 122 cm. Courtesy of the artist 41 Jet Schepp, Anne Frank, 2005, bronze statue. Courtesy of the city of Amsterdam 42 Judith Weinshall Liberman, Anne Frank’s Hiding Place, 1989, wall hanging, Maps of the Holocaust, 67" × 106". Courtesy of the artist, The Temple Museum of Religious Art of The Temple Tifereth Israel, Beachwood, Ohio, USA 43 Judith Weinshall Liberman, Anne Frank’s Amsterdam, 1990, wall hanging, Maps of the Holocaust, 83" × 114". Courtesy of the artist, The Temple Museum of Religious Art of The Temple Tifereth Israel, Beachwood, OH, USA 45 Brett S. Kaufman, Anne Frank Outside Looking In, 1995, archival ink on cotton rag, 24" × 20". Courtesy of the artist 45 Bill Fink, Anne Frank, 2008, glass artwork with an acrylic case that goes over the glass with acrylic stand and back lighting, 7" × 5" × ¼". Courtesy of the artist 46 Iris Anne Berger, Auschwitz, 1982, oils on canvas, 92 × 122 cm. Courtesy of the artist 47 Marie Helene Ardaen, Anne Frank, 1972, oil on canvas, 124 × 84 cm. Current location unknown 48 Ruth Schloss, Anne Frank, 1981, photographic print and acrylic on canvas, 100 × 73 cm. Courtesy of the artist’s estate 49 Oleg Djimbinov, Anne Frank, 2007, digital art, 18" × 13". Courtesy of the artist 51 Iris Anne Berger, Breaking Dawns, 1994–1995, oils on canvas, 92 × 122 cm. Courtesy of the artist 52 Aaron Morgan, The Face of the Holocaust, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 36" × 36". Courtesy of the artist’s estate 52 Samuel Bak, Study A, 1995, oil on canvas, 25 5/8" × 21 1/8". Private collection. Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA, USA 58 Samuel Bak, Study F, 1995, oil on linen, 237/8" × 15 5/8". Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA, USA 59 Samuel Bak, Self-Portrait, 1995, oil on canvas, 160 × 200 cm. Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA, USA 60 Samuel Bak, Self-Portrait with Friends, 1997, oil on Linen, 46 × 55.9 cm. Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA, USA 62 Samuel Bak, Group, 1997, oil on Linen, 66.7 × 100.3 cm. Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA, USA 63 Haim Maor, Anne and I, 1984, print on paper, 33.5 × 83 cm. Courtesy of the author 67 Judith Weinshall Liberman, Self Portrait of a Holocaust Artist # 102, 1997, mixed media on stretched canvas, 18" × 18". Courtesy of the artist, The William Benton Museum of Art, Storrs, CT, USA 67 Judith Weinshall Liberman, Witness, 1998, wall hanging, 18" × 26". Courtesy of the artist, The Temple Museum of Religious Art of The Temple Tifereth Israel, Beachwood, OH, USA 68 Judith Weinshall Liberman, Self Portrait of a Holocaust Artist # 54, 1997, mixed media, 10" × 8". Courtesy of the artist, The William Benton Museum of Art, Storrs, CT, USA 69

List of Illustrations

Fig. 50 Fig. 51 Fig. 52 Fig. 53 Fig. 54 Fig. 55 Fig. 56 Fig. 57 Fig. 58 Fig. 59 Fig. 60 Fig. 61 Fig. 62 Fig. 63 Fig. 64

Fig. 65

Fig. 66 Fig. 67 Fig. 68 Fig. 69 Fig. 70 Fig. 71 Fig. 72 Fig. 73

Michel Kichka, frame from page 8 in Second Generation: The Things I Didn’t Tell My Father, 2013, illustration. Courtesy of the artist 70 Avner Bar Hama, The Escape – June 1956, 2005, digitally manipulated photograph printed on dibond, 70 × 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist 72 Avner Bar Hama, Late Visit to the Cemetery, 2009, digitally manipulated photograph printed on dibond, 50 × 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist 72 Nir Hod, Untitled, 1994, black and white photograph, each piece 30 × 18 cm. 4 pieces. Courtesy of the artist 74 Zehava Masser, Anne and Me, 2008, mixed media on canvas, each piece 40 × 30 cm. 3 pieces. Courtesy of the artist 75 Zehava Masser, Anne and Me, 2008, acrylic on wood, each piece 21 × 22 cm. 2 pieces. Courtesy of the artist 76 Anat Masad, Anne Anat Anne and Anat, 2008, installation, mixed media, each piece 20 × 15 cm. 30 pieces. Courtesy of the artist 76 Dvora Morag, Porthole, 2008, installation, mixed media, 51 × 46 cm. Courtesy of the artist 77 Dvora Morag, Porthole, 2008, detail from the installation, mixed media, 22 × 10 cm. Courtesy of the artist 78 Asaf Hanuka, A frame from “A Good Jew,” 2012, comics. Courtesy of the artist 79 Renato Guttuso, The Triumph of War, 1966, oil on canvas, 126 × 186 cm. Alinari Archives, Florence, Italy 83 Otto Schier, The First Transport of Prisoners to Auschwitz, 1975, mixed media, various dimensions. Courtesy of Tarnów, Poland 83 Judy Chicago, Im / Balance of Power, 1990, sprayed acrylic, oil paint and photography on photo linen, 215.26 × 283.84 cm. Courtesy of the artist 86 Adel Abdessemed, Mon Enfant (My Child), 2014, ivory, 133 × 70 × 40 cm. ©Adel Abdessemed 87 Gustav Metzger, Historic Photographs: No. 1: Liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, April 19–28 days, 1943, 1995/2011, black and white photograph and rubble, 150 × 211 cm. Courtesy of the artist’s estate 89 Michael James Toomy, The Ghosts of the Warsaw Ghetto III, 2007, a hand sketched and painted acrylic paint on canvas, 24" × 48". Courtesy of the artist 90 Setsuko Ono, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Victoire d’Une Defaite, 2009, charcoal and acrylic on canvas, 2 × 1.49 m. Courtesy of the artist 90 Moshik Lin, And in the end someone will say that this is another Jewish invention, 2012, caricature. Courtesy of the artist 92 Werner Horvath, Anne Frank, 2007, oil on canvas, 70 × 50 cm. Courtesy of the artist 92 Jacob Gildor, Target – Untitled, 2008, collage and acrylic on cardboard, 69 × 48 cm. Collection of the artist 93 Michael Knigin, Anne’s Stigma II, 2003, Print, 28" × 22". Courtesy of the artist’s estate 94 Ruth Schloss, Anne Frank, 1981, photographic print and acrylic on canvas, 100 × 81 cm. Courtesy of the artist’s estate 95 William Rock and Huang Xiang, Anne Frank, 2008, acrylic, Chinese ink on canvas, 5.5 × 3 feet. Courtesy of the artists 97 View of the Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial, 2002, Boise, ID, USA 98

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Fig. 74 Fig. 75 Fig. 76 Fig. 77 Fig. 78 Fig. 79 Fig. 80 Fig. 81 Fig. 82 Fig. 83 Fig. 84 Fig. 85 Fig. 86 Fig. 87 Fig. 88 Fig. 89 Fig. 90 Fig. 91 Fig. 92 Fig. 93 Fig. 94

Fig. 95 Fig. 96 Fig. 97

List of Illustrations

Greg Stone, Anne Frank, 2001, cast bronze, life size. Courtesy of Boise, ID, USA 99 Linda Stein, Anne Frank 808, 2015, mixed media tapestry, 59" × 59" × 2". Collection of Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond Learsy 101 Linda Stein, Anne Frank 839, 2015, mixed media tapestry, 59" × 59" × 2". Courtesy of the artist 102 Alexsandro Palombo, Never Again, 2015. Cartoon. Courtesy of the artists 103 Alexsandro Palombo, Never Again, Anne Frank in Auschwitz-Birkenau, 2015. Cartoon. Courtesy of the artist 105 Alexsandro Palombo, Never Again, Anne Frank in Auschwitz I, 2015. Cartoon. Courtesy of the artist 105 Jennifer Gottschalk, Yellow Badge / Warsaw Boy, 2008, digital art, 42 × 59.4 cm. Courtesy of the artist 106 Samuel Bak, Identification, 2007, oil on canvas 11" × 14". Courtesy of Pucker gallery, Boston, MA, USA 107 Avner Bar Hama, Generation to Generation – Shoah, 2005, print on canvas, 150 × 200 cm. Collection of the artist 108 Tamar Messer, Lamentations, 2:21, 2007, linoleum cut, 19 × 19 cm. Collection of the artist 109 Susan Keeter, Portrait of Anne Frank, 1996, oil on canvas, 61 × 51 cm. Courtesy of the artist 110 Mitzi Trachtenberg, Anne, 1995, collage and mixed media on canvas, 4" × 5". Holocaust Museum Pittsburgh, PA, USA 112 Israel Bernbaum, Jewish Children in Warsaw Ghetto and in Death Camps, 1981, oil on canvas, 30⅜" x 82¼". Collection of Montclair State University, NJ, USA 113 Judy Chicago, Grown Men Pointing Guns at Children, 1991, mixed media on rag paper, 76.2 × 101.6 cm. Courtesy of the artist 115 Marc Chagall, Anne Frank, 1958, lithograph, 27 × 21 cm 116 Drora Weitzman, Herzl and Anne, 2005, photography and frame, 34 × 46 cm. Courtesy of the artist 121 Avner Bar Hama, If You Will – State in the Way . . ., 2005, digital manipulated photograph printed on dibond, 80 × 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist 122 Avner Bar Hama, Revenge of a Little Boy . . ., 2005, digital manipulated photograph printed on dibond, 125 × 90 cm. Courtesy of the artist 123 Michael Knigin, Dreaming, 2008, montage, variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist’s estate 123 David Tartakover, Plate No. 6 from the project “Proclamation of Independence,” 1988, collage on paper, 70 × 50 cm. Courtesy of the artist 125 Avner Bar Hama, A Surprising Visit to the Western Wall, 2004–2009, digital manipulated photograph printed on dibond, 50 × 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist 126 Hal Goldberg, Anne Frank at the Wall in Jerusalem, 1985, white Carrara marble, 24" × 14" × 14". Courtesy of the artist 127 Michael Knigin, Fantasy, 2008, montage, variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist’s estate 129 Arnold Trachtman, The Austrian Rider, 1990, acrylic on canvas, 137.16 × 162.56 cm. Courtesy of the artist 132

List of Illustrations

Fig. 98

Fig. 99 Fig. 100 Fig. 101 Fig. 102 Fig. 103

Fig. 104

Fig. 105 Fig. 106

Fig. 107 Fig. 108 Fig. 109 Fig. 110 Fig. 111 Fig. 112 Fig. 113 Fig. 114 Fig. 115 Fig. 116 Fig. 117 Fig. 118 Fig. 119 Fig. 120 Fig. 121

Adolf Hitler, Albert Vögler, Fritz Thyssen and Walter Borbet during a visit to the Corporate Thyssen Industries, photograph, 1938. © Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz 133 Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, The Polish Rider, 1655, oil on canvas, 114.9 × 135 cm. Copyright The Frick Collection, New York, NY, USA 134 António Moreira Antunes, Expresso, 1983, Cartoon. Collection of the artist 135 Carlos Latuff, Gaza Ghetto, 2008, pen on paper, variable sizes. Collection of the artist 136 Alan Schechner, The Legacy of Abused Children: from Poland to Palestine, 2003, digitally altered photographs & DVD projection. Courtesy of the artist 137 Avner Bar Hama, Hands Up! – Generation to Generation 2 – Continuity, 2005, digitally manipulation photograph on dibond, 140 × 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist 139 Avner Bar Hama, Generation to Generation – Continuity – Pure Hands !, 2005, digitally manipulation photograph printed on dibond, 50 × 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist 140 Avner Bar Hama, Children’s Lover!, 2005, digitally manipulation photograph printed on dibond, 65 × 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist 141 Avner Bar Hama, Holocaust Denial – Arbeit Macht Frei – Hands Up!, 2009, digitally manipulation photograph printed on dibond, 50 × 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist 142 Yossi Shachar, “Nachlawi” 1, 2014, caricature. Courtesy of the artist 144 Yossi Shachar, “Nachlawi” 2, 2015, caricature. Courtesy of the artist 145 Yossi Shachar, Humiliating Examination, 2018, caricature. Courtesy of the artist 146 Moshik Lin, It Is Really Terrible What We Do to These Poor Palestinians . . ., 2018, caricature. Courtesy of the artist 148 Guy Morad, Find the Differences, 2012, caricature. Yediot Ahronot, January 2, 2012, p. 21. Courtesy of the artist 149 Moshik Lin, Zionazis, 2012, caricature. Ma’ariv, January 2, 2012, p. 23. Courtesy of the artist 150 Michael (Mysh) Rozanov, The Problem of Self-Image, 2012. Digital illustration. Courtesy of the artist 151 Uri Fink, Untitled, 2017, caricature. Ma’ariv, April 24, 2017, Deot (Opinions). Courtesy of the artist 153 Ayana Friedman, Fresh Air for Anne, 2009, installation, varied dimensions, various dimensions. Courtesy of the artist 155 Doreen Kern, Anne Frank, 1995, bronze, 50 cm height. Courtesy of the artist 158 June Allan, Anne Frank, 2002, acrylic on paper, 19 × 16 cm. Courtesy of the artist 158 Alexsandro Palombo, Never Again, Anne Frank, 2015, cartoon. Courtesy of the artists 159 Sam Philipe, Anne Frank, 2015, bronze, various dimensions. Collection of Kalman and Malki Samuels at Shalva, Jerusalem 160 Lawrence Holofcener, Anne Frank, 2000, bronze relief, 25.5 × 17.5 × 5 cm. Courtesy of the artist’s estate 162 Alexsandro Palombo, Never Again, Anne Frank, 2015, cartoon. Courtesy of the artist 163

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Fig. 122 Fig. 123 Fig. 124 Fig. 125

Fig. 126 Fig. 127

Fig. 128 Fig. 129 Fig. 130 Fig. 131 Fig. 132 Fig. 133 Fig. 134 Fig. 135 Fig. 136

Fig. 137 Fig. 138 Fig. 139 Fig. 140 Fig. 141 Fig. 142

List of Illustrations

Mike and Doug Starn, Anne Frank Grave Marker, 1989, mixed media, 45 × 50 cm. Collection Cornelis Suuijk, Anne Frank Center, USA 163 Jet Schepp, Anne Frank, 2005, bronze statue. Courtesy of the city of Purmerend, The Netherlands 165 Pieter d’Hont, Anne Frank, 1960, bronze statue, 125 cm. Courtesy of the city of Utrecht, The Netherlands 166 Andriessen Mari Sylvester, Anne Frank, 1977, bronze statue, 26.2 × 7.5 cm. Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Courtesy of the city of Amsterdam, The Netherlands 166 Statue of Anne Frank in Rose Garden, Fukuyama City, Japan, late 1990s. Courtesy of Reverend Makoto Otsuka, pastor of a Fukuyama church 168 Josephus (Joep) G. M. Coppens, Anne Frank, 1995, bronze statue on marble base, 71 × 17 × 13 cm. Asten, The Netherlands. Courtesy of the city of Asten, The Netherlands 168 Sara Pons Arnal, Anne Frank, 2001, bronze, life-size. Barcelona, Spain. Courtesy of the city of Barcelona, Spain 169 Samuel Bak, Study D, 1995, oil on Canvas, 25⅝" × 21⅛". Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA, USA 176 Samuel Bak, From Ashes, 2006, oil on canvas, 14" × 11". Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA, USA 177 Marjolein Rothman, Disappearance, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 60 × 40 cm. Courtesy of the artist 178 Samuel Bak, Walled In, 2008, oil on canvas, 30" × 24". Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA, USA 179 Avner Bar Hama, Fractures, 2009, digitally manipulated photograph printed on dibond, 50 × 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist 180 Avner Bar Hama, Fractures Disappear, 2009, digitally manipulated photograph printed on dibond, 50 × 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist 181 Avner Bar Hama, Fractures Do Not Disappear, 2009, digitally manipulated photograph printed on dibond, 50 × 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist 182 Gustav Metzger, Historic Photographs: Liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, April 19–28 days 1943, 1995, bromide print, wooden shuttering, galvanized steel channel stock 150 × 184 cm. Courtesy of the artist’s estate 183 Noam Lahav, Auschwitz: The Annunciation I (Anne Frank), 1992, oil on canvas, 100 × 80 cm. Courtesy of the artist’s estate 184 Noam Lahav, Auschwitz: The Annunciation II (Anne Frank), 1992, oil on canvas, 100 × 80 cm. Courtesy of the artist’s estate 184 Haya Graetz-Ran, Without A Name, 2008, oil on canvas, 3 oval pieces 20 × 30 cm. each. Courtesy of the artist 185 Samuel Bak, Into the Trees, 1995, oil on linen, 161⁄8" × 13". Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA, USA 186 Samuel Bak, Absence, 1997, oil on linen, 201⁄8" × 201⁄8". Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA, USA 187 Daniela Ament, Vanishing Memory, 2007, bronze, rusted iron and acrylic glass, various dimensions. Courtesy of the artist, Israel 188

Introduction: Icons of Loss The Photograph as Testimony and Memory The photograph is a fragmented representation of tangible reality captured by the camera’s lens. The information presented in the photograph introduces a fraction of a second of an ongoing event from which we cannot learn what was before it or after it. Nonetheless, the photograph has a latent potential to indicate the past, to reflect or clarify the specific reality shown and to function as an agent to remember the photographed occasion. In Susan Sontag’s definition, “Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.”1 She added that “photographs furnish evidence . . . whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretentions (through artistry) of the individual photograph, a photograph – any photograph – seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects.” Moreover, “a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selected transparency.”2 Despite this, Sybil Milton claimed, “It is important to remember that the camera is not neutral, even in documentary newsreels and official war photographs.”3 Sontag also argued that “Photographs do not explain; they acknowledge.”4 Therefore, “In order to be able to interpret a photograph, there must be some knowledge of the event being photographed,” Janina Struk wrote.5 Marianne Hirsch emphasized the denotative and the connotative representations as two options of discussing Holocaust pictures.6 The first one describes the historical event as it happened from an historical point of view, while the other is an interpretive point of view. The interpretive image gradually distances itself from the historical source and thus becomes a symbol. Well-known Holocaust photographs produced by Nazis, Jews, neutral and Allied photographers influenced many artists, and they rely on them in their artworks. One of the most used images is that of the little boy with his hands raised during the Warsaw Ghetto liquidation (Fig. 1). Marianne Hirsch described the photograph in these words:

1 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 3–4. 2 Ibid., 5–6. 3 Sybil Milton, “The Camera as Weapon: Documentary Photography and the Holocaust,” Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual, vol. I (1984): 45. 4 Sontag, On Photography, 111. 5 Janina Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, Interpretation of the Evidence (London-New York: I. B. Tauris, 2004), 4. 6 Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelizer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 226–227. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110656916-001

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Introduction: Icons of Loss

If you had to name one picture that signals and evokes the Holocaust in the contemporary cultural imagination it might well be the picture of the little boy in the Warsaw ghetto with his hands raised. The pervasive role this photograph has come to play is indeed astounding: it is not an exaggeration to say that, assuming an archetypal role of Jewish (and universal) victimization, the boy in the Warsaw ghetto has become the poster-child for the Holocaust.7

Lucy Dawidowicz suggested a meaning in historical terms: Consequently, in the deluded German mind, every Jewish man, woman and child became a panoplied warrior of a vast satanic fighting machine. The most concrete illustration of this delusion is the now familiar photograph taken from the collection attached to Stroop’s report of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. It shows uniformed German SS men holding guns to a group of women and children; in the foreground is a frightened boy of about six, his hands up. This was the face of the enemy.8

The spectator’s attitude and emotions are influenced when photographs depict vulnerable and helpless children. One of the main reasons that this photograph became an iconic one is that unlike photographs depicting piles of corpses, humiliating nude, skeletal hungry Jews, in this photograph all the figures are dressed, the representation of violence is restrained and it does not immediately evoke an association of death.9 When the photograph’s status changes from an archival item to a memorial agent in public space, additional meanings are added to it. Therefore, Richard Raskin stated, “An important first step towards understanding this picture involves looking at it closely, so that our subsequent discussion can be grounded in what is actually there, rather than in what we might assume to be there or think we see.”10 Following the publication of Anne Frank photographs in her diary (Figs. 2-7),11 “her face with the sad shy smile” became “one of the icons of this century.”12 Her portrait is one of the most used images as well. The photographs of the boy from the Warsaw Ghetto and Anne Frank became famous worldwide as documents representing the Holocaust. Many artists adopted them as a source of inspiration to express their feelings and ideas about Holocaust events in general and to deal with the fate of these two victims in particular. Behind Anne 7 Marianne Hirsch, “Nazi Photographs in Post-Holocaust Art: Gender as an Idiom of Memorialization,” in Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century, eds. Omer Bartov et al. (New York: New Press, 2002), 100–101. 8 Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews: 1933–1945 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975), 166. 9 Dan Porat, “The Story of a Picture,” B’shvil Hazikaron 14 (2013): 29 (Hebrew). 10 Richard Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint: A Case Study in the Life of a Photo (Denmark: Aarhus, 2004), 11. 11 A. H. Rosenfeld, “Popularisation and Memory: The Case of Anne Frank,” in Lessons and Legacies, the Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World, ed. P. Hayes (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press 1991), 244. 12 Dick Van Galen Last and Rolf Wolfswinkel, Dutch Holocaust Literature in Historical Perspective (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 13.

The Warsaw Ghetto Boy’s Photograph

3

Frank’s photographs there is a young girl whose life story is known through her diary and the Anne Frank House, while the identity of the boy in the photograph from Warsaw Ghetto is unknown.

The Warsaw Ghetto Boy’s Photograph The photograph of the boy from the Warsaw Ghetto (Fig. 1) is taken from German documentation of the Warsaw Ghetto liquidation and was first published in General Jürgen Stroop’s report of 1943.13 Alongside the young boy in short pants, boots, coat and cap with his raised hands, we see on the left and in the background of the street scene other Jews – men, women, and children – also with raised hands. Some are carrying bags, and on the right a Nazi soldier is pointing his submachine gun at the boy. Many have claimed that they were the boy in the photograph, but since there is no conclusive evidence, we do not know his identity.14 This did not prevent him from becoming an icon of the Holocaust that has been used obsessively in books, teaching aids, films, and artworks.15 General Jürgen Stroop initiated the photographing of the Warsaw Ghetto evacuation in order to add it to his report. There are several possibilities as to who recorded this event. Probably more than one photographer took the photographs. The assumption is that some of the photographers belonged to PK 689 (Propaganda Kompanie), a propaganda unit engaged in recording scenes of Jewish life and death in the Warsaw Ghetto. Several sources have been mentioned in research on this photograph; some have attributed it to the above-mentioned unit and others have cited other organizations involved. The latest research mentions Stroop’s personal photographer Franz Konrad as the photographer of the infamous photograph of the evacuation of the Warsaw Ghetto. The result is that the photographer’s identity is still unclear.16 The first time the Warsaw Ghetto boy’s photograph reached public attention was when it was included in Alain Resnais’s film Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog), shown at the 1956 Cannes film festival. However, only in 1960 did the photograph

13 Jürgen Stroop, The Stroop Report: The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More! (New York, 1979), unnumbered. Jürgen Stroop was an SS officer responsible for the elimination of the Warsaw Ghetto who commanded the fight against the uprising of the ghetto’s Jews. Stroop prepared a decorated album for Adolf Hitler including reports on the battle in Warsaw and a series of photographs taken by the Germans during the Warsaw Uprising. On the front cover, the inscription, in beautiful German calligraphy, states “Es gibt keinen jüdischen Wohnbezirk in Warschau mehr!” (The Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no more). 14 About possible identities see: Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, Interpretations of the Evidences, 200–201; Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint, 81–103. 15 Milton, “The Camera as Weapon: Documentary Photography and the Holocaust,” 45. 16 Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint, 31–31; 66–67.

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Introduction: Icons of Loss

Fig. 1: Photograph from the Warsaw Ghetto. General Jürgen Stroop’s report of 1943.

acquire its international status, specifically through the publication of Gerhard Schoenberner’s book, Der Gelbe Stern (The Yellow Star), in which he included the picture in the book’s collection of Holocaust photographs. As this photograph appeared on the cover of the British, French, and Canadian editions, it was widely circulated and reached a large audience in many countries. Since then, the Warsaw Ghetto boy’s photograph has appeared in many artistic expressions, such as Ingmar Bergman’s movie, Persona, in 1966, the television series, The Glittering Prizes, by Frederic Raphael, broadcast on BBC2 in 1976, Yala Korwin’s poem, The Little Boy with his Hands Up, of 1982, and other works from the 1980s until the present day.17 As an icon, the Warsaw Ghetto boy sometimes appears with the Nazi soldier pointing his submachine gun at him, but most frequently he is shown alone. When the Warsaw Ghetto boy’s photograph became well known, it was published with the tendentious addition of a yellow Star of David (known in Hebrew as the Shield of David or Magen David) on his coat (which did not exist in the original) and that is how it was etched in the collective memory. The addition of the yellow Star of David is a factual-historical mistake, since in the Warsaw Ghetto the inmates wore white armbands with a blue Star of David. We can find examples of this and other mistakes concerning the depiction presented in the original photograph, for example in Peter L. Fischl’s poem, To the Little Polish Boy Standing with His Arms Up, of 1994: I would like to be an artist So I could make a painting of you Little Polish Boy

17 Yala Korwin, To Tell the Story: Poems of the Holocaust (New York: Holocaust Library, 1987), 75–76; Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint, 105–108.

The Warsaw Ghetto Boy’s Photograph

5

Standing with your little hat on your head The Star of David on your coat Standing in the ghetto with your arms up as many Nazi machine guns pointing at you.18

In addition, in Ella Dor-On’s poem, A Jewish child in Ghetto, of 1998 the yellow Star of David is mentioned as well: A Jewish child in Ghetto, surrounded by a wall. Alone, without his mother, with hands raised up, so small! He marches hurt and grievous on freezing roads, in cold. Light coat. . . Bare knees in winter. . . So helpless to behold! With yellow Star of David – a symbol of disgrace. He’s on the verge of crying. What fate is he to face?19

Although the descriptions in both poems are very expressive, when examining the original photograph there is no yellow Star of David on the boy’s coat and there are not “many Nazi machine guns,” only two soldiers holding submachine guns. Another mistake is found in Elie Wiesel’s speech to the German Parliament (Bundestag, January 27, 2000) when referring to the photograph of the Warsaw Ghetto boy: There is a picture that shows laughing soldiers surrounding a Jewish boy in a ghetto, I think probably in the Warsaw Ghetto. I look at it often. What was it about that sad and frightened Jewish child with his hands up in the air that amused the German soldiers so? Why was tormenting him so funny?20

In fact, in the original photograph the soldiers are not laughing at the boy, they are not even looking at him. Thus, the photograph of the Warsaw Ghetto boy has

18 This is the first stanza of the poem, in which Fischl repeats the same description several times. The poem is in the Archives of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Los Angeles. ©1994 Peter L. Fischl. 19 These are the first three stanzas of the poem, in Ella Dor-On, The Number On Grandmother’s Arm (Tel Aviv: Margalit, 1998), 22 (Hebrew) (translated from Hebrew by Ella Dor-On) http://www.ako gan.de/elladoron/number_on_arm.pdf (accessed in December 12, 2018). 20 https://www.bundestag.de/parlament/geschichte/gastredner/wiesel/rede-247400 (accessed in January 30, 2000).

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Introduction: Icons of Loss

become an independent image, to which artists have added or from which they have eliminated details as they wished. Historical photographs of World War II are commonly used in Holocaust art, and many artists adopt this approach. Barbie Zelizer stated, “Images help stabilize and anchor collective memory’s transient and fluctuating nature in art, cinema, television, and photography, aiding recall to the extent that images often become an event’s primary markers.”21 Moreover, Monica Bohm-Duchen wrote, “Given these photographs’ indisputable status as ‘ethical reference points,’ it is hardly surprising that many artists have felt compelled, both visually and morally, to make use of them in their own work.”22 There has been only one comprehensive and in-depth study of this famous photograph, by Richard Raskin in his book, A Child at Gunpoint: A Case Study in the Life of a Photo.23 Raskin analyzed the photograph thoroughly to identify the individuals in it, and he presented four possible identities of the boy. In addition, he examined the role of the photograph in selected literary and visual works of art. Other studies on Holocaust memory, such as Barbie Zelizer’s book, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye,24 have examined the influence of historical photographs, including the Warsaw Ghetto boy’s photograph. Additional research discussed the representation of the Holocaust in visual arts and its effect on Holocaust commemoration, such as the volume of essays, Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust, edited by Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz.25 Janina Struk, in her book Photographing the Holocaust, Interpretation of the Evidence, discussed historical photographs from pre-war Germany through the Holocaust, as well as the use of photographs after it. She included the Warsaw Ghetto boy’s photograph.26 In the book, The Boy: A Holocaust Story, Dan Porat referred to the most recognizable photograph of the Holocaust.27 Porat dissects the photograph’s components and unravels the stories of the individuals – both Jewish and Nazis – associated with it. This book displays historical facts of the photograph in a literary style along with 60 photographs illustrating the lives of the figures in the book in the years preceding World War II and following them to their deaths. Porat presented the stories

21 Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 6. 22 Monica Bohm-Duchen, “The Uses and Abuses of Photography in Holocaust-Related Art,” in Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust, eds. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 221–234, esp. 221. 23 Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint: A Case Study in the Life of a Photo. 24 Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye. 25 Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz, eds. Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). 26 Struk, Photographing the Holocaust. 27 Dan Porat, The Boy: A Holocaust Story (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010).

About Anne Frank’s Photographs

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of three Nazi criminals and the story of two Jewish victims, a teenage girl and a young boy, who encounter these Nazis in Warsaw in the spring of 1943. He tried to answer the question of the history behind this infamous photograph.

About Anne Frank’s Photographs Anne Frank is, perhaps, the only individual among the millions who perished, whose face has remained with us; her personal diary has become common property, treasured by many; her portrait, known to all, has come to epitomize the unknown portraits of her counterparts, all those hundreds of thousands of anonymous boys and girls, grown old – like her – before their time and sentenced to death with their whole lives still ahead of them. Ruth Schloss28

Anne (Anneliese Marie) Frank was born on June 12, 1929 in Frankfurt am Main in Germany to Edith and Otto Frank, sister to Margot born on February 16, 1926. The Frank family was involved in German society, Otto Frank and his two brothers served in the Imperial German Army during the First World War. The Frank family members were liberal Jews. They went to synagogue occasionally and observed the most important Jewish holidays. After Hitler rose to power in 1933, the Frank family felt unsafe and moved to Merwedeplein in Amsterdam. Otto Frank worked in the Opekta Company manufacturing products used in making jam. For seven years, they lived relatively quietly until the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940. Otto Frank planned to go into hiding with his family on July 16, 1942, foreseeing the approaching situation. He prepared a secret hiding place not only for his family but also for the van Pels family, Hermann, Augusta, and their 16-year-old son, Peter, and Friedrich “Fritz” Pfeffer, a German Jewish dentist and close friend of the Franks. The Frank family’s contacts and helpers were a few of Otto Frank’s employees: Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman, Miep Gies, and her husband, Jan, and Bep Voskuijl. They provided them not only for their physical needs but also made sure they were safe, and brought them news from the Netherlands, Europe, and the world. They risked their lives helping them. The call-up notice for 16-year-old Margot to report for work in Germany made the Frank family disappear the next day. They were in hiding for two years, until an anonymous informant betrayed them on August 4, 1944. The entire group of eight inhabitants of the annex was arrested. On August 8, 1944, they were all deported to the Westerbork transit camp in northern Holland. From there, on September 6, 1944,

28 Ruth Schloss, Anne Frank in Perspective, April 1981, unpaged (Catalog).

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Introduction: Icons of Loss

Fig. 2: Anne Frank in Amsterdam, 1939.

Fig. 3: Anne Frank in Amsterdam, 1942.

they were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, arriving after a three-day journey. Edith Frank died in Auschwitz in January 1945. Anne and Margot were transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the end of October 1944, where they died from a typhus epidemic, probably in the beginning of March 1945.29 The photographs of Anne Frank are internationally known documents representing the Holocaust (Figs. 2–7). They have been adopted by many artists as a source of inspiration to express their feelings and ideas about Holocaust events in general and to deal with the fate of Anne Frank and her family in particular. Anne Frank became famous because of her diary, written in Dutch,30 in which (despite her young age) she describes sensitively, acutely and maturely, what she, her family and their friends went through in their hiding place from the Nazis. Although there are no explicit details about the Holocaust in the diary, Anne Frank is simultaneously the Holocaust’s “most famous victim,”31 as well as “the most famous child of the twentieth century.”32 Her face, with the sad shy smile, evolved

29 Menno Metselaar and Ruud van der Rol, The Story of Anne Frank (Amsterdam: Anne Frank House, 2004). 30 Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1967). Translated by: B. M. Mooy Aart-Doubleday. 31 Judith Miller, One, By One, By One, Facing the Holocaust (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 10; James E. Young, “The Anne Frank House Holland’s Memorial ‘Shrine of the Book,’” in The Art of Memory Holocaust Memorials in History, ed. James E. Young (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), 131. 32 Rosenfeld, A. H., “Popularisation and Memory: The Case of Anne Frank,” in Lessons and Legacies, the Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World, ed. P. Hayes (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 244.

About Anne Frank’s Photographs

Fig. 4: Anne Frank in Amsterdam, May 1942.

9

Fig. 5: Anne Frank in the fifth grade of the Montessori school in Amsterdam, 1940.

Fig. 6: Anne Frank in the sixth grade of the Montessori school in Amsterdam, 1941. Fig. 7: Anne Frank in Amsterdam, 1941.

into one of the icons of the twentieth century following the publication of her photograph in the diary.33 From the mid-1950s onward, the diary became an international property: in 1955, it was adapted into a play on Broadway and became an instant success, as did the movie “The Diary of Anne Frank,” which was screened in the United States in 1959.

33 Van Galen Last and Wolfswinkel, Dutch Holocaust Literature in Historical Perspective, 13.

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Introduction: Icons of Loss

The diary has been published in more than 50 languages and sold worldwide in over 30 million copies. In 1960, The Anne Frank House, the house in which the Frank family hid, was opened to the public, and hundreds of thousands of tourists visit it every year. Streets, schools, awards and conventions are named after Anne Frank, and her image appears on stamps, coins and artworks.34 Judith Tydor Baumel claimed that Anne Frank’s fame was to a large extent a combination of circumstances, such as the right timing of the exposure of the diary and its publication as a book, which was accompanied by massive public relations.35 Only a few exhibitions dealt with the presentation of Anne Frank’s image in artworks. In 1981, Ruth Schloss presented 50 works in her exhibition, Anne Frank in Perspective, in which Anne Frank’s face was seen simultaneously in Jewish and universal contexts.36 The artist connected Anne Frank’s features with her fate in hiding and in the concentration camp. She created a dialogue between Anne Frank’s face and her diary, which is a tangible embodiment of her inner world, and she tried to describe how Anne Frank would have looked decades later if she had survived. In Judith Weinshall Liberman’s exhibition, Holocaust Wall Hanging of 1990, Anne Frank’s image was presented in many of the artist’s works.37 For example, the girl’s face was repeated several times in different sizes as a Holocaust icon placed beside piles of corpses, train cars and the number on the arm. Her face peeps from the small window of a monumental boxcar in which the Jews were transported to the extermination camps. The most extensive and detailed work about Anne Frank, her life, her diary and her memory and legacy was The Anne Frank Project (1991–1994) created by Ellen Rothenberg (b. 1949).38 The Anne Frank Project was composed of a threepart installation through which the artist questions the memory and myth of Anne Frank. Monica Bohm-Duchen wrote about the artist’s reassessment of the young diarist:

34 Dina Porat. “Forty Years’ Battle – Anne Frank’s Diary and Holocaust Denials 1958–1998,” in The Holocaust:the Exclusive and the Universal, collection of articles in honor to Yehuda Bauer (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2001), 162–164 (Hebrew). Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust, From Auschwitz to Schindler, How History is Bought, Packaged, and Sold (New York: Routledge, 1999), 23. 35 Judith Tydor Baumel, Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust (London and Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 1998), 144. 36 Ruth Schloss, Anne Frank in Perspective (Catalog). 37 In 1992 she presented the wall hangings at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. See: Judith Weinshall Liberman, The Holocaust Wall Hangings (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1992). (Catalog); Judith Weinshall Liberman, Holocaust Wall Hangings (Rockland, MA: Charles River Lithography, 2002). 38 Monica Bohm-Duchen, ed., After Auschwitz, Responses to the Holocaust in Contemporary Art (London: Lund Humphries, 1995). (Catalog). Matthew Baigell, Jewish Artists in New York: The Holocaust Years (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 100–102; http://www.ellenro thenberg.com/anne-frank-project.html (accessed in January 26, 2017).

About Anne Frank’s Photographs

11

Her realization, after reading the critical and unexpurgated version of the Diary (published in English in 1989), that earlier editions had eliminated nearly all reference to the young girl's burgeoning sexuality and her troubled relationship with her mother, as well as to the family’s German origins and the fact that now, in Amsterdam, they were in hiding from the Germans, prompted Rothenberg to explore the complex ways in which Anne Frank has been mythologized, turned into a kind of Jewish saint stripped of both cultural specificity and individual complexity. In technically inventive and thought-provoking ways, Rothenberg's work invites us to reassess the situation.39

The first part, Partial Index (1991), was a large wooden architectural structure with a front wall of twelve doors containing enlarged archival materials, pages from Anne’s diary, floor plans of the hiding place, photographs of her and from the walls of her room, etc., with no logical order occupying the entire space. This room presented Anne in a human rather than symbolic manner. The second part, A Probability Bordering on Certainty (1993), was created while Rothenberg was living in Berlin during 1991–1992, which enabled her to conduct research about Anne Frank at The Anne Frank Institute and Museum and the Netherlands’ Institute for War Documentation. It contained tangible objects that directly presented a connection to Anne Frank’s questioning of her identity. For example, there was a set of business cards stating “Anne Frank, Professional Writer,” suggesting Anne Frank’s future, had she survived. The Combing Shawl consists of the text of Anne Frank’s diary printed on vellum strips hanging on a wall and ending on the floor with 350 metal combs. It referred to Anne Frank’s small silken cape, which she wore around her shoulders when combing her hair, one of the personal articles found in the hiding place. The wall space of the third and final part, Conditions for Growth (1994), were covered by a mass of rulers and inscriptions surrounded by industrial scales weighing pillows, pencils, and bread, hanging rulers and a pile of erasers. The notations inscribed on the walls of the Secret Annex, recording the heights of Anne Frank and the other children, inspired the representations in this part. Here, the artist considered the impossibility of quantifying the experience of the Holocaust. Matthew Baigell pointed to the importance of Rothenberg’s inventiveness: Ellen Rothenberg’s The Anne Frank Project is a notable exception because of the multivalent responses it is intended to provoke. One might wish to argue that this work is among the most stylistically and conceptually advanced works using Holocaust imagery. Quite different from the more traditionally responsive works of other artists, but its meanings are in no way totally open-ended. It is about Anne Frank – her life, times, and her possibilities. It is not morally ambiguous or neutral; neither is it just about process and viewer response to process. Postmodern techniques and devices of presentation are present, but the purposes of the work are focused.40

39 Monica Bohm-Duchen, “Fifty Years On,” in After Auschwitz, Responses to the Holocaust in Contemporary Art, ed. Monica Bohm-Duchen (London: Lund Humphries, 1995), 140. 40 Baigell, Jewish Artists in New York, 116.

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Introduction: Icons of Loss

In June 2009, I curated an exhibition called Anne Frank in the Artists’ Eyes, a large collection of original artworks depicting Anne Frank.41 It presented a wide range of art considering Anne Frank’s image as it had engaged artists’ thoughts, ideas and emotions. Twenty-nine artists from Hungary, Germany, Austria, Holland, Sweden, UK, USA and Israel participated in this exhibition with various artistic media and diverse styles. Many of the artworks exhibited are discussed in this book. This exhibition is one of the few exhibitions on this topic.42 Despite the small number of exhibitions devoted specifically to representations of the young diarist in art, Anne Frank’s image has been used extensively in the work of many artists from around the globe. Every artist refers to Anne’s image according to his/her cultural perception and artistic style. By using the image of children of the Holocaust, the artists evoke our sympathy and at the same time stir our anger against the Nazi crime: the murder of one-and -a-half million children during the Holocaust.43 This book is in the field of art history; therefore, it emphasizes the visual expression of the topics and images of the artworks of the different artists. Its method combines the artistic-biographic approach and socio-historical reference in order to create a link between the iconographic and stylistic artistic debate and the historical time and social-cultural context in which the artworks were created. In this way, we can simultaneously see the personal point of view of each artist and learn about general trends and processes indicating the attitude of the artists to the boy from the Warsaw Ghetto and Anne Frank as Holocaust images in art. The documentary structure of this book is comprised of artworks found in collections of artists, museums, artists’ estates and private owners. The questions I try to answer in the book are: In what way have the artists used the image of the boy from the Warsaw Ghetto and Anne Frank to represent the Holocaust? What are the messages and the meanings that the artists deal with through their images? To what extent have the artists used the Warsaw Ghetto boy’s and Anne Frank’s images to cope with contemporary issues connected to violence and genocide?

41 It was held in the Rumbach Synagogue in Budapest, Hungary, built in 1872 by the Viennese architect Otto Wagner, by Peter Wilhelm Art Center to honor Anne Frank’s 80th birthday. 42 Batya Brutin, Anne Frank in the Artist’s Eyes (Budapest: Peter Wilhelm Art Projects, 2009) (Catalog). 43 See detailed discussion about the image of a child alone in Holocaust art in: Ziva AmishaiMaisels, Depiction and Interpretation: The Influence of the Holocaust on the Visual Arts (Oxford: Pergamon, 1993), 143–147.

About the Book’s Chapters

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About the Book’s Chapters Until now no comprehensive and in-depth research about the visual representations of the boy from Warsaw and Anne Frank’s images in artworks has been written. This book remedies this conspicuous lack. In this book, the ways in which the boy from Warsaw and Anne Frank’s images are depicted, how they are used, and their meaning in connection to Holocaust memory are examined. This book also examines whether the Warsaw Ghetto boy’s image appears alone in order to isolate him or whether he is part of a layout of additional images symbolizing the Holocaust and its meanings. In addition, the book questions how the artists use the image of the boy from the Warsaw Ghetto to represent the Holocaust and to what extent the image is used to deal with contemporary issues. The research also discusses the joining of Anne Frank’s image with depictions of the Annex. In addition, it examines the use of her image and the correlation between her diary’s text and the visual “text” in the artworks: Does the written content in the diary appear in the visual representation and, if so, in what form? What meaning does the diary’s text take on when it appears as part of the components of the artwork? There is also a presentation of Anne’s image in the public sphere in the form of statues. The book’s character is thematic, and it is not intended as a catalog. Therefore, it does not deal with all the artists who use the Warsaw Ghetto boy’s and Anne Frank’s images. Nor are all the artworks of artists who I discuss included. Examination of a large number of artworks of many artists pinpoints that there are mutual topics that have engaged them, and they all sought to express them in their artworks. The artists put the boy’s and Anne’s images in a visual as well as a contextual environment according to the subjects they choose to discuss in relation to Holocaust legacy and memory. The Introduction: Icons of Loss deals with the use of historical photographs in general and the Warsaw Ghetto boy’s and Anne Frank’s photographs in particular. The first chapter, Jewish Children’s Fate During the Holocaust, refers to the tragic fate of Jewish children during the Holocaust through these two children’s photographs. The second chapter, It Could Have Been Me, shows the artists’ identification with both children’s fate by entering into the existence, the situations and experiences of Holocaust victims by depicting themselves as if they were the Warsaw Ghetto boy or Anne Frank in situations from the Holocaust. The third chapter, Symbols of the Holocaust: Universal Imagery and Particularly Jewish Iconography, presents both children’s images in order to emphasize the continuing violence, cruelty and atrocities against children in various places throughout the years after the Holocaust, with a universal approach. In addition, it presents the children’s particular Jewish identity as victims of the Nazi plan to eliminate all Jews, even children. The fourth chapter, Connection to the State of Israel, deals with presentations of them in connection with the establishment of the State of Israel as a result of the Holocaust. The fifth chapter, Uniqueness of the Figures, discusses the unique representations of Anne Frank by depicting the Annex, her connection to the

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Introduction: Icons of Loss

diary and in memorials. The boy’s image is mainly used for political statements and purposes, referring either to the corrupt Nazi regime using power against the Jews or to the contemporary Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The sixth chapter, Dissolving Memory, discusses the fragility of Holocaust memory and imparting its legacy to future generations, so it will not be forgotten, by using the images of the Warsaw Ghetto boy and Anne Frank. The Epilogue presents the findings and insights that have arisen from the artworks depicting the images of these two famous children.

1 Jewish Children’s Fate During the Holocaust “Whatever the calamity that struck the entire Jewish people – deportations, arrests, murders – it has been the Jewish child who has suffered most of all.”1

The fate of Jewish children during the Holocaust – in the ghettos, in the camps, in the forests, and in hiding – was cruel and especially difficult. Their parents could not provide them with security and protection, as parents usually do. Their childhood was disrupted; they could not understand why everything was forbidden, why all they asked for was met with the reply: “no,” “there is not,” “you cannot,” or “we are not allowed to” and the like. The children were deprived of seeing landscapes, blooming trees, birds, butterflies, and other simple, joyful things. They did not understand why they were so cold and hungry all the time. Death was all around them. The dark and frightening atmosphere was all they knew. Despite all this, it is important to mention that all children’s experiences during the Holocaust cannot be generalized. The differences in age, gender, and types of family are factors that must be taken into consideration when we discuss the fate of children during the Holocaust.2 The Nazis and their collaborators murdered one-and-a-half million vulnerable and helpless Jewish children during the Holocaust for ideological reasons. The murder of the children, who symbolized the physical and cultural continuity of the Jewish nation, conveys the full meaning of Nazi ideology, which had set itself the task of total elimination of the Jews. The annihilation of helpless children haunted many people. Yitzhak Katzenelson expressed this powerfully in his poem “The First Ones”: First to perish were the children, abandoned orphans, The world’s best, the bleak earth’s brightest [. . .] They were the first taken to die, the first in the wagon. They were flung into the big wagons like heaps of dung – And were carried off, killed, exterminated, Not a trace remained of my precious ones! Woe unto me, woe.3

1 Joseph Kermish, To Live with Honor, To Die with Honor: Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives, “O.S.” (Oneg Shabath) (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986), 392. 2 Deborah Dwork, Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), xxxiii. Dwork’s comprehensive research examines the experience of children and youth in various places, at different ages, with parents or alone, in the ghettos, in the camps, in the woods, and in hiding. 3 Yitzhak Katzenelson, The Song of the Murdered Jewish People, trans., Noah H. Rosenbloom (Lohamei Hagetaot: Beit Lohamei Hagetaot and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1980), 38–40. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110656916-002

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1 Jewish Children’s Fate During the Holocaust

Gideon Hausner, in his opening speech at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961, also referred to the death of innocent children during the Holocaust. A millionand-a-half Jewish children “whose blood was spilt like water throughout Europe, when they were separated by force from their mothers who tried to hide them, torn to pieces before their parents’ eyes, their little heads smashed against the walls.”4

The Warsaw Ghetto Boy as a Symbol to Represent the Jewish Children’s Fate During the Holocaust The little boy from the Warsaw Ghetto was among the million-and-a-half Jewish children. Because we do not know many details about him, he is most often depicted in a symbolic manner. For example, American Jewish artist Arnold Trachtman (b. 1930) used the image of the Warsaw boy in a few of his artworks. He was influenced by the newsreels at the end of the war, but only began to deal with the subject of the Holocaust in the mid-1980s.5 In his 1987 artwork, A Boy (Fig. 8), Trachtman portrayed the Warsaw boy casting a black shadow against a background of no specific place or time. The message conveyed here is that the Holocaust represented by the boy can occur in any place, at any time, and to anyone. He emphasized the vulnerability and helplessness of a child when violence occurs. Yala Korwin (1933–2014), a Holocaust survivor, used the same idea by depicting the Warsaw boy as a black shadow, but she gave the viewers the context by adding two Nazi soldiers, one holding a weapon aimed at the boy.6 The drawing The Little Boy with His Hands Up, from 1987 (Fig. 9), shows a large black silhouette of the Warsaw Boy on a gray background outline rendered in scumbling that emphasizes the silhouette. On the right side, there are two Nazi soldiers; one of them depicted frontally aiming his gun at the image of the boy. The artist changed the sizes of the images and, by doing so, the ratio between the child’s image and those of the soldiers emphasizes the great wrong done by the Nazis to children, whose only fault was their Jewishness. In her poem The Little Boy with His Hands Up, Yala Korwin suggested that the figure of the boy embodies the enormity of the crime committed against these innocents:

4 Gideon Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem (New York: Harper and Row 1966), 324. 5 Stephen C. Feinstein, ed., Witness and Legacy: Contemporary Art about the Holocaust (Minneapolis, MN: Lerner Publications Company, 1995), 44 (Catalog). http://www.albany.edu/mu seum/wwwmuseum/holo/Trachtman.htm (accessed in October 10, 2008); The author’s correspondence and telephone conversations with Arnold Trachtman, October 2008, November 2011. 6 Korwin, To Tell the Story, 66; The author’s correspondence and telephone interview with Yala Korwin, August–September 2008, December 2011.

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Fig. 8: Arnold Trachtman, A Boy, 1987, charcoal, 38" × 22". Courtesy of the artist.

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Fig. 9: Yala Korwin, The Little Boy with His Hands Up, 1987, black ink on paper. Courtesy of the artist’s estate.

Your image will remain with us And grow and grow To immense proportions, To haunt the callous world, To accuse it, with ever stronger voice, In the name of the million youngsters Who lie, pitiful rag-dolls, Their eyes forever closed.7

Karl Stojka (1931–2003), a gifted amateur artist, was born to a Romany (Gypsy) family who had lived in Austria for over 200 years. When Germany invaded and occupied Austria in 1938 not only Jews, but also Sinti and Roma (Gypsies) were immediately excluded from society and became outcasts. His father was murdered by the Nazis in Mauthausen concentration camp in 1942. Stojka was only 12 years old when he, his mother and five brothers and sisters were deported to the “Gypsy family camp” in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943. He was one of the very few of his family and community to survive the horrors of the Nazi camps. He, as a witness, devoted himself not only to commemorating his murdered family and people during World War II, but to

7 Korwin, To Tell the Story, 76.

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Fig. 10: Karl Stojka, Little Boy in Warsaw Ghetto, 1989. Courtesy of the artist’s estate.

spreading the words “Never Forget” as a human being, regardless of race, religion and origin for future generations.8 With his many canvases Stojka provided descriptive visual accounts of Nazi persecution and mass murder of both Jews and the Romany community. He not only painted from the standpoint of the eyewitness, but also turned to well-known photographs to convey the many horrors the victims suffered. Though relying on the infamous photograph in Little Boy in Warsaw Ghetto from 1989 (Fig. 10), Stojka, unlike Trachtman and Korwin, depicted an uncompleted figure of the boy with his hands raised using strong intimidating colors. He added a yellow Star of David with the letter “J” in the center on the boy’s coat to emphasize his Jewishness. On the right he depicted a single Nazi soldier with a dark, vicious expression on his face aiming his machine gun at the boy. He placed a large Nazi swastika

8 https://www.karlstojka.com/about/; http://lifeintheshadows.wtonline.org/-karl-stojka.html (accessed in August 26, 2018); Kart Stojka, Ein Kind in Birkenau (Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial, 1992), unpaged (Catalog).

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above the boy to highlight the cause of the boy’s fate. The artist surrounded the scene with barbed wire fences and large floodlights reminiscent of those in the concentration camps. The artist expressed empathy with the Jewish boy’s destiny, but by adding extra elements of his own experience in the camp as a child, he stressed the fact that he experienced and witnessed a similar fate. On the right lower corner the artist signed Z 5742 Karl Stojka as he signed all his paintings.9 Samuel Bak (b. 1933, Vilna, Poland), a Holocaust survivor, began to depict the boy from the Warsaw Ghetto only in the mid-1990s after portraying the Star of David, the Tablets of the Law, keys, trees, and tombstones in his works referring to the Holocaust.10 Bak stated that the Warsaw Ghetto boy’s photograph meant a lot to him many years before he began to use it in his paintings. The photograph captured his attention in the early fifties when he lived in Israel, and since then it has occupied his mind.11 When Bak studied the figure of the Warsaw Ghetto boy in his first works of 1995, he felt that for him, the boy represented all children who experienced the Holocaust, including himself. The children were the Nazis’ enemy, as Lucy Dawidowicz wrote,12 and they aimed to eliminate them as if they were their main target. Bak described his own intention in working with the image of the boy: In the mid-nineties, I decided to tackle the subject of the Warsaw Boy. I must have been troubled by the fact that he had become a sort of a logo of the Holocaust. Reproduced thousands of times, on innumerable brochures and books, repeatedly reprinted in the press, and sometimes used for the wrong reasons. This photo became banalized. And I felt sad that this exceptional image was doomed to lose the poignancy of its uniqueness. On the other hand, something that typifies my creative process is imbedded in my attraction for things that seem banal; I wish to reinvigorate them. I am fascinated by the thin line that stretches between what is called stereotype and what is perceived as myth.13

Since he started to use the Warsaw Ghetto boy’s image in the mid-nineties, it became central in his paintings and he uses it obsessively in his numerous paintings to this very day. In his Study B from 1995 (Fig. 11), Bak depicted a large image of the Warsaw Boy standing in a ruined town, his feet not visible.14 The boy’s figure, which dominates almost the entire space in the painting, is leaning on a wooden cross with

9 All Roma prisoners were tattooed with a number on arrival in the camp, the number preceded by the letter Z to mark them out as Zigeuner, the German word for gypsy. 10 The author’s interviews with Samuel Bak, Strasbourg, October 2002 and Jerusalem, July 2008, and correspondence January 2012. 11 The author’s interviews with Samuel Bak, Strasbourg, October 2002; Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint, 148. 12 Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews: 1933–1945, 166. 13 The author’s interviews with Samuel Bak, Strasbourg, October 2002; Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint, 151–152. 14 Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint, 142.

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Fig. 11: Samuel Bak, Study B, 1995, oil on canvas, 25 5/8" × 21 1/8", Private collection. Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA.

supporting beams on the sides, framed against the background of a dark blue sky. The boy’s face is covered by a board on which is a red target outline, riddled with bullet holes. His hands are pierced as a sign of his crucifixion. The edge of his coat is yellow and bears a Star of David. The feeling is that the child is suspended between heaven and earth, life and death. The marked target on the boy’s face indicates that Jewish children were marked with a yellow Star of David and were a target for elimination according to Nazi ideology. The extermination of the children meant extermination of the Jewish people’s future. The addition of the yellow Star of David is connected to the artist’s personal memory from the spring of 1941 when the German occupiers ordered the Jews of Vilna, including Bak, to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothes. It is also related to the fact that when he was seven his family members asked him to draw the Star of David for them on pieces of yellow fabric. He recounts this haunting task: I used to draw the stars at age seven. And this thought – as if I made stamps you have on passports on all those people who went to Ponary with the yellow badge, and there they had to strip and there they were shot – this thing is part of the mechanism of absurd guilt feelings of every survivor.15

15 Yehudit Shendar, ed., An Arduous Road: Samuel Bak, 60 Years of Creativity (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2006), xx (Catalog); Eilat Negev, “HaComeback” (The Comeback), Yedioth Ahronoth, 7

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The wooden cross on which the boy’s figure is leaning represents the Holocaust on the universal level and the Jews as the ultimate victims. Here Samuel Bak’s work stands in the pictorial tradition of the crucifixion as representing the torments and murder of the Jews during the Holocaust. Many artworks dealing with the Holocaust include depictions of crucified Jesus as a symbol for the tortured Jew in the Holocaust. The origin of this image as used in Jewish art dates from the mid-nineteenth century when artists, mainly Jewish, depicted Jesus as a Jew and emphasized that he was crucified as a Jew. On one hand, the image of Jesus has been formed as a symbol of the Jewish “Kiddush Hashem” (Jewish sanctification of God’s name), and on the other hand as a symbol of blaming Christianity for persecution of the Jews for their religion.16 There are artists who added a text on the Warsaw boy’s body to mark him as the Nazi regime’s ultimate enemy and victim. American Jewish artist Muriel Nezhnie Helfman (1934–2002) is best known for her series of six tapestries, Images of the Holocaust, partly inspired by actual and quite well-known photographs of Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, violence, and brutality, including the photograph of the little boy from Warsaw. Her idea for these tapestries occurred during her 1973 trip to Europe with her husband.17 The concept for the series took many years to evolve. It started in 1979, with serious and comprehensive research in the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., as well as the Yad Vashem Archives in Israel and the Holocaust Museum and Learning Center in St. Louis, Missouri. Nezhnie Helfman collected a large variety of graphic photographic images for her project, and the artist was very conscious of maintaining the accuracy of details during the design stage. She aspired to achieve a balance between revealing the hurtful descriptions and an esthetic view, attracting the viewer’s attention and conveying the dignity of the individual. To emphasize the Jewishness of the characters, in most cases the artist added Hebrew passages from Jewish holy books.18 One of the images that inspired Nezhnie Helfman was General Jürgen Stroop’s report of 1943 from the Nuremberg Trials documents, and she planned to make a tapestry using the opening page of the document. She was fascinated by the beautiful German calligraphy that appears on it, declaring “Es gibt keinen jüdischen Wohnbezirk in Warschau mehr!” (The Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no more) (Fig. 12). Finally, in 1982 she created the Ghetto Child – Stroop Report instead (Fig. 13). The artist depicted the known image of the Warsaw Ghetto boy in the center, on a light background, to highlight it, and set it against the German inscription in several shades

Days, December 8, 2006, 66 (Hebrew); author’s interviews with Samuel Bak, Strasbourg, October 2002, and Jerusalem, July 2008, and correspondence January 2012. 16 See an extended discussion in: Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation, 180–197; Ziva Amishai-Maisels, “The Jewish Jesus,” Journal of Jewish Art 9 (1982): 84–88. 17 Linda Rees, Nezhnie: Weaver and Innovative Artist (St. Louis, MO: Image Lin, 2004), 120–121. 18 Ibid., 116.

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Fig. 12: General Jürgen Stroop Report of 1943, title page.

Fig. 13: Muriel Nezhnie Helfman, Ghetto Child – Stroop Report, 1982, tapestry, wool and cotton, 60" × 48". Courtesy of Dallas Center for Holocaust Studies.

of red as a mark of authenticity. On the left, under the boy’s hand, she added the stamp of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg that appears on the Stroop Report presented as evidence at the trials. To stress the child’s fate, Nezhnie Helfman made his face pallid so it would emphasize his frightened eyes, and by heightening other parts of his figure – hands, hat rim, the hem of his coat, and his knees – she emphasized the feeling that he is trapped. The use of red for the stamp and the German inscription, and especially positioning the inscription on the boy’s image, convey a strong feeling that his fate is doomed. The dark side borders contribute to the trapped feeling and can be interpreted as a black strip of mourning. By putting these three elements together, Nezhnie Helfman not only reminds us of the boy’s fate, but also indicates that the responsible Nazi criminals were caught and brought to justice in the Nuremberg trials. In a different approach, Aaron Morgan (b. 1943–2014), an American Jewish artist, expressed his strong feeling about the fate of the Jewish people during the Holocaust, especially of the innocent children, through the image of the Warsaw Ghetto boy. In his Remember Us of 2006 (Fig. 14), he depicted two-thirds of the image of the Warsaw boy with his hands raised, emerging from a background of corpses painted in strong brown and red colors to express the boy’s harsh fate in the Holocaust. On the image, he adds a citation from Barbara Sonek’s poem Holocaust: “We were nothing more

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Fig. 14: Aaron Morgan, Remember Us, 2006, computer generated art on fine watercolor paper, 96.5 × 96.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist’s estate.

than children. We had a future . . . We had dreams, then we had no hope . . . Remember us, for we were the children whose dreams and lives were stolen away.” The citation reminds us of the vulnerability and helplessness of the Jewish children killed by the Nazis.19 Other artists surrounded the Warsaw boy’s image with various elements connected to Holocaust events in general, and to the fate of the Jewish children during the Holocaust in particular, to convey their ideas, messages and feelings. Avner Bar Hama, an Israeli artist (b. 1946, Morocco), uses the image of the Warsaw boy obsessively in his art to convey a range of topics relating to his Jewish-Israeli identity. He is preoccupied with Jewish existence from past to present. In some of his artworks,

19 Aaron Morgan, The Mound Series (Port Washington, NY: Self-publishing, 2007), unnumbered; author’s correspondence and telephone conversations with Aaron Morgan, August–September 2008, February 2012.

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he deals with the fate of Jewish children during the Holocaust and in others with current events.20 Bar Hama’s interest in the Holocaust increased during the years 2001–2002, which he spent in Paris as an emissary of the Jewish Agency. He returned to Paris once again in 2004 after receiving a scholarship to live and work in the city.21 As he relates, “One day I happened across a marble plaque bearing the following inscription: ‘Jewish children were taken from this school and deported to the death camps by the Nazis and by the Vichy government, and died for being Jewish. Let us remember them.’ I bumped into more and more of these amazing signs and began photographing them.”22 The Darkness of Europe 3 (Fig. 15) is based on Bar Hama’s The Darkness of Europe of 1988 and on The Darkness of Europe 2 from 2003 in which by digitally manipulating the original work from 1988 and covering its surface with numerous biblical verses that all contain the word “Generation,” he emphasized our responsibility to ensure that the memory of the Holocaust is transmitted to future generations, so that it will never be forgotten. In 2004 based on The Darkness of Europe 2, Bar Hama created an additional variation The Darkness of Europe 3 (Fig. 15). In this artwork he added the figure of the boy from Warsaw, and underscored the presence of the Angel of Death, which was in the original painting of 1988, to his left and of the crow’s head to his right. By placing these three images together at the center of the composition, the artist created a causal relationship between them: the anonymous body thus appears to be the body of a real child, victim of the Nazis and its identification as such amplifies the resonance of the written command to transmit the memory of the Holocaust from one generation to the next. In Clean Job, from 2006 (Fig. 16), there is a pile of bars of soap on which the image of the Warsaw boy is reflected. Bar Hama photographed a pile of soap bars that attracted his attention on the streets of Paris. It is hard to disregard the connotation that arises in our minds because of the circulating rumor that the Nazis

20 Conversation between Yael Paz and Avner Bar Hama prior to recording the program “100 Years of Israeli Art” broadcast on Israeli television Channel 2 in January 2006; Batya Brutin, “Avner Bar Hama: Between Private and National Memory,” in Mountain-Field-Home, Installations 1995–2013, ed. Hava Pinchas-Cohen (Jerusalem: Rubin Mass, 2013), 80–82. 21 Author’s interview with Avner Bar Hama, July 2008. Brutin, “Avner Bar Hama: Between Private and National Memory,” 83; Rachel Berger, “‘In Every Generation. . .’ the Holocaust in the Works of Avner Bar Hama,” in The Walls Stand Witness – Avner Bar Hama (Rehovot: The Municipal Art Gallery, 2007), 6–11 (Hebrew) (Catalog); The Struggle Is Eternal (Jerusalem: Artists House, 1988), unnumbered (Hebrew) (Catalog). 22 David Shalit, “The Artist’s Dialogue with Jewish Themes,” Etrog: Periodical for Education, Judaism, and Society 35 (2007): 42–43 (Hebrew).

The Warsaw Ghetto Boy as a Symbol

Fig. 15: Avner Bar Hama, The Darkness of Europe 3, 2004, digitally manipulated photograph printed on canvas, 25 × 21.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 16: Avner Bar Hama, Clean Job, 2006, digitally manipulated photograph printed on canvas, 70 × 50 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

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manufactured soap from the Jewish victims’ corpses during the Holocaust.23 By presenting the Warsaw boy as a symbol of the helpless child Holocaust victim in the midst of the soap pile the feeling obtained is that the soap bars themselves represent the dead victims as well. The choice of soap bars was not innocent: soap symbolizes cleanliness, therefore it represents for the artist the “clean,” organized, and precise manner in which the Nazis executed the murder of the Jews.24 On one hand, the black background projects fear and represents the disaster of the Holocaust, while on the other hand, as in Trachtman’s artwork, the black background around the pile disconnects the image from defined time or place – and a sensation of danger is created: the danger of the Holocaust that still hovers in the air. In the work Shoah 1939–1945, from 2006 (Fig. 17), by Israeli artist Ben Rotman (b. 1948), the Warsaw boy stands in a heap of large, colorful skulls. He is only partially visible: we see his raised hands and his head. A hint of a yellow star appears on his hat. The skulls, depicted as being in flames, represent the millions of Jews murdered in the Holocaust who remain anonymous, while the boy in black and white with the “mark of disgrace” on his hat reminds us that the dead were human beings and that there were children among them, murdered merely because they were Jewish. Through the color contrast between the image of the skulls and that of the Warsaw boy one senses that the skulls are in flames and the boy “rises” from them to represent them. The way in which the artist added the yellow star to the boy’s hat resembles the insignias on military headgear. As the artist states, for him the Warsaw boy is the “symbolic soldier” of the Holocaust and a reminder of its horrors.25 American Jewish artist Michael Knigin (1942–2011) depicted the Warsaw boy in a series of works.26 In the work Warsaw Boy IV (Fig. 18), he places the boy from the known photograph in the front of the work, fear on his face, behind him a blurred

23 The sources of the rumor that the Nazis manufactured soap from the corpses of Jewish victims in the camps are: (1) the expression the Nazis used against the Jews in the camps: “we will further make soap out of you”; (2) the Nazis’ failed attempt to manufacture soap from human fat in a small factory in a suburb of Gdansk, where they used the victims’ bodies from concentration camp Stutthof for their experiments to find the right formula for manufacturing soap; (3) the letters R.I.F that were impressed on the soap, used by the concentration camp inmates, and were incorrectly interpreted as initials for “Rein Jüdisches Fett” (Pure Jewish Fat), mistakenly substituting the letter J for I; see Sarah ShnerNeshamit, Gam la-metim lo heniḥu: yizur sabbon mi-shuman adam bi-Ṿez’eshats’ parvar Gdansḳ (No Peace Even for the Dead: The Manufacture of Soap from Human Fat) (Lohamei Hagetaot: Beit Lohamei Hagetaot, 1998) (Hebrew). The rumor about manufacturing soap from Jewish bodies was spread during the Holocaust and later took root. Yad Vashem sent the R.I.F soap for examination in a Tel Aviv University laboratory and it was scientifically proven that it is not made of human fat, Yad Vashem Archive AM4/1207. 24 Author’s interviews with Avner Bar Hama, March 2010, November 2011, and January 2012. 25 The author’s correspondence and telephone conversations with Ben Rotman, October–November 2009. 26 The author’s correspondence and telephone conversations with Michael Knigin, September– November 2009.

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Fig. 17: Ben Rotman, Shoah 1939–1945, 2006, mixed media, print on canvas, 80 × 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 18: Michael Knigin, Warsaw Boy IV, 2009, montage. Variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist’s estate.

train whose only clear part are its wheels. In the background, there are ruins in vibrant colors that look like burning flames and a sharp clear green line slashes them diagonally and focuses our gaze towards the armed soldier on the right. The general feeling in the work is of impending disaster, destruction and devastation threatening the boy,

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Fig. 19: Michael Knigin, Warsaw Boy V, 2009, montage. Variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist’s estate.

caught in this against his will. The boy is threatened by the ruins, by the soldier pointing his gun at him and by the train that will transport him to the death camp. In Warsaw Boy V, created in 2009 (Fig. 19), Knigin used almost the same images as in the previous artwork: the boy in the front with a fearful expression on his face, behind him a blurred train, and a Nazi soldier standing behind pointing a gun at him. In the background of the ruins, above the boy’s head, are two white doves with their wings spread. There is a feeling that the doves are trying to protect the child with their wings, to no avail. The soldier threatens to kill, while in the background is the train that will transport the boy to the extermination camp. In addition, the artist created a formative parallel between the boy’s raised hands and the doves’ wings. This is also how Yala Korwin began her poem, The Little Boy with His Hands Up: Your open palms raised in the air like two white doves frame your meager face, your face contorted with fear, grown old with knowledge beyond your years.27

But the meaning of this work is that the boy is trapped and threatened, his raised hands a sign of his being a captive of the Nazi soldier, while the doves spreading their wings, instead of symbolizing freedom, in this work symbolize the absence of freedom.

27 Korwin, To Tell the Story, 75.

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In Israeli artist Rolanda Teicher-Yekutiel (b. 1957), a “second generation” of Holocaust survivors,28 we find a different use of the Warsaw boy’s image in order to relate to the Jewish children’s fate during the Holocaust. The scenes depicted in the photographs from the ghettos and camps influenced her, including the photograph of the little boy from Warsaw. Between 1985 and 2001, she created several series expressing pity for the fate of Holocaust victims, mainly the children among them. In her series The Wooden Compassionate One (1985–2001), Teicher-Yekutiel created an imaginary situation in which the character of Pinocchio appears in an event that happened in the Holocaust. Pinocchio is the Compassionate One, playing the role for the artist of the one who takes pity. Employing a photomontage technique, the artist planted Pinocchio’s image into photographs from the Holocaust in such a way that his likeness appears to simultaneously both belong and not belong to the scene. For her, Pinocchio is a “mediator” on her behalf and a messenger of the current world that has compassion and is trying to “repair” the wrong done to the victims of the Holocaust in a world with no compassion. Through Pinocchio’s colorful clothes, the artist emphasized him as an “otherworldly being,” thus contrasting him to the scenes from the past in black and white.29 By doing so, Teicher-Yekutiel is treading a thin line between fact and fiction. These depictions are problematic because the viewer is familiar with Pinocchio’s story and, as a result, there is no correlation between the scenes. Instead, there is misunderstanding and a problem as to understanding what is depicted. The artist told me that she chose Pinocchio’s image due to his gestures and the actions they depict, so that viewers could relate to the scene from the Holocaust. Hence the addition of Pinocchio’s image is not random and the artist has created an interesting interaction with the original scene in the book.30 Along with her explanation for choosing Pinocchio, it can be suggested that Teicher-Yekutiel unconsciously chose Pinocchio as the “Compassionate One” because his ambition is to become a real boy, and in this he represents humanity. In her work The Wooden Compassionate One (Fig. 20) she showed almost the entire original photograph with the boy, part of the deportees’ convoy and the Nazi soldiers. Pinocchio tries to prevent a Nazi soldier from shooting the Warsaw boy. Teicher-Yekutiel used parts of the photograph from the Stroop album where the boy with raised hands, the soldiers, and some of the other deportees are seen. The image of Pinocchio is taken from a scene in a book where Pinocchio is captured in the net of a giant green sea monster that thinks he is a rare fish and wants to fry him in

28 The term refers to children of Holocaust survivors. 29 The author’s interviews with Rolanda Teicher-Yekutiel, Tel Aviv, May 1998, December 2011. 30 The author’s interview with Rolanda Teicher-Yekutiel, Tel Aviv, December 2011.

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Fig. 20: Rolanda Teicher-Yekutiel, The Wooden Compassionate One, 1985–2001, montage, variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 21: Maraja (Libico Romano Maraja) in Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio. Ramat Gan: Massada, 1963, p. 81 (Hebrew).

boiling oil (Fig. 21).31 While Pinocchio is saved from the monster with the help of his friend, the guard dog Alidoro, in Teicher-Yekutiel’s work Pinocchio himself acts to save the boy and the Jews in the ghetto from the Nazis. In order to do so, the artist changed the position of Pinocchio’s right arm so he could “intervene” in their favor by deflecting the Nazi soldier’s machine gun. This is a symbolic visual expression of the ultimate collective gap between the one who dominates and the oppressed, between the aggressor and the victim, between the strong and the weak. The Nazis limited the food supply to the ghetto, causing constant famine. The lack of food and the very poor quality of the daily food supply most severely affected the children. Bar Hama is the only artist who used the copy of almost the entire original photograph with the boy to deal with the children’s hunger in the ghetto. In the center of it, he placed a loaf of bread, dry, moldy, full of worms in Hunger in the Ghetto (Fig. 22). The vague image of the boy symbolizes the hungry children in the ghetto, while the inedible loaf of bread indicates the lack of food and the constant searching for a piece of bread to ease the famine. Bar Hama was deeply affected by the many photographs of hungry children from the Warsaw Ghetto.

31 Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio (Ramat Gan: Massada, 1963), 81 (Hebrew). Drawings by Maraja (Libico Romano Maraja).

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Fig. 22: Avner Bar Hama, Hunger in the Ghetto, 2006, digitally manipulated photograph printed on canvas, 60 × 50 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

In her memoirs, Masha Greenbaum referred to the hunger in the Kovno Ghetto: Since the beginning of the ghetto’s existence hunger prevailed. Boys that had not yet reached working age, and very small ones, aged eight, were secretly passing the barbed wire fence and going into town to get some food . . . and yet, from the horror of famine, and despite the danger, these small traders risked themselves repeatedly. Others replaced those captured, as hunger was stronger even than the fear of the Germans. When they left the ghetto, these young children took clothes, valuables and money for sale and roamed the city, looking for a way to buy food. As hunger grew stronger in the ghetto, so grew the risk these children were willing to take. How great was their joy when they were able to return safely to their families in the ghetto and bring some bread or other food products.32

From the early 2000s we witness a growing use of illustrations in the genre of the graphic novel about the Holocaust, among them graphic novels especially for children.33 Most of them contain the story about the creator’s personal world. All of the graphic novels about the Holocaust intend to tell the story of actual events during the Holocaust, thus becoming a valuble factual source alongside the biographical content. The image of the boy from Warsaw appears in various graphic novels dealing with the Holocaust. The image is used on the one hand to represent the Jewish victims,

32 Masha Greenbaum, Hope at the Edge of the Abyss, The Jews of Lithuania from Ghetto to Camp (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1999), 82–84 (Hebrew). 33 Graphic novel is a kind of comic book that usually contains a long and complex story, similar to the story of novels. Unlike the comic strip, which contains funny and amusing content, the contents of a graphic novel are often serious and are usually intended for adults.

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especially the children, and on the other hand, the image functions as an allegory of human suffering or an expression of the trauma of the Holocaust in general. The graphic novel The Golden Necklace written by Israeli authors Binyamin Fensh and Eliyahu Goot and illustrated by Israeli illustrator Jacky Yarhi (b. 1965) deals with the persecution of the Jews in Tunisia (North Africa) under the Nazi occupation from November 1942.34 The book is intended for the Haredi (a section within Orthodox Judaism) audience. In order to explain what the Nazis are capable of the father in the story tells his family about how Hitler came to power and what happened to the Jews first in Germany and then in Poland. All the illustrations in the book are colorful except this section which the illustrator colored in shades of brown.

Fig. 23: Jacky Yarhi, a frame from page 9 in The Golden Necklace, 2017, illustration. Courtesy of Institute Sarei Zevulun, Israel.

In one of the frames on page 9 of the book Yarhi depicted the scene from the photograph of the Warsaw boy (Fig. 23) in order to deal with the fate of the Jews in

34 Binyamin Fensh and Eliyahu Goot, The Golden Necklace (Ateret, Israel: Institute Sarei Zevulun, 2018), 9 (Hebrew). Images of this page are not allowed to be used without permission. This book was published in French as well with the title: Le Tresor de Djerba. Author’s correspondence and telephone conversations with Binyamin Fensh, October 2018.

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Warsaw in general and the fate of the children represented by the Warsaw boy, in particular. The artist used only part of the original scene since it is well-known, and focused on the incomplete image of the boy with the Star of David with the word “Jude” on it, in the front, part of the convoy on the left and a partial view of the soldier with a machinegun aiming at him on the right. Yarhi emphasized the boy’s fear, helplessness and vulnerability. At the top of the frame the authors added the text: “The Jews of Warsaw were concentrated in the ghetto. Tens of thousands died of starvation, hundreds of thousands were sent to concentration camps and extermination camps. . .” Yarhi explained that the photograph of the convoy with the Warsaw boy is so recognizable that it was not necessary to complete the figures to convey the message.35

Anne Frank’s Face as an Icon to Describe the Jewish Children’s Fate During the Holocaust Anne Frank was also among the million-and-a-half murdered Jewish children. Contrary to the Warsaw boy, she became famous because of her diary in which she integrated her photographs. There is wide use of Anne Frank’s photographic image in artworks by many artists worldwide (Figs. 2–7), each artist referring to her image according to his/her cultural perception and artistic style. There have been artists who described Anne Frank’s short but intense and harsh life story. For example, American-Jewish Israeli born artist Judith Weinshall Liberman (b. 1929) began to depict Anne Frank’s image in 1988 in her wall hangings, after creating two dozen paintings portraying the Holocaust. In 1990, she exhibited them in a show titled The Holocaust Wall Hangings. They fall mainly into two distinct groups of works: Scenes of the Holocaust and Maps of the Holocaust. Anne Frank’s image powerfully dominates most of the Maps of the Holocaust.36 Neither Weinshall Liberman or her parents nor anyone else in her immediate family were physically in the Holocaust. She was born and grew up in Israel (then Palestine) during World War II. She said that as a ten-year-old child she was aware of what was going on in Europe: in the ghettos, camps and the killings, and increasingly heard bits of information about the horrific fate of the Jews. It was not only because she was born in Israel, but also because of her beloved nanny, Batya, who had immigrated to Israel from Poland shortly before the outbreak of World War II, and whose parents, who had remained in Poland, were murdered by the Nazis. The artist added that it is reasonable to assume that the war years made an enormous

35 The author’s correspondence and telephone conversations with Jacky Yarhi, October 2018. 36 Judith Weinshall Liberman, Holocaust Wall Hangings (South Deerfield, MA: Schoen Books, 2002) (Catalog). Judith Liberman and Bob Lewis, The Holocaust Wall Hangings, Video, 1996.

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impression on her, and that is the main reason she focused on the Holocaust in her art.37 Regarding the images of Anne Frank in her work, she said: I dedicated several artworks to Anne Frank. One reason is because she is well-known, and it is easy for people to identify with her more than with the abstract number of six million. Likewise, she was a child during the Holocaust and thus represents the million-and-a-half murdered Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust.38

In Anne Frank’s Journey, Weinshall Liberman describes the long journey Anne Frank was forced to travel during her short life (Fig. 24). From her birthplace in Frankfurt, Germany, she fled with her family to Amsterdam, Holland, immediately after the Nazis rose to power. In July 1942 the family went into hiding from the Nazis. She and her family were caught in August 1944 and sent to Westerbork, a transit camp in Holland, from there to Auschwitz, Poland, and finally to Bergen Belsen, the concentration camp in Germany where she died. She was not yet sixteen when she died. Anne Frank’s images are set against a backdrop of boxcars to symbolize the well-functioning train system that carried the Jews to the death camps, and the outline of the map of Europe clearly indicates the place it happened. Her face becomes fainter as she nears her death at Bergen Belsen. Anne Frank’s image behind bars appears repeatedly on the frame.39 Anne Frank’s image, based on the famous photograph (Fig. 2), appears repeatedly along the path of her journey as well as in the wall hanging’s border, as if in motion, intensifying her life story and her image. By multiplying her photograph, the artist marked Anne Frank’s path from Frankfurt where she was born, through Amsterdam where she hid, to the camps (Westerbork, Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen) where she was imprisoned and finally perished, and it haunts us. The reason Weinshall Liberman created the wall hangings from cloth was to hang them on the wall loosely and gently, since the topic depicted is sensitive. She added: “The loose-hanging fabric promised to be significant in itself by evoking an image of banners of the Third Reich, which flew over Europe during the Holocaust.”40 She used various techniques: print, sewing, appliqué, embroidery and beading. The artist used a limited palette of red as a symbol of blood and fire, gray to describe suffering and despair and black to portray death.41

37 The author’s interview with Judith Weinshall Liberman, Boston, MA, September 2007; Weinshall Liberman, The Holocaust Wall Hangings, unpaged (Catalog in Hebrew and English); Weinshall Liberman, Holocaust Wall Hangings, 2; Judith Liberman and Bob Lewis, The Holocaust Wall Hangings, Video, 1996. 38 The author’s interview with Judith Weinshall Liberman, Boston, MA, September 2007. 39 Weinshall Liberman, Holocaust Wall Hangings, 61. 40 Ibid., 1. 41 Ibid., 1; The author’s Interview with Judith Weinshall Liberman, Boston, MA, September 2007.

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Fig. 24: Judith Weinshall Liberman, Anne Frank’s Journey, Maps of the Holocaust, 1988, wall hanging, 81" × 127". Courtesy of the artist, The Temple Museum of Religious Art of The Temple Tifereth Israel, Beachwood, OH, USA.

In The Diary of Anne Frank, Samuel Kaplan, a Russian-American Jewish artist (b. 1928 in Baku, Republic of Azerbaijan) depicted her destiny in Amsterdam, Holland, through a cobweb (Fig. 25).42 By doing so, the artist emphasized the Frank’s perilous life in Amsterdam after the Nazis rose to power, their fear from July 1942 on, when the family went into hiding, and apprehension about the unknown when Anne Frank and her family were captured and sent to the camps. In the left background there is a view of the city of Amsterdam and in front the artist has placed Anne and her parents walking to their hiding place at dawn, wearing hats and layers of clothing under their coats with the yellow Star of David. Their facial features are blurred to emphasize that they are evading detection. In July 8, 1942, Anne wrote about this in her diary: We put on heaps of clothes as if we were going to the North Pole, the sole reason being to take clothes with us . . . I had on two vests, three pairs of pants, a dress, on top of that a skirt,

42 Samuel Kaplan lived in Kiev until 1991 when he immigrated to the United States. Two of his uncles perished in Holocaust. He dedicated at least two paintings to one uncle’s memory. The author’s correspondence with Mr. Julian (Yonatan) Rapaport, Jerusalem, August-September 2018.

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Fig. 25: Samuel Kaplan, The Diary of Anne Frank, 2000, oil, tempera on canvas, 20" × 28". In possession of Mr. Julian (Yonatan) Rapaport.

jacket, summer coat, two pairs of stockings, lace-up shoes, woolly cap, scarf, and still more; I was nearly stifled before we started, but no one inquired about that.43

And the next day in July 9, 1942, Anne wrote: So we walked through the pouring rain, Daddy, Mummy and I, each with a school satchel and shopping bag filled to the brim with all kinds of things thrown together anyhow.44

In the center we see a large image of Anne Frank with a contemplative gaze on her face, holding a pen and writing in her diary on which two small figures are seen sitting close together, to imply Anne Frank and Peter van Pels’s relationship. In front of her there is a menorah to emphasize both her living conditions and her Jewishness. In the back center Anne, in a white dress with no facial features is walking down the stairs, in the hiding place, in the light coming from the small attic window behind her reflecting her shadow on the wall. This description conveys an ominous atmosphere.

43 David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom, eds. The Diary of Anne Frank, The Critical Edition (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 209. 44 Ibid., 210.

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Fig. 26: Susan Keeter, Anne Frank and Her Parents Going into Hiding, 1998, oil on paper, 15 × 28.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist, Syracuse, NY, USA.

On the right is the scene of the capture, Anne walks down the stairs but now she is walking towards the Nazi lorry full of the people who had been hiding with her, leaving the diary pages behind on the stairs. Kaplan painted this artwork after he read the Anne Frank diary, drawing the first sketch in 1964. For this picture the artist used a live model who looked like Anne Frank. He drew with bleak colors of black, gray and light blue to convey the harsh fate of Anne Frank. American fine artist and illustrator Susan Keeter (b. 1958) also shows stages in the annals of Anne Frank in three separated artworks that she drew for a children’s book on the subject (Figs. 26–28).45 In Anne Frank and Her Parents Going into Hiding Keeter describes Anne and her parents walking down a deserted street early in the morning to the hiding place (Fig. 26). Margot, Anne’s sister, had gone out with Miep Gies earlier and waited for them in the “back house.” Anne and her parents are seen wearing layers of clothing under their coats marked with the yellow Star of David. They wear hats and carry their own bags. Anne is seen in the center close to her father and her mother walks at a little distance, which emphasizes Anne’s distance from her mother and the strong bond she had with her father. Her blue coat and hat make her stand out. The intense purple and orange colors in the background intensify the atmosphere of tension Anne and her parents felt as they walked to the hiding place.

45 The author’s interview with Susan Keeter, Syracuse, NY, September 2007.

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Fig. 27: Susan Keeter, Anne Frank Going into the Secret Annex, 1998, oil on paper, 16.5 × 25.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist, Syracuse, NY, USA.

In Anne Frank Going into the Secret Annex Anne is standing at the first steps of a staircase looking up curiously to the hideout (Fig. 27). On the left is the bookshelf attached to the entrance to the hiding place to disguise it. Anne wrote in her diary on August 21, 1942: Things are getting very mysterious round here now, Mr. Kugler was afraid they might come to look for hidden bicycles, and that’s why he wanted to have the door to our hiding place camouflaged, now it’s been done so as to look like an ordinary bookcase, when in fact it is a door, for the bookcase with all its books swings on hinges so you can open it like a door, notwithstanding that it looks as if it’s fixed to the wall.46

The artist distinguishes between the space describing the entrance to the hiding place and the staircase by using shades of blue and brown to define the entrance, portraying a calm atmosphere compared to the black shades of the staircase, highlighted by Anne’s white blouse, which conveys the sense of mystery of an unfamiliar place. To portray the opening of the hiding place with the bookcase, other than the diary, the artist relied on photographs she saw in books when she studied the subject in preparation for the paintings. In Anne and Otto Frank Unpacking in the Secret Annex Keeter illustrated a place that looks like an attic, full of objects (Fig. 28). Anne and her father seem to

46 Ibid., 230.

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Fig. 28: Susan Keeter, Anne and Otto Frank Unpacking in the Secret Annex, 1998, oil on paper, 15 × 27 cm. Courtesy of the artist, Syracuse, NY, USA.

be busy arranging things in an attempt to restore order. Anne wrote in her diary on July 10, 1942: Our living room and all the other rooms were chock-full of rubbish, indescribably so, all the cardboard boxes which had been sent to the office in the previous months lay piled on the floor and the beds; the little room was filled to the ceiling with bedclothes. We had to start clearing up immediately if we wished to sleep in decent beds that night. Mummy and Margot were not in a fit state to take part; they were tired and lay down on their unmade beds, they were wretched, and lots more besides, but the two “clearers-up” of the family, Daddy and myself, wanted to start at once. The whole day long we unpacked boxes, filled cupboards, hammered and tidied, until we were dead beat.47

The variety of strong colors intensifies the sense of disorder that prevails there. The artist chose to render the wall and roof on the right in dark tones to hint at the danger of hiding in contrast to the background in the depths of the work, painted in light green-blue color to show that the hiding place is the chance to be saved. The British artist Iris Anne Berger (b. 1934) referred to milestones in Anne Frank’s short life in several of her paintings as well. As a young girl growing up in London, in the 1940s and 1950s, immediately after World War II, she was exposed

47 Ibid., 215.

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to films, newspapers, and magazines showing the horrors carried out by the Nazis.48 She wrote: For me personally 1945 signalled the new era. But even then I was conscious of the ambiguity of “beginnings” for on the world horizons of my life I saw the terrible images of the twisted, skeletal bodies in the Nazi camps. My art reaches out and embraces the themes of suffering and oppression.49

Berger created a series of twenty-eight paintings depicting Anne Frank inspired by reading Anne Frank’s diary and visiting the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. She wrote: The paintings represent a fusing together of thoughts and images associated with the exterior and interior of the house, the concentration camp, and the railway track. This fusion serves to heighten the contrast between hope and despair – the hopes of freedom and the despair of darkening realities. It was the immorality and somatic agony, wrought by the persecution of the Jewish people that I so very much wanted to give expression to in my paintings. It is my hope that these paintings might draw the viewer to contemplate and ask questions about the past. Through the depiction of Anne’s “inner life” – her feelings and thoughts, and her external circumstances, constituted by the physical reality of the camp, we see the opposition between hope and despair. This opposition is the dynamism, which forces the collective memory’s responsibility to the present and future. It can do this because there exists a past whose tragedy is internalized through remembrance.50

In the center of Red Sky 1, in a lightened rectangle, the house – the Frank family’s hiding place – and the chestnut tree next to it, which Anne Frank saw from her window, are seen (Fig. 29). The brightness represents hope for freedom, faith in freedom. In front of it, there is a smaller rectangle depicting the image of Anne Frank, based on the famous photograph (Fig. 2), with vague facial features and vertical bars falling over her head and over the blue sky beyond. This signals imprisonment. Under it, we see the staircase leading to the hiding place and the bookcase, that was placed before the entrance door of which Anne wrote on Friday, August 21, 1942: The entrance to our hiding place has now been properly concealed. Mr. Kugler thought it would be better to put a cupboard in front of our door. . .but of course it had to be a movable cupboard that can open like a door.51

The light tones of the rectangles rebound against turbulent red skies, predicting what is to follow. From the house in the back, fences stretch to both sides, and on

48 The biographical details, the citations and the information about Iris Anne Berger’s artworks are from the author’s telephone conversations and a letter the artist wrote to her in October 2007. 49 From a letter the artist wrote to the author in October 2007. 50 Ibid. 51 Barnouw and van der Stroom, 230.

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Fig. 29: Iris Anne Berger, Red Sky 1, 1982, oils on canvas, 92 × 122 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

the left fence horrific scenes from the camps are hung, to signify Anne Frank’s fate in the camps. The whole painting is seen from the window frame of her bedroom. About this depiction Berger wrote: In this painting, we find a dual perspective operating. On the one hand, the viewer is drawn to reflect on the way in which Anne Frank perceives her own reality; it is her head, which looks out upon reality, the inter-flows of the present cut with memory. Behind her is the house from which she once looked upon the garden. On the other hand, we look on through a large window, which takes us into the heart of the inner picture. The meaning in this picture is created by collapsing conventional temporal categories where future qua future is unknown to “the present.” Here past, present and future merge as one from the multiple time perspectives, whether it is the collective memory of the viewer looking back on the horrors of the Holocaust, or Anne’s present normality before hiding, represented by the garden, or her future represented in the camp walls which are analogous to her bedroom wall with the pictures of film stars – her present and past and future. The temporal dimensions of consciousness, Anne’s and our own are drawn into the dynamics of fragmented temporal narratives.52

For this painting, the artist referred to familiar photographs of the Secret Annex, the bookcase, the camp’s fences and Anne Frank’s well-known photograph. There have been artists who described individual scenes from Anne Frank’s short life story. For example, a well-known Dutch sculptor Jet Schepp (b. 1940)

52 From a letter the artist wrote to the author in October 2007.

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Fig. 30: Jet Schepp, Anne Frank, 2005, bronze statue. Courtesy of the city of Amsterdam.

sculpted Anne Frank in 1994, for the first time. When the artist looked for a proper location to place the statue so that people could contemplate it, she thought Merwedeplein in Amsterdam might be perfect, as it had been the place where the Frank family had lived from 1933 until 1942. However, the inhabitants were not enthusiastic about living with the statue in their midst, so this plan was canceled. In 1996, when the artist exhibited the sculpture again, it received an enthusiastic response and the municipality of Purmerend bought it and placed it at Anne Frank Boulevard in that city (Fig. 121). In 2004, after 25 years of efforts to put Anne Frank’s statue at Merwedeplein, Mr. Gert Jan Jimmink, the owner of the bookstore where Otto Frank purchased the diary for Anne’s thirteenth birthday, asked the artist to prepare a larger copy of the original and it was inaugurated there in 2005.53 In the sculpture Anne Frank, the figure of Anne is positioned on an elevated base with the inscription: “Anne Frank 1929–1945.” The young girl is wearing layers of clothing, holding a suitcase in her right hand and a bag under her left arm (Fig. 30). She gives a last glance at the house in Merwedeplein, Amsterdam, before leaving for the hiding place. Anne Frank described the preparation for hiding in her diary on Wednesday, July 8, 1942:

53 From a letter the artist wrote to the author in December 2008.

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Fig. 31: Judith Weinshall Liberman, Anne Frank’s Hiding Place, 1989, wall hanging, Maps of the Holocaust, 67" × 106". Courtesy of the artist, The Temple Museum of Religious Art of The Temple Tifereth Israel, Beachwood, Ohio, USA. Margot and I began to pack some of our most vital belongings into a school satchel. The first thing I put in was this diary, then hair-curlers, handkerchiefs, schoolbooks, a comb, old letters . . .We put on heaps of clothes as if we were going to the North Pole, the sole reason being to take clothes with us. . . I had on two vests, three pair of pants, a dress, on top of that a skirt, jacket, summer coat, two pair of stockings, lace-up shoes, woolly cap, scarf and still more . . .Margot filled her satchel with schoolbooks, fetched her bicycle, and rode off behind Miep unto the unknown, as far as I was concerned. You see I still did not know where our secret hiding place was to be.54

The artist stated: “This is a sculpture of a young girl who did not know her future fate when leaving her house in Merwedeplein, Amsterdam, and going into hiding. I wanted to commemorate this moment in her short life.”55 In the wall hanging by Weinshall Liberman, Anne Frank’s Hiding Place (Fig. 31), the image of Anne Frank from the famous photograph (Fig. 2) is placed in the center together with a quotation from her diary from Friday, October 29, 1943, in white print on black background: I wander from one room to another, downstairs and up again, feeling like a songbird who has had his wings clipped and who is hurling himself in utter darkness against the bars of its cage.

54 Barnouw and van der Stroom, 208–209. 55 The author’s telephone conversations with Jet Schepp, October 2007.

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“Go outside, laugh, and take a breath of fresh air,” a voice cries within me, but I don’t even feel a response anymore; I go and lie on the divan and sleep, to make the time pass more quickly, and the stillness and the terrible fear, because there is no way of killing them.56

There are two frames around the image and the quotation. The first one is gray, on which the words “the annex” on the right and “Prinsengracht 263” on the left, which are written in red on a black background. The second frame is black and it encloses the piece, conveying a trapped feeling. Superimposed upon the wall hanging surface, in addition to the quotation, is a net creating an atmosphere of imprisonment. Superimposed upon the image of Anne Frank is a floor plan of the second and third floors of the building’s annex where she and her family hid from the Nazis and where she wrote her diary.57 In this artwork, Weinshall Liberman dealt with the feeling of the claustrophobia of hiding,58 and at the same time with the persecution and oppression of the Jews in general, showing the fate of an innocent Jewish child who was caught in an historical event against her will and with no ability to influence it. In another wall hanging, Anne Frank’s Amsterdam (Fig. 32), the image of Anne Frank from the famous photograph is scattered in various sizes on the surface (Fig. 2). According to the artist, the repeated images allude to the picture-covered wall in Anne Frank’s room. A layout of the city of Amsterdam to which Anne Frank came to escape from Nazi Germany and in which she was then compelled to go into hiding looks like a spider’s web as we saw in Kaplan’s artwork (Fig. 25). On each side of the wall hanging, the artist added the inscription: “Anne Frank’s Amsterdam” to emphasize Anne Frank’s fragile fate.59 Stephen Feinstein wrote, “This is suggestive of how the history of Amsterdam has been altered because of Miep Gies’s accidental discovery of the Diary after the Frank family was deported. Anne Frank is now associated with the city in which she had so many hopes and was betrayed.”60 American Jewish artist Brett S. Kaufman (b. 1967) addressed Anne Frank’s fate in a unique way. He depicted her image in Anne Frank Outside Looking In (Fig. 33). She is outside, looking in on her own life in the annex through a broken pane of glass. On her face, he added the inscription that she wrote in her diary on June 12, 1942: “I hope I shall be able to confide in you completely, as I have never been able to do in anyone before, and I hope that you will be a great support and comfort to me.”61 He

56 Barnouw and van der Stroom, 411. 57 Weinshall Liberman, Holocaust Wall Hangings, 62. 58 Stephen C. Feinstein, “Conceptualizing the Scale of Destruction, Judith Weinshall Liberman’s Wall Hangings about the Holocaust,” in Holocaust Wall Hangings, ed. Judith Weinshall Liberman (South Deerfield, MA: Schoen Books, 2002), 8. 59 Weinshall Liberman, Holocaust Wall Hangings, 61. 60 Feinstein, “Conceptualizing the Scale of Destruction, Judith Weinshall Liberman’s Wall Hangings about the Holocaust,” 8. 61 Barnouw and van der Stroom, 177.

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Fig. 32: Judith Weinshall Liberman, Anne Frank’s Amsterdam, 1990, wall hanging, Maps of the Holocaust, 83" × 114". Courtesy of the artist, The Temple Museum of Religious Art of The Temple Tifereth Israel, Beachwood, OH, USA.

Fig. 33: Brett S. Kaufman, Anne Frank Outside Looking In, 1995, archival ink on cotton rag, 24" × 20". Courtesy of the artist.

used Anne Frank’s famous photograph (Fig. 2) as well. By combining her image and her text from the diary, the artist symbolically “tells” Anne Frank’s life story. The final scene of the film Schindler’s List, in which the survivors pass by and place a stone on the tombstone of Oscar Schindler, inspired the artist to place stones on top of the artwork. Even though Kaufman states that it was the first time he became

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Fig. 34: Bill Fink, Anne Frank, 2008, glass artwork with an acrylic case that goes over the glass with acrylic stand and back lighting, 7" × 5" × ¼". Courtesy of the artist.

aware of that Jewish tradition, he used it to honor Anne Frank as the representative of all children who perished in the Holocaust. Kaufman read the diary of Anne Frank numerous times and he was astonished at the beauty and the writing capability of such a young person. He thinks that it makes her loss much harder to comprehend, and it makes one think what Anne would have accomplished had she survived. The possibilities seem endless.62 American Jewish artist Bill Fink (b. 1954) imprisoned Anne Frank’s famous photograph (Fig. 2) in glass (Fig. 34). By doing so, he conveys the distress and the denial of freedom that Anne experienced as she wrote in her diary in hiding on Friday, December 24, 1943: Believe me, if you have been shut up for 1½ years, it can get too much for you some days. In spite of all justice and thankfulness you can’t get rid of your feelings. Cycling, dancing, whistling, looking out at the world, feeling young, to know that I’m free – that’s what I long for; still I mustn’t show it, because I sometimes think if all 8 of us began to pity ourselves, or went about with discontented faces, where would it lead us?63

62 Citation from the author’s correspondence with Brett S. Kaufman, December 21, 2009. 63 Barnouw and van der Stroom, 431.

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Fig. 35: Iris Anne Berger, Auschwitz, 1982, oils on canvas, 92 × 122 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Fink viewed Anne Frank’s terrible fate as an example of the fragility of life. He wrote: “I chose the image of Anne Frank because she reminds me about how horrific life can become when the wrong person is leading a country. It is evident that this can happen again when we consider some of the world leaders today.”64 Into her painting Auschwitz, Iris Anne Berger placed the enormous outline of Anne’s head (Fig. 35). Enclosed inside it lies the house, her hiding place, the place of her private dreams amidst the darkness around her. Across this image, the infamous entry gate to Auschwitz, where Anne, her mother and her sister were first shipped, cuts across Anne and her past, as if to nullify her existence. The railway tracks coming out of the gate can be viewed both as leading from the house to the camp and from the foreground to and through the gateway of Auschwitz to the gas chambers beyond at the end of the dark tunnel, where so many perished in despair. On either side of the railroad tracks are the fence posts of the camp and here the figures and faces of camp inmates look out at us.65 Berger used Anne Frank’s photograph (Fig. 2) to contemplate the fragments of Anne Frank’s fate, but at the same time she did not forget the many other victims who had experienced the same horrors.

64 Citation from the author’s correspondence with Bill Fink, September 2008. 65 From the author’s correspondence with Iris Berger, October 2007.

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Fig. 36: Marie Helene Ardaen, Anne Frank, 1972, oil on canvas, 124 × 84 cm. Current location unknown.

On August 4, 1944, Anne Frank and her family were arrested, sent to Westerbork transit camp, and on September 3 of the same year they were on the train to Auschwitz. Although very little is known about Anne Frank’s experience in the camps, artists imagined her fate in the camps, daring to visualize her as a prisoner behind bars or barbed wire. Belgian artist Marie Helene Ardaen (b. 1952) heard the story of Anne Frank as a youngster from Mr. David Lelyveld (a Dutch citizen), her father’s good friend who lost his entire family in Auschwitz.66 Influenced by the story, Ardaen envisioned Anne Frank in a small prison cell, with a small opening behind her (Fig. 36). In Ardaen’s painting, Anne is looking out through a barred window staring at the spectators with a profoundly sad look. She is wearing a striped prisoner’s garment. A bird, outside the barred window, is facing Anne, holding on tightly below the window frame. As opposed to Anne’s captivity, the bird symbolizes Anne’s lost freedom. The rest of the background is colored with patches of green, yellow and brown colors conveying a feeling of uncertainty. On the right of Anne, the artist added an inscription in Dutch from Anne’s diary. On October 29, 1943, she wrote, “I wander from one room to another, downstairs and up again, feeling like a songbird who has had his wings clipped and who is hurling himself in utter darkness against the bars of his cage.”67 The

66 From the author’s correspondence with Marie Helene Ardaen, July 2015, January, March 2018. 67 Barnouw and van der Stroom, 411.

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Fig. 37: Ruth Schloss, Anne Frank, 1981, photographic print and acrylic on canvas, 100 × 73 cm. Courtesy of the artist’s estate.

artist emphasized Anne’s lack of freedom by putting her in a cage-like space in which we see a songbird and through the bird itself. Israeli artist Ruth Schloss (1922–2013) was curious about Anne Frank’s fate in the camp. She was born in Nürnberg, Germany, and immigrated to what was then Palestine with her parents and sister in 1937 at the age of 15. Following the Nazi rise to power and the restrictions they imposed on German Jews, Schloss’s father felt they were no longer wanted in Germany. Despite his love for Germany and its culture he decided to leave and immigrate. In 1981, Schloss presented an exhibition entitled Anne Frank in Perspective which was held in the Sha’ar Zion Library, Beit Ariela in Tel Aviv.68 The exhibition featured 50 works presenting the image of Anne Frank simultaneously in a Jewish and universal context. About it she said: “I myself feel especially close to the image of Anne Frank. I knew neither her nor any of her family. Yet she and I are of the same generation. She was born, as I was, in Germany that existed before the brown shirts and the rampant storm troopers . . . I came to know her as did many others, through her diary she left.”69

68 Ruth Schloss, Anne Frank in Perspective (1981), unpaged (Catalog). 69 Ibid.

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The decision to make Anne Frank the subject of her artworks was coincidental, as Schloss described: Her memory, however, which had remained vague for me throughout the years, came to life by coincidence. One day as I was working, I overheard a strange news item on the radio: “Today is the birthday of Anne Frank, who was killed in the Holocaust. If she had survived,” the announcer added, “she would have been fifty years old today.” This was on June 12, 1979. The chance news item must have hit a dormant nerve ending. It aroused emotions, kindled an idea. This exhibition is its realization.70

Before she began her series of works depicting Anne Frank, she visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, Holland, reread Anne Frank’s diary and collected photographs and information about Anne Frank as she described: Trying to envision her possible image, I returned to the pages of her diary, one by one. I went to Amsterdam to see the remnants of her hiding place. I collected photographs and bits and pieces of documents, and I pondered the uniqueness of her personality as well as what she had in common with her other contemporaries.71

In one of the artworks Schloss visualized Anne Frank as a camp prisoner (Fig. 37). Her hair is shaved and she is wearing a striped camp uniform, a sad expression on her face and a black collar-like strip encircles her neck. Because of the missing hair, Anne Frank’s eyes look big, as though they pop out fearfully. The red and black striped background and her pale face refer to her terrible fate. By using Anne Frank’s famous photograph (Fig. 2) as the foundation of her depiction, Schloss emphasizes the enormous change in Anne’s feminine appearance. Anne Frank’s fate in American artist Oleg Djimbinov’s (b. 1980) artwork is even more evocative (Fig. 38). She is standing in a foggy background behind barbed wire, dressed in a striped prisoner’s garment and watched by German soldiers on the ground and in the watchtower. It is a very direct depiction and seems based on camp prisoners’ photographs and on Anne Frank’s photograph from May 1942 (Fig. 4). The artist shortened her hair, changed her lip expression and direct serious gaze. He stated that “Even though Anne Frank is mostly known to represent Jews who died in Holocaust, in my mind she represents all the children of past and future who suffered and will suffer horrors of war.”72 In this manner, Anne Frank is a universal symbol reminding us of atrocities committed against innocent children.

70 Ibid. The author’ interview with Ruth Schloss, Kfar Shmaryahu, February 5, 20, 2006. 71 Ibid. The author’s interview with Ruth Schloss, Kfar Shmaryahu, February 5, 20, 2006. 72 From the author’s correspondence with Oleg Djimbinov, July 2007. Brutin, Anne Frank in the Artists Eyes, 5, 17.

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Fig. 38: Oleg Djimbinov, Anne Frank, 2007, digital art, 18" × 13". Courtesy of the artist.

Another expressive depiction is found in Berger’s painting. She also described Anne Frank’s fate in the camp (Fig. 39). She placed Anne’s face behind the fence together with other prisoners’ agonized faces. The camp barrack is reminiscent of a dark, gloomy dungeon, with one lamp on the ceiling. In the background, we see the stairs to the Frank family’s hiding place. The artist reminds us of the rapid denouement of Anne’s life after she and her family were taken from their hiding place to their deaths in the camp. By using Anne Frank’s photograph (Fig. 2), the artist emphasizes the fact that she was so young, innocent and helpless when she was sent to the camp. Morgan superimposed Anne Frank’s famous photograph (Fig. 2) with a mound of corpses (Fig. 40). Her ghostly appearance merges into the corpses. The mound is composed of faceless bodies’ heaped one on top of the other, representing the six million Jews, of which one-and-a-half million were children. Many of the figures shown in the painting could easily have been Anne Frank.73 In that manner, she represents not only the dead children, but also all Holocaust victims.

73 Aaron Morgan, The Mound Series (Port Washington, NY: Self-publishing, 2007), unnumbered; author’s correspondence and telephone conversations with Aaron Morgan, August–September 2008, February 2012.

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Fig. 39: Iris Anne Berger, Breaking Dawns, 1994–1995, oils on canvas, 92 × 122 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 40: Aaron Morgan, The Face of the Holocaust, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 36" × 36". Courtesy of the artist’s estate.

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*** The fact that the Warsaw boy’s identity is unknown allowed artists to depict him in a symbolic manner. Trachtman and Korwin portrayed the Warsaw boy as a dark image. Trachtman placed him against a background of no specific place or time (Fig. 8), while Korwin added two Nazi soldiers to signify the context for the viewers (Fig. 9). Both emphasized the boy’s vulnerability and helplessness. Stojka, unlike Trachtman and Korwin, depicted a colorful threatening description with an incomplete figure of the boy. To emphasize his Jewishness he added a yellow Star of David with the letter “J” and the large Nazi swastika to stress the source of the boy’s fate. Bak took a different approach by depicting the Warsaw boy as the Nazis’ enemy, whom they targeted to destroy (Fig. 11). Nezhnie Helfman and Morgan dealt with the fate of the Jewish children during the Holocaust by marking them as the ultimate Nazi victims. Nezhnie Helfman placed the German inscription “The Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no more” on the boy’s image as a reminder of the perpetrators’ culpability regarding the child’s fate (Fig. 13), while Morgan added a citation from Sonek’s poem Holocaust in order to remind us that the Nazis murdered innocent, helpless Jewish children (Fig. 14). Bar Hama, Rotman and Knigin put the Warsaw boy’s image in the midst of various objects linked to Holocaust events and to the fate of the Jewish children during the Holocaust. In one of his pieces, Bar Hama presented the Warsaw boy’s helpless childish image between the Angel of Death and the crow’s head to emphasize his terrible fate that must be told to the next generations (Fig. 15). In another artwork he presented the Warsaw boy’s image in the midst of a pile of bars of soap to emphasize the “clean,” organized, and precise Nazi method of murdering the one and a half million children in the Holocaust and as a reference to the rumor that the Nazis made soap out of Jews’ bodies (Fig. 16). Rotman placed the Warsaw boy in a pile of large colorful skulls to emphasize their humiliation and the horrific way they died (Fig. 17), while in both artworks Knigin created a background with hidden symbols pointing to the extermination of the Jews, such as the train to the camps, ruins, and an armed soldier near the Warsaw boy (Figs. 18–19). In Warsaw Boy V he added two doves spreading their wings to symbolize the absence of freedom, rather than escape to freedom. Teicher-Yekutiel used the Warsaw boy’s image in a different approach to deal with the Jewish children’s fate during the Holocaust (Fig. 20). She brings Pinocchio into her artwork as a mediator on behalf of herself, and he acts to save the boy and the Jews in the ghetto from the Nazis. Unlike the above artists, Bar Hama used the copy of the entire original photograph with the boy as he sought to encapsulate the children’s hunger in the ghetto in a piece of bread (Fig. 22). He blurred the boy’s image to symbolize the hungry children in the ghetto, and the inedible loaf of bread in the center, mostly on the boy, represents the absence of food and the constant search for a piece of bread to ease the hunger.

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Yarhi’s illustration is extraordinary since it is a frame of a graphic novel (Fig. 23). He used the scene from the original photograph but cropped and reframed it to give the infamous image new symbolic meaning. While nothing is known about the identity or fate of the Warsaw boy, the background of Anne Frank is well-known. Anne Frank is famous; her life story and her face are familiar because of her diary and extant photographs. On one hand, Weinshall Liberman, Kaplan, Keeter and Berger described Anne Frank’s short life story, punctuated by harsh experiences. With Anne Frank’s multiplied image, the outline of the map of Europe and the backdrop of boxcars, Weinshall Liberman marked the places to which Anne Frank was forced to travel during her short life: from Frankfurt, Germany, to Amsterdam, Holland to Westerbork transit camp in Holland, and from there to Auschwitz, Poland, and finally to Bergen Belsen, the concentration camp in Germany where she died when she was not yet sixteen (Fig. 24). Kaplan described Anne Frank’s fate as a collage of scenes (Fig. 25). By doing so, he mostly emphasized the fear, distress and loneliness Anne experienced during her short life in Amsterdam, in hiding and in imprisonment. In her paintings Keeter showed three stages of going into hiding and the beginning of hiding to describe the change of Anne’s fate in a short time and the transformation from normal life to a stressful and frightening life (Figs. 26–28). Berger referred to milestones in Anne Frank’s short life, the house in which the Frank family hid, the chestnut tree next to it, the staircase leading to the hiding place and the bookcase, vertical bars and fence with horrific scenes from the camps (Fig. 29). Offering different interpretations, Schepp, Weinshall Liberman, Kaufman, Fink and Berger described individual scenes from Anne Frank’s short life story. Schepp depicted Anne Frank wearing layers of clothing, holding a suitcase and giving a last glance at the house in Merwedeplein, Amsterdam, before she left for the hiding place (Fig. 30). Weinshall Liberman referred to Anne Frank’s hiding place with its claustrophobic atmosphere as a symbol of the persecution and oppression of the Jews in general and Anne Frank in particular (Figs. 31–32): first, in the hiding place in the annex on Prinsengracht 263 (Fig. 31), and again in a spider’s web layout of the city of Amsterdam where Anne Frank came to escape from Nazi Germany (Fig. 32). Both Kaufman and Fink used glass to refer to Anne Frank’s being denied freedom. Kaufman addressed Anne Frank’s life in the annex in a unique manner. She is looking inside through broken glass (Fig. 33). Fink enshrined Anne Frank’s image in glass to emphasize her confinement and her experience of being denied freedom, as well as to demonstrate the fragility of life (Fig. 34). Berger referred to phases in Anne’s life: the house, her hiding place and that of camps, Auschwitz in particular, by placing the house and the gateway of Auschwitz on the enormous outline of Anne’s head (Fig. 35). Ardaen, Schloss, Djimbinov, Berger and Morgan ventured to envision Anne Frank’s fate in the camp by imagining her as a prisoner behind bars and barbed wire despite the fact that very little is known about her experience there. Ardaen

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depicted Anne Frank in a small prison cell, wearing a striped prisoner’s garment and gazing with a profoundly sad look. She contrasted Anne’s captivity with the bird’s freedom to emphasize Anne’s lost freedom (Fig. 36). Schloss imagined Anne Frank as a camp prisoner wearing a striped camp uniform, with shaved head, a collar on her neck and a sad expression on her face, stressing the enormous changes in Anne’s feminine appearance (Fig. 37). In a very direct depiction, Djimbinov showed Anne Frank as a prisoner dressed in a striped prisoner’s garment, standing behind barbed wire and watched by German soldiers on the ground and in the watchtower (Fig. 38). By describing Anne’s face among other prisoners’ faces behind the fence, Berger emphasized the change of Anne’s fate, when she and her family were taken from their hiding place to their deaths in the camp (Fig. 39). Going even a step further, Morgan depicted Anne Frank’s ghostly appearance merging with a mound of corpses to represent not only the dead children, but also all Holocaust victims (Fig. 40).

2 It Could Have Been Me Some artists personally identified with the Warsaw Ghetto boy and Anne Frank, choosing them as figures to represent the victims of the Holocaust. Sometimes this identification stemmed from taking personal and human responsibility for preserving their memory and, occasionally, from a desire to figure out how the artists would have acted if they had been “there.” As a result, the artists’ personal identification with these figures serves as an entrance into the existence, the situations and experiences of the victims by depicting themselves as if they were the Warsaw Ghetto boy or Anne Frank. Among the artists who identified with the Warsaw Ghetto boy or Anne Frank are survivors who personally experienced the horrors of the Holocaust, as well as those who lived outside of Europe during the period of the Holocaust or were born after the Holocaust.

The Generation of the Holocaust Some Holocaust survivor artists and artists of their generation put themselves in an imaginary situation as the Warsaw Ghetto boy or as Anne Frank, trying to identify with them and understand what they experienced during the Holocaust. We can see in Bak’s first works from 1995 an example of a Holocaust survivor who identified with the Warsaw Ghetto boy when he studied the boy’s figure. Bak identified with him by adding his self-portrait as part of the boy’s depiction. The decision to use the iconic image of the Warsaw Ghetto boy followed a long period of doubt: [. . .] For a long time, I studied this sacred image, lived in its presence, but was afraid to make it part of my pictorial world. I dared not challenge the terrible power of the photograph’s authenticity. The passing of time made me reconsider, and he became the subject of many of my works.1 [. . .] On one hand I know that it is the uncontested symbol of the Jewish Holocaust, and that it was a finger of a Nazi officer that had opened the shutter of a camera’s inner eye and immortalized the Jewish child. But on the other hand I believe that this boy’s grandeur comes from and belongs to eternity.2

1 Samuel Bak, “Speaking About the Unspeakable” (paper presented at the Council of Europe, International Colloquy: Teaching about the Holocaust and Artistic Creation, Strasburg, France, October 2002). The author’s correspondence with Samuel Bak, January 2012. 2 Samuel Bak, “Icons of Loss- The Image of the Warsaw Boy in the Art of Samuel Bak” (paper presented at the 6th International Conference on “Teaching the Shoah: Fighting Racism and Prejudice” at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, July 10, 2008). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110656916-003

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[. . .] the Warsaw boy has become to me a source of inspiration. With his arms lifted in an attitude of resignation and surrender, and his depleted gaze focused on my eyes, he never stops questioning me.3

On March 27, 1944, a children’s Akzion (action) took place in the forced labor camp, where Bak and his parents were incarcerated, in which 250 children were deported to their deaths.4 He recalls the event: Early, with the arrival of the morning’s faint daylight, after a tense and sleepless night, Father leaves for the workshop. Also, our cell partners leave. Mother, who works on a later shift, stays with me. . . Loud voices of the Gestapo command our attention. “The children! The children!” . . . Voices in German shout through the corridor. “Get out! Quickly, you schweine!” . . . The noise of whistles and shouted orders is more and more interspersed with the growing sound of lamentation. . . Slava seizes Mother by her arm and quickly draws the two of us into her corridor . . .The women grab me, push me under the bed, and cover me with tattered clothes.5

A few days later, Bak’s father managed to smuggle him out of the camp in a sack for woodcuts. Bak recalls: Father’s blackened hands hold the patched-up burlap sack that he has brought with him. The sack smells strongly of freshly cut wood. . . His hands open the sack. “Get in and make yourself as small as you can.” I climb inside. . . We are in a line of men who are carrying identical sacks . . . Father, following in the steps of the other men enters the barracks, moves aside, and his strong hands set me down on the floor. . . I wait and wait and wait. . . Suddenly somebody grabs me, brings me quickly to the window and opens the sack, letting me slide from the window to a ground that is covered by soft vegetation.6

Outside, a woman (Aunt Janina Rushkevitch’s maid) waited to pick him up. She waved his mother’s scarf, as a prearranged signal, and took him to his mother. They were waiting for his father to join them, which never happened. He was shot to death in Ponary, along with other labor camp prisoners, in July 1944, ten days before Vilna’s liberation. A few studies led to the work Self-Portrait (Fig. 43) in which Bak integrated his own self-portrait into the depiction of the Warsaw boy’s image to stress his identification with the boy. In the work Study A (Fig. 41), Bak depicts the image of the

3 Ibid.; the author’s interviews with Samuel Bak, Strasbourg, October 2002 and Jerusalem, July 2008. 4 Yehudit Shendar, An Arduous Road, Samuel Bak, 60 years of Creativity, VIII (Catalog). 5 Dan Omer, “Ani Holekh u’Mitkaleph Yoter v’Yoter” (I peel more and more), Proza, nos. 40–41, (July-August 1980): 63. (Hebrew); Samuel Bak, Painting in Words – A Memoir (USA: Parker Gallery and Indiana University Press, 2001), 74–75. 6 Omer, “Ani Holekh u’Mitkaleph Yoter v’Yoter,” 63 (Hebrew); Bak, Painting in Words – A Memoir, 84–86.

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Fig. 41: Samuel Bak, Study A, 1995, oil on canvas, 25 5/8" × 21 1/8". Private collection. Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA, USA.

Warsaw boy close to a red brick wall.7 The patchy image of the boy is mainly made of stone and partly of wood. His hands are pierced as a sign of the crucifixion, as we saw in his Study B of 1995 (Fig. 11). His stone coat is integrated into a tombstone decorated with hands in the position of the priestly blessing. Behind his coat, there is a large hole and the artist’s self-portrait as a child is partially visible, with a blue sky behind him. The artist’s face is without expression and his eyes are fixed still, like the face and eyes of the Warsaw boy. The brick wall is reminiscent of the Warsaw Ghetto wall and symbolizes the imprisonment in the ghetto and the denial of freedom. By connecting the image of the Warsaw boy with his self-portrait, Bak expresses his identification with the Warsaw boy’s fate, his own fate and that of many other children like him during the Holocaust. In Study F Bak depicts the Warsaw boy’s image with a yellow star on his coat, pierced with shots, on a board leaning on two sticks, in front of a ruined brick wall seen on the right (Fig. 42).8 The boy is absorbed into the board, leaving behind his

7 Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint, 138. 8 Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint, 132.

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Fig. 42: Samuel Bak, Study F, 1995, oil on linen, 237/8" × 15 5/8". Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA, USA.

shoes, and losing his face which is replaced by a hole. Thus, the boy exists between reality and illusion. Through the hole appears part of the artist’s face, this time as an older man, hiding behind the boy who perished, almost replacing the boy’s face. Bak expresses not only his ongoing identification with the Warsaw boy’s fate, but also a survivor’s feelings of guilt that he was saved from the children’s deportation while the other children were sent to the death camps.9 In Self-Portrait (Fig. 43), for which Study F was a sketch, the boy from the Warsaw Ghetto appears along with Samek Epstein, Bak’s murdered childhood

9 Ziva Amishai-Maisels, “Haunting the Empty Place,” in Absent / Presence, Critical Essays on the Artistic Memory of the Holocaust, ed. Stephen C. Feinstein (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 131–132.

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Fig. 43: Samuel Bak, Self-Portrait, 1995, oil on canvas, 160 × 200 cm. Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA, USA.

friend and his own memory of himself as a child in the tragic years of the Holocaust.10 Bak said, “In the Vilna Ghetto I was his age and I looked exactly like him.”11 Bak also expresses here a survivor’s sense of guilt: he cannot forgive himself for being saved from the transport of children from Vilna, hidden in a sack and lowered over the ghetto walls. He wrote, “I feel guilty for having escaped the fate of those other children. The bereaved parents may justly think that their children died in my place.”12 He is the child in the sack, wearing a coat he inherited from a child who had died in the ghetto, surrounded by accusing wooden ghost children, made up of images of the Warsaw boy and Samek, on the left. On the right, the image of the Warsaw boy appears alone, his legs depicted as a negative and his upper body and face painted on several pieces of paper taped together. The tape in the center creates the shape of a Star of David. The other piece of tape on his elbow creates an X, marking the defilement of the Ten Commandments. The empty shoes at the bottom of the Warsaw boy’s image are reminiscent of the

10 Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint, 147. 11 The author’s interviews with Bak, Strasbourg, October 2002 and Jerusalem, July 2008, correspondence January 2012. 12 Bak, Painting in Words – A Memoir, 83.

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piles of shoes left by the victims as a reminder of their terrible fate. The ghosts, shown on the far right side, return from the death camps with their smoking chimneys, to haunt him, stopping him from using the brush he holds in his hand by blocking his way to the canvas behind them on the left.13 Langer wrote, on Bak’s Self-Portrait, “no one’s survival can be detached from the loss of someone else.”14 He added, Through one of the great ironies of Holocaust history the other child in the picture, a casualty of the Warsaw rather than the Vilna ghetto, immortalized through the best-known photograph to outlast the catastrophe, is far more familiar to us than the image of the living boy. With his hands raised, fear and confusion in his eyes, he is imprinted on what appears to be the remains of a primitive wood and canvas surface as the archetypal victim, from whose existence the artist-to-be will inherit an important influence on his version of reality.15

Following his Self-Portrait, Bak has obsessively painted hundreds of variations with the Warsaw boy in different contexts. For instance, Self-Portrait with Friends depicts the Warsaw boy as anonymous, disassembled and patched three times (Fig. 44).16 On the right, the figure is seen behind the torn striped prisoner garment, with the front piece of fabric pierced with bullet holes, his face sealed with wooden boards, his hat also pierced and a yellow Star of David lying on his body. The second figure in the center is featureless, wearing half a coat and his legs separated and patched onto the boy’s body. The image of the third child is a small dark shadow down on the left side. Other raised hands are seen around the figures, making it seem as though there are more children in this group. The artist’s portrait as a boy is seen as a mask and is incorporated in the body of the central Warsaw boy as a symbol of identification with his fate and as part of the whole group. Another half-self portrait of the artist is peeking above the small shadow of the boy’s image. It is clear that the artist identifies with the Warsaw boy’s fate and with all the children who experienced the Holocaust. Bak himself was a child in it, and he recognizes that his fate could have been much like that of the boy in the artwork. Bak went a step further in his identification with the Warsaw boy in Group by adding his self-portrait as the Warsaw boy (Fig. 45).17 The group of the multiplied image of the Warsaw boy consists of a few faceless images. One is an anonymous inmate wearing a striped uniform in the foreground, and another is wearing a

13 Ziva Amishai-Maisels, “Haunting the Empty Place,” 132. 14 Lawrence L. Langer, Preempting the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 110. 15 Ibid., 111. 16 Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint, 144. 17 Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint, 141; Ziva Amishai-Maisels, “The Disappearance of the Identity of the Holocaust Victim in Art,” in Jewish Artists and Central-Eastern Europe, Jerzy Malinowski, Renata Piątkowska, Tamara Sztyma-Knasiecka, eds. (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2010), 415.

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Fig. 44: Samuel Bak, Self-Portrait with Friends, 1997, oil on Linen, 46 × 55.9 cm. Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA, USA.

yellow Star of David on his coat in the center and there is a large disappearing image in the background, both figures with pierced hands as we saw in Study B from 1995 (Fig. 11). In contrast to them, in the back rows we see two images of the Warsaw boy, one on the right, with a cap with the artist’s self-portrait as a child at the time of the Holocaust and another smaller portrait in the center that could be the artist’s self-portrait or Bak’s murdered childhood friend Samek.18 In this artwork, Bak totally identifies with the fate of the Warsaw boy and sees himself as a victim too. Some writers and artists have found that a personal identification with Anne Frank enabled them to best convey the horrors of the Holocaust. In 1961, Russian poet and political and cultural activist Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933–2017) wrote his most famous poem Babi Yar. Under Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971), erstwhile leader of the Soviet Union, cultural “thaw” had allowed some freedom of expression. In his poem, Yevtushenko identified with Anne Frank, the wellknown icon of the Holocaust:

18 The author’s interviews with Bak, Strasbourg, October 2002, and Jerusalem, July 2008, correspondence January 2012.

The Generation of the Holocaust

Fig. 45: Samuel Bak, Group, 1997, oil on Linen, 66.7 × 100.3 cm. Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA, USA.

It seems to me that I am Anna Frank, Transparent, as the thinnest branch in April, And I’m in love, and have no need of phrases, But only that we gaze into each other’s eyes. How little one can see, or even sense! Leaves are forbidden, so is sky, But much is still allowed – very gently In darkened rooms each other to embrace. -“They come!” -“No, fear not – those are sounds Of spring itself. She’s coming soon. Quickly, your lips!” -“They break the door!” -“No, river ice is breaking. . .” Wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar, The trees look sternly, as if passing judgement. Here, silently, all screams, and, hat in hand, I feel my hair changing shade to gray. And I myself, like one long soundless scream Above the thousands of thousands interred,

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I’m every old man executed here, As I am every child murdered here.19

The Israeli poet Amnon Shamosh identified with Anne Frank as well, but in a different manner. He was born in 1929 in Aleppo, Syria, and immigrated to Palestine in 1938, as a child. In 1970, he visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam with his wife, son and daughter, who was fourteen at the time. Upon entering the house, he was struck by the fact he had not noticed until then that Anne Frank was born in 1929, the same year he was born. He stated: It flashed upon my mind that, if what happened there and then had not taken place, she might now be travelling around with her children and I could be where she was. I identified with her even more when my daughter, while standing in front of Anna's picture, turned to me with a sad expression on her face, and I saw a surprising resemblance between them, two girls just starting to blossom.20

This experience came back to Shamosh’s mind coincidentally after seven years. To his complete surprise, on a stormy night, after midnight, a poem came to him. 1 We were born in the same year Anna Frank and I imprisoned we were together Anna Frank and I we both wrote a diary she from left to right I from right to left hers was preserved mine –disappeared which one of us is alive 2 We were born in the same year Anna Frank and I the discovery slapped my

19 Translated by Benjamin Okopnik, http://remember.org/witness/babiyar (accessed in August 26, 2018). 20 Amnon Shamosh, Anna Frank and I, A Poem in 3 Versions and 18 Translations (Ra’anana: Even Hoshen, 2010), 5, 44.

The Generation of the Holocaust

face in the house on the Canal and my daughter beside me her age shivering (my hand held hers) imprisoned we were together Anna Frank and I trembling with Jewish fear we both wrote a diary she from left to right I from right to left hers was preserved and its echo fills the world mine – disappeared which one of us is alive what taste to life if I could not in my life do a little of a little of what she did by her death 3 We were born in the same year Anna Frank and I the poor in deeds the discovery slapped my face in the house on the Canal and my daughter beside me and her age imprisoned we were together Anna Frank and I

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we both wrote a diary she from left to right I from right to left hers was preserved mine – disappeared which one of us lives and exists and what point to life if I could not in my life do a little of a little of what she did by her death Where will I go, Anna? And what will I do I, the poor in deeds? Ana,21 Anna, answer me.22

In 1984, Israeli “Second Generation” artist Haim Maor and Amnon Shamosh collaborated on the work Anne and I (Fig. 46).23 Alongside the poem, there is an illustration by Maor depicting Anne Frank sitting at her desk writing in her notebook. Behind her appears Shamosh’s portrait as if following her example. As written in the poem, Maor depicted both writing a diary. Anne is writing from left to right with her right hand, while Shamosh is writing from right to left with his left hand, creating an imagined link to bind them. Maor used one of the famous photographs of Anne Frank (Fig. 5) and colored it in yellow to symbolize in a concealed manner the yellow Star of David which she and the Jewish population were forced to wear. Like Shamosh, Weinshall Liberman’s identification with Anne Frank was enhanced by the fact that both she and Anne Frank were born in 1929.24 She stated,

21 “Ana” – Please in Hebrew. 22 Amnon Shamosh, Anna Frank and I, 5, 43. Translated from the Hebrew by Ada Aharoni. 23 Amnon Shamosh, “Anna and I,” in Amnon Shamosh, Upon the Harp with a Solemn Sound (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1984), 9–10; Brutin, Anne Frank in the Artists Eyes, 7–8 (Catalog). The author’s telephone interviews with Amnon Shamosh, September 2008. 24 Weinshall Liberman, Holocaust Wall Hangings, p. 78.

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Fig. 46: Haim Maor, Anne and I, 1984, print on paper, 33.5 × 83 cm. Courtesy of the author.

Fig. 47: Judith Weinshall Liberman, Self Portrait of a Holocaust Artist # 102, 1997, mixed media on stretched canvas, 18" × 18". Courtesy of the artist, The William Benton Museum of Art, Storrs, CT, USA. Over the years, it has often crossed my mind that, but for the wise decision my family made back in 1920 to immigrate from Russia to Palestine, where they could work toward the establishment of a Jewish state, I might have been in Europe during the Holocaust and shared Anne Frank’s fate.25

In the center of Self Portrait of a Holocaust Artist # 102 the artist depicted Anne Frank’s schematic head on a gray background with a black frame (Fig. 47). Anne Frank’s image is based on the well-known photograph of her from 1939, but the artist used only Anne’s head (Fig. 2). The color gray symbolizes the agony and despair

25 The author’s interview with Judith Weinshall Liberman, Boston, September 2007; Judith Weinshall Liberman, My Life into my Art, an Autobiography (USA: Booklocker, 2007), 252.

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Fig. 48: Judith Weinshall Liberman, Witness, 1998, wall hanging, 18" × 26". Courtesy of the artist, The Temple Museum of Religious Art of The Temple Tifereth Israel, Beachwood, OH, USA.

in Anne’s life, while the color black symbolizes Anne’s death. The artist’s eye is superimposed upon Anne Frank’s left eye to “complete” her face and create identification between them. Thus, the artist expresses her empathy for the young Holocaust victim and her own effort to see things through Anne’s eyes. It is customary to refer to the eyes as the mirror of the soul, a window to a person’s inner world. Since it is also conventional to think that the human soul continues to exist after death, the eye can represent the dead. The eye is one of the most common images in art. It already existed in early periods and it is prominent in contemporary art. It has many ways of appearing, as the central element in the artwork or as an individual element standing for itself.26 Due to the intensity of the eye and the power of eye contact, many artists use this image to catch the spectator’s attention and to convey ideas and messages from soul to soul. Weinshall Liberman used this depiction again in Witness, strengthening the link between Anne Frank and herself (Fig. 48). It is set against a schematic map of

26 Francis Huxley, The Eye (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990); Guy Hubbard, “Artistic Eyes,” Arts and Activities, vol. 121, no. 1 (February 1997): 34.

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Fig. 49: Judith Weinshall Liberman, Self Portrait of a Holocaust Artist # 54, 1997, mixed media, 10" × 8". Courtesy of the artist, The William Benton Museum of Art, Storrs, CT, USA.

Europe and, as in Anne Frank’s Journey (Fig. 24), the long journey Anne Frank was forced to travel during her short life is marked with a strip. Part of the strip passes over Anne Frank’s mouth as if to keep her silent. As a victim she could not “raise” her voice, in hiding or in the camps, “but nothing, even death, could not silence the voice,” the artist wrote.27 Weinshall Liberman’s identification with Anne Frank escalated to a point that the artist merged her own face with Anne’s face, for example in Self Portrait of a Holocaust Artist, Merging with Anne Frank (Fig. 49). On the left the artist placed part of Anne Frank’s image from the famous photograph from 1939 (Fig. 2), while on the right the artist’s own photograph completes the face. Weinshall Liberman wrote: I placed myself in Holocaust settings in an effort to explore my emotional relationship to the subject of the Shoah . . . Superimposing my own image on a victim’s face constituted a record of my emotional journey. I not only remembered the victims but never forgot that “there, but for the grace of God, go I.”28

The Generations after the Holocaust There are artists belonging to the generation after the Holocaust who identified with the Warsaw boy and Anne Frank’s fate by depicting their own portraits next to

27 Weinshall Liberman, Holocaust Wall Hangings, 78. 28 Weinshall Liberman, My Life into My Art, an Autobiography, 324.

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Fig. 50: Michel Kichka, frame from page 8 in Second Generation: The Things I Didn’t Tell My Father, 2013, illustration. Courtesy of the artist.

or instead of their images. Some of the artists have a personal relationship to the Holocaust while others have no such direct connection to it. Second generation descendants of Holocaust survivors expressed their identification with Holocaust victims by using their self-images to describe themselves in situations that happened in the Holocaust as if they were “there.”29 For example, in his autobiographical graphic novel Second Generation: The Things I Didn’t Tell My Father30 Michel Kichka (b. 1954), an Israeli cartoonist and illustrator of Belgian origin, described himself as the Warsaw boy in one of the book frames (Fig. 50). Growing up, Kichka was haunted by the ghosts of events that happened years before he was born through his father and photographs he saw in his father’s books, so he was familiar with the infamous photograph from Warsaw from his childhood. He depicted a partial presentation of the convoy, the Nazi soldiers and himself in the center as the Warsaw boy. To emphasize the fact that he is the child described, Kichka added freckles to the child’s face. He said: “I had the same body

29 Batya Brutin, The Inheritance, The Holocaust in the Artworks of Second-Generation Israeli Artists, (Jerusalem: Magnes and Yad Vashem, 2015), 191–192 (Hebrew). 30 Michel Kichka, Second Generation: The Things I Didn’t Tell My Father (Tel Aviv: Modan, 2013). It was first published in French: Deuxième génération: Ce que je n’ai pas dit à mon père (Paris: Dargaud, 2012).

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structure as a child, but I had freckles on my face. I painted myself as the boy from Warsaw because I identified with him.”31 Two Israeli artists, Bar Hama and Nir Hod, expressed their identification with the Warsaw boy though by different means and for varying reasons. One of the prominent and essential components in Bar Hama’s identity is the compulsive feeling of having been uprooted, without having the chance to bid farewell properly to his home, neighbors, friends and teachers. He was only ten years old, in June 1956, when his family was forced to flee Morocco – both because of the increasing persecution of local Jews and because of his father’s Zionist activities. This feeling arose again when he began to be involved with the Holocaust. While doing so, his insight was sharpened, given all that occurred because of his Jewishness and his father’s Zionist activities. Only when he matured and became familiar with the history of the Holocaust could the artist connect his personal experience with the events the Jews experienced – including North African Jewry – during the Holocaust.32 The Escape – June 1956 from 2005 (Fig. 51) is one of the artworks in which Bar Hama deals with displacement. He “planted” his self-portrait photograph in place of the face of the boy with his arms up from the well-known photograph taken in the Warsaw Ghetto and photographs of his parents’ faces in place of the man and woman in the center of the opening from which a group of people emerge. The portraits of the artist and his parents were taken from family photographs brought from Morocco; and in this manner Bar Hama turned himself and his parents into a part of a Holocaust scene and connected it to his own experience of harassment and violent uprooting as a child. The feeling of being persecuted for being Jewish gave the artist the impetus to imagine he was physically in the Holocaust. In this way, he places the Holocaust and events in his own life story as a Jew on an axis of happenings that the Jewish nation experienced and assigns them meanings and messages for the future. Of this, he wrote, “I am not a survivor’s child. I was not physically there, but I was there in the same way that I was present in the exodus from Egypt and the revelation on Mount Sinai, and the entire Israeli nation and its generations are Holocaust survivors (In every generation a man must see himself as though he was in exodus [from Egypt] . . . now . . . past turns into present.”)33 The work Late Visit to the Cemetery from 2009 (Fig. 52) is based on a photograph the artist took in a Jewish cemetery in Berlin. It depicts a scene in a cemetery in which the Warsaw boy with his hands up appears on a gravestone, second on the left. Gravestones, trees behind him and falling leaves on the ground surround the boy.

31 The author’s interviews with Michel Kichka, September 2012, September 2018. 32 The author’s interview with Avner Bar Hama, July 2008, November 2011, January 2012; Batya Brutin, “Avner Bar Hama: Between Private and National Memory,” 80. 33 The Struggle is Eternal, unnumbered (Catalog – Hebrew).

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Fig. 51: Avner Bar Hama, The Escape – June 1956, 2005, digitally manipulated photograph printed on dibond, 70 × 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 52: Avner Bar Hama, Late Visit to the Cemetery, 2009, digitally manipulated photograph printed on dibond, 50 × 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

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On the right, as if emerging from a light bubble, the artist’s shadow is seen. The setting and the colors in this description convey a mysterious sensation; and the entire depiction looks like a meeting of entities taking place more than seventy years after the Holocaust – between the dead from the past and the artist from the present. The meeting’s purpose is to express identification with the children murdered during the Holocaust because they were Jewish, which the Warsaw boy represents, and to strengthen the continuum of Jewish identity. The message conveyed is that our Jewish essence today is integrated in our consciousness of our past. The use of the Warsaw boy’s image, according to the artist, was derived from the fact that this well-known photograph exists in the Jewish and the world’s collective and cultural consciousness as the representative of the Holocaust. From the artist’s personal identification with the fate of the Jewish children, he asked himself more than once what would he have done if he had been a child in the Holocaust era. Nir Hod (b. 1970), an Israeli artist who lives and works in New York, is a grandson of Holocaust survivors on both of his parents’ sides. He is the only artist of the third generation after the Holocaust who depicted himself as a child from the Holocaust, using the image of the Warsaw boy. Several similes concerning harsh human situations, including the Holocaust, were etched into his inner world. One of the prominent and significant images that fascinated and influenced him was the photograph of the Warsaw Ghetto liquidation, which haunted him for more than twenty years. In his work Untitled from 1994 (Fig. 53) the artist expressed his identification with the Warsaw boy by depicting himself four times as the Warsaw boy in a mysterious way.34 To create this work, Hod purchased in a second hand warehouse in Tel Aviv a long old coat, which a tailor fitted to his size, a hat, shoes and socks. The place, its smell, lighting and dirt reminded him of the Holocaust, especially Auschwitz clothing storage places with the piles of abandoned garments. Even though all four photographs look identical at first glance, they are different from each other in the hand gestures of the artist, in the shadows of the figure and the hint of the Nazi soldier, and in the undefined background. The artist identifies with the Warsaw boy by “entering” into his image. He wanted to experience the situation by “being” the boy for a while, and to be able to reinvent the boy’s image when “exiting” it and being himself again. This work is extraordinary since this is the

34 Aïm Luski, Painting, Above & Beyond (Ramat Gan: The Museum of Israeli Art, 1994), unpaged (Catalog – Hebrew).

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Fig. 53: Nir Hod, Untitled, 1994, black and white photograph, each piece 30 × 18 cm. 4 pieces. Courtesy of the artist.

only artwork in which the artist replaces the Warsaw boy’s image with himself masquerading as that child.35 In different and compelling ways, Zehava Masser, Anat Masad and Dvora Morag, Israeli artists and daughters of Holocaust survivors, chose to identify with Anne Frank. Zehava Masser (b. 1946 in the Czech Republic) felt a deep identification with Anne Frank while reading the diary. She depicted herself and Anne, both sitting in the same position, writing in a notebook as though they were the same (Fig. 54). Masser is seen in the front to emphasize the present, while Anne is depicted in the right upper corner to indicate that she belongs to the past. Masser used her own photograph taken when she was in first grade in elementary school and for Anne she used a photograph taken in 1940 in the fifth grade of the Montessori school in Amsterdam (Fig. 5). The only distinction between them is the pink ribbon on the artist’s head. The artist said:

35 The author’s telephone interview and e-mail correspondence with Nir Hod, January 29, 2017.

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Fig. 54: Zehava Masser, Anne and Me, 2008, mixed media on canvas, each piece 40 × 30 cm. 3 pieces. Courtesy of the artist.

While reading the diary I felt a deep sense of identification with Anne. Like her so am I, dark hair, big dark eyes, sad eyes. Like her so have I, as a teenager felt longings, love and frustrations. Her image is etched in me consciously and sub-consciously until today. As an artist, I felt a strong need to express this identification on my canvas.36

In all three depictions, the background is dark to emphasize the horrific times of the Holocaust and at the same time, by changing the size of the figures, Masser points out the gap in age, cultural and experience between her and Anne Frank. In another work, Masser used the same Anne Frank image both on the left panel and for her self-image on the right panel; they are sitting in the same position as in the previous artwork, both with faces that are white and without facial features (Fig. 55). In this way, the artist conveys the idea that she and Anne are interchangeable – I could be her and she could be me. There is a total identification of the artist with the image of Anne Frank. In her 30-piece installation Anne Anat Anne and Anat, Anat Masad depicted Anne Frank’s image using the photograph of her from the sixth grade of the Montessori school in Amsterdam, 1941 (Fig. 6) and her own photograph as a little girl with a pink ribbon on the artist’s head, as in Masser’s Anne and Me (Fig. 56). She also felt a deep identification with Anne Frank while reading the diary. By depicting Anne Frank’s image with her own portrait Anat Masad emphasized the random destiny of mankind. A human portrait of a girl – Anne’s or hers – raises the possibility that it was mere chance that the Holocaust occurred in Anne’s generation and not the artist’s.37

36 The author’s interview with Zehava Masser, Ashkelon, Israel, August 2008. 37 The author’s interviews and correspondence with Anat Masad, Kibbutz Kfar Masaryk, Israel, November-December 2008. Brutin, Anne Frank in the Artists Eyes, 7.

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Fig. 55: Zehava Masser, Anne and Me, 2008, acrylic on wood, each piece 21 × 22 cm. 2 pieces. Courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 56: Anat Masad, Anne Anat Anne and Anat, 2008, installation, mixed media, each piece 20 × 15 cm. 30 pieces. Courtesy of the artist.

A copy of Anne Frank’s diary has been in Dvora Morag’s possession since her childhood and it became a part of her inner world. She was fascinated by the young girl’s experience in hiding and it brought up philosophical questions about humankind’s behavior. Morag said, “The diary brought me the opportunity to

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come closer to my Holocaust survivor parents. It offered us the possibility of exchanging words about the unspeakable.”38 On an actual window shutter, she placed photographs of Anne Frank along with her own photograph, photographs of other Holocaust images and a text about her thoughts as a result of reading the diary (Fig. 57). Morag said that “the shutter functioned for me as a filter dividing between interior and exterior and through the porthole it enables us not to see what we do not want to see or what we are unable to see.” By using the shutter, the artist referred to the small window in the attic of Anne Frank’s hiding place and to the slit in the curtain through which she sometimes looked outside as she wrote on Sunday, December 13, 1942:

Fig. 57: Dvora Morag, Porthole, 2008, installation, mixed media, 51 × 46 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

I’m sitting cozily in the main office, looking outside through a slit in the curtain. It is dusk but still just light enough to write to you. It is a very queer sight, as I watch the people walking by; it looks just as if they are all in a terrible hurry and nearly trip over their own toes. With cyclists, now, one simply can’t keep up with their speed. I can’t even see what sort of person is riding on the machine.39

38 The author’s interview with Dvora Morag, Tel Aviv – Israel, July 2008. http://www.nrg.co.il/on line/47/ART1/809/484.html (Hebrew). (accessed in March 30, 2016). 39 Barnouw and van der Stroom, 327.

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Fig. 58: Dvora Morag, Porthole, 2008, detail from the installation, mixed media, 22 × 10 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

On the central portion of the shutter, Morag placed a large photograph of Anne Frank from 1941, which Anne had attached to her diary (Fig. 7), along with the artist’s own photograph with her head leaning downward, contemplative, covering her face with one hand (Fig. 58). In addition, there is a photograph of a pile of corpses covered by Morag’s own palm, which she used in several artworks.40 In this artwork, and particularly in this detail, Morag expressed empathy and familiarity with the image of this young Jewish girl. Morag said: “Indeed the book (Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl) creates closeness and intimacy with the image of this young Jewish girl, but it allows the reader to detach him/her self and to repress the atrocity outside the annex.”41 In a very different way Asaf Hanuka (b. 1974), an Israeli illustrator and comic book artist, tried to imagine himself in the times of the Holocaust, using the image of Anne Frank. It appears in one frame of the page “A Good Jew” which appeared in the Israeli newspaper Calcalist on Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day, April 19, 2012 (Fig. 59).42

40 Discussion about artworks in which Morag used the photograph of a pile of corpses with her own palm, see: Brutin, The Inheritance The Holocaust in the Artworks of Second Generation Israeli Artists, 160–164. 41 The author’s interview with Dvora Morag, Tel Aviv, Israel, July 2008. 42 Hanuka included this page in the autobiographical graphic novel, Asaf Hanuka, The Realist (Haifa: Pardes Publishing), 2017 (Hebrew).

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Fig. 59: Asaf Hanuka, A frame from “A Good Jew,” 2012, comics. Courtesy of the artist.

He drew himself, in one panel, as a stubble-faced Anne Frank wearing glasses and sitting at the table writing in her diary. To describe Anne Frank, he too used the well-known photograph taken in 1940 in the fifth grade of the Montessori school in Amsterdam (Fig. 5). Hanuka merged both faces, Anne’s and his own, in order to examine his feelings and connection to the Holocaust as a Mizrahi Israeli,43 and the result is in the text below the description: “And when I try to imagine myself at that place, something seems off.” Even though the Holocaust is deeply ingrained in Israeli society’s existence and consciousness, Hanuka expressed how little he has in common with the Dutch teenager, who symbolizes the Holocaust. On this page, and especially in this frame, he implies how he is unable to identify truly with the tragedy being memorialized. He explained that as a grandson of grandparents who immigrated to Israel from Iraq, he feels that the Holocaust has “taken over” all the other Jewish historical events and he, as a Mizrahi Israeli, feels that the Jewish history of the Mizrahim is not being dealt with in Israeli society. He feels an ambiguous pain related to the fact that his grandparents’ experience of immigrating to Israel has not been properly told and that the Holocaust is not part of his Jewish identity.44

43 Mizrahi Israeli is a descendant of Jews from Arab countries. 44 Author’s correspondence and telephone conversations with Asaf Hanuka, November 2018.

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*** The artists expressed their identification with the Warsaw boy and Anne Frank by adding their self-portraits to the depiction of the boy or Anne, each one of them according to their own personal experience. Survivor artist Bak connected his own fate and the fate of many other children like him during the Holocaust with the Warsaw boy’s fate by adding his self-portrait to the boy’s image (Fig. 41). He expressed not only his ongoing identification with the boy’s fate but also his guilt feelings that he survived and the other children perished in the camps (Fig. 42). In Self-Portrait, in addition to identification with the boy and the feeling of survivor’s guilt Bak showed the murdered children’s shadows that constantly haunt him (Fig. 43). In Self-Portrait with Friends and Group (Figs. 44–45), Bak integrated his self-portrait. In the first artwork, he shows his mask like a self-portrait incorporated in the Warsaw boy’s figure, and in the second artwork the artist’s self-portrait is shown as the Warsaw boy himself. Bak identifies with the Warsaw boy’s fate, seeing it as a symbol of all the children who experienced the Holocaust, including himself. Maor portrayed the poet Shamosh’s identification with Anne Frank by placing Shamosh’s portrait behind Anne’s, representing him as her follower (Fig. 46). Weinshall Liberman, who did not experience the Holocaust firsthand and was born in the same year as Anne Frank, at first superimposed her own eye upon Anne Frank’s left eye to “complete” her image, thus creating identification between them (Fig. 47). Then she used the same depiction once more, set against a schematic map of Europe showing Anne Frank’s journey marked with a strip (Fig. 48). In her third depiction expressing her identification with Anne Frank, Weinshall Liberman merged Anne’s face and her own to complete one face (Fig. 49). Children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, as well as other artists who are not directly related to the Holocaust, identify with both the Warsaw boy and Anne Frank. As a second-generation descendant of a Holocaust survivor, Michel Kichka depicted himself as the Warsaw boy as if he himself were experiencing the evacuation event during the Holocaust (Fig. 50). Bar Hama and Hod were fascinated by the image of the little boy from the Warsaw Ghetto. Bar Hama integrated his self-portrait with the Warsaw boy’s photograph in order to identify with the boy’s fate and at the same time to deal with his own compulsive feeling of uprootedness (Fig. 51). He also confronted his identification with the boy’s fate by imagining a meeting between him and the other dead children more than seventy years after the Holocaust, asking himself what he would have done if he had been a child during the Holocaust (Fig. 52). Hod identified with the Warsaw boy in a unique and singular way by masquerading as the boy himself (Fig. 53). Masser, Masad and Morag were deeply impressed by Anne Frank, and reading her diary had caused them to identify with her. Masser and Masad expressed this

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through choosing similar depictions of Anne, both artists placing their own images next to that of the young diarist (Figs. 54–56). Morag integrated Anne’s image and her own image with other elements referring to the Holocaust (Figs. 57–58). Coming from a point of view very different from that of the artists discussed above, Hanuka combined Anne Frank’s image with his own face to examine his feelings about the Holocaust and its place in his Jewish identity (Fig. 59).

3 Symbols of the Holocaust: Universal Imagery and Particularly Jewish Iconography There are artists who use the Warsaw Ghetto boy and Anne Frank’s images as symbols representing the Holocaust in a universal context to depict violence, cruelty, and atrocities against children in other parts of the world – not just in comparison. Moreover, they do so to illustrate that even after the Holocaust these acts continue, as if the lesson of the Holocaust has not been learned. Other artists present the Warsaw Ghetto boy and Anne Frank with emphasis on their Jewish identity, using characteristic Jewish symbols or in an implied manner to emphasize the intention of the Nazis to eliminate the potential continuation of the Jewish people – through the children.

Universal Imagery To express their universal ideas, thoughts, and messages artists used the Warsaw Ghetto boy and Anne Frank’s images to refer to World War II, specifically, to impart the horror and violence inflicted against children in war, and to convey the loss of childhood and human rights in general. Several artists selected the Warsaw Ghetto boy’s image to symbolize the gruesome events of World War II. For example, Italian artist Renato Guttuso (1911–1987) chose the Warsaw boy’s image in The Triumph of War from 1966 to symbolize the violence of World War II (Fig. 60). He relied visually on Franz Marc’s colorful 1913 painting Densities of the Animals depicting horses, dogs (or wolves), and deer, along with a cannon, exploding fragments, and spilled blood, referring to the First World War, and Pablo Picasso’s horses from Guernica (1937), a response to the Spanish Civil War.1 To underscore the horrors of World War II in general, he placed the faceless Warsaw boy below two helmeted Nazi soldiers with the vicious faces of beasts, thus representing all innocent murdered children. The strong colors and the wild animals baring their teeth in agony create a tempestuous and violent scene in which the helpless Warsaw boy stands in the middle with his hands raised. The artist chose the Warsaw boy’s image, which was already a famous symbol of the Holocaust, to refer not only to the Holocaust but also as a comparison to the Ardeatine massacre. This mass execution was carried out in Rome on March 24, 1944 by German occupation troops as a reprisal for a partisan attack conducted the previous day in central Rome.2

1 Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation, 146. 2 Ibid. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110656916-004

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Fig. 60: Renato Guttuso, The Triumph of War, 1966, oil on canvas, 126 × 186 cm. Alinari Archives, Florence, Italy.

Fig. 61: Otto Schier, The First Transport of Prisoners to Auschwitz, 1975, mixed media, various dimensions. Courtesy of Tarnów, Poland.

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Polish architect Otto Schier also used the image of the Warsaw boy in his work referring to one significant event of Nazi violence against Polish inhabitants in occupied Poland during World War II. He designed and erected the monument The First Transport of Prisoners to Auschwitz in Prisoners of KL Auschwitz Square in Tarnów, in front of the former mikveh (Ritual Jewish bath) at Boznic Street in 1975 (Fig. 61).3 This monument commemorates a group of 728 Poles, among them 20 Jews, from Tarnów and the surrounding area, as the first transport to Auschwitz extermination camp on June 14, 1940.4 The central element of the monument (made of concrete) contains a vertical wall displaying the badge of the Polish Auschwitz Prisoners (a triangle with the letter “P” in it) and on the horizontal base an inscription: “From here left the first transport of 728 Poles to the extermination camp Auschwitz.” On the wall behind it, made of stone and concrete stripes to symbolize the Auschwitz prisoners’ striped uniform, is a metal frieze with despondent figures of men, women and children led by Nazi soldiers, on a convoy symbolizing the prisoners’ march to Auschwitz. The artist relies on a long descriptive tradition of representing a convoy of deportees.5 Apparently, the artist was familiar with Nathan Rapoport’s “The Final March” basrelief on the back side of the Warsaw Ghetto monument in Warsaw from 1948 and was influenced by it. That bas-relief depicts the mass deportation of Jewish men, women and children, to the death camp. On the relief, Rapoport said, “My goal was to return, at least spiritually, what was taken in the destruction and death. My mission was to create shadows of mothers and fathers, young and old; the tragic and noble end of their lives should be remembered for future generations.”6 Although the first transport of prisoners from Tarnów to Auschwitz included men only they were the first Polish prisoner group at the concentration camp, serving the Nazis as forced laborers, living in harsh conditions, enduring violence and torture, this did not prevent the artist from depicting the victims in a universal manner.

3 The monument unveiling was on June 14, 1975, on the 35th anniversary of the event. Marian Biedroński realized the iron frieze with figures, and Alfred Gucwa forged the plastic elements on the concrete.http://www.it.tarnow.pl/index.php/eng/Worth-seeing/Tarnow/Monuments-andStatues-in-Tarnow (accessed in August 11, 2014). 4 http://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%20704.pdf (accessed in July 11, 2014); http://www.deathcamps.org/occupation/tarnow%20ghetto.html (accessed in July 11, 2014). 5 For a more detailed discussion, see Batya Brutin, Living with the Memory: Monuments in Israel Commemorating the Holocaust (Lohamei Hagetaot: Beit Lohamei Hagetaot, 2005), 30–37 (Hebrew); David Roskis, Facing Evil: Responses to Calamities in Contemporary Jewish Culture (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1993), 278–307 (Hebrew); Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation, 19; Brutin, “Avner Bar Hama: Between Private and National Memory,” 86–87. 6 Nathan Rapoport, “Memoir of the Warsaw Ghetto Monument” in The Art of Memory, Holocaust Memorials in History, ed. James E. Young (New York: The Jewish Museum and Prestel, 1994), 106; James E. Young, The Texture of Memory, Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1993), 163–184.

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Moreover, almost in the front of the convoy, there is a schematic of the well-known image of the Warsaw boy with raised hands. By adding this image, the artist does not differentiate the Polish Jews from the Polish population and acknowledges the Warsaw boy as a universal image representing the victims of the Nazi regime. A few other artists have used the Warsaw Ghetto boy’s image to symbolize violence against children during and after the Holocaust in order to deal with the questions about what humanity has learned from the Holocaust. American-Jewish artist Judy Chicago (b. 1939) is known for a series of works named Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light that she created with her husband Donald Woodman, a photographer, between the years 1985 and 1993.7 The series includes paintings, photographs, tapestries, and glass works in which the artist refers to the Holocaust from her personal point of view. The work Im / Balance of Power, from 1990 (Fig. 62), is comprised of nine squares whose organizing axis is a scale painted yellow that appears vaguely in the central square while in each middle side square there is one part of it. It is difficult to ignore the color choice that evokes an immediate connotation of the color of the Star of David the Jews were forced to wear in the Holocaust. The central square contains a depiction of the Warsaw boy and behind him some of the crowd from the original photo. On the right is an evil-faced Nazi soldier with a helmet and blue uniform, aiming his gun at the boy. In the center square, as in every corner square, there is a depiction comprised of an original photograph of hurt, frightened, and helpless children, who were involved in some kind of traumatic event and a colorful painting with a contrasting depiction, used to enhance the children’s vulnerability and suffering. In the top left square is a depiction evocative of a girl from an Israeli ma’abarah (refugee camp) of 1948 contrasted with a painting of elegant and protected houses of the rich. The top right square contains a photograph of an abused boy and to its side, a depiction of a man beating a naked woman. In the lower left square is a photograph of starving children and beside it a painting of a couple joyfully eating, with plenty of food around them. The lower right square contains a photograph of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, a nine-year-old Vietnamese girl from June 8, 1972, the victim of napalm bombs compared with an aggressive fighter pilot with an oxygen mask. The artist wrote: I am looking for the connection between the brutality toward and murder of children during the Holocaust and that evidenced in their worldwide treatment today: abuse, neglect, malnutrition, and disease [. . .]. I am trying to find a way to suggest (gently) that, even though the murder of one and a half million Jewish children was a terrible tragedy, we should also think about children today and how they’re suffering and dying by the millions all over the globe [. . .]. I’ve

7 Judy Chicago, Holocaust Project: from Darkness into Light, with photography by Donald Woodman (New York: Penguin Books, 1993). (Catalog); the author’s correspondence with Judy Chicago, November 2011.

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Fig. 62: Judy Chicago, Im / Balance of Power, 1990, sprayed acrylic, oil paint and photography on photo linen, 215.26 × 283.84 cm. Courtesy of the artist. decided to title the children’s image Im / Balance of Power, as I’ve discovered the connection I’ve been seeking. What links the treatment of children during the Holocaust with conditions today is exactly what the title implies: their powerlessness. As I read somewhere, “Those who have the least to say about the course of events are apt to suffer most gravely from the consequences.”8

Like Chicago, the Algerian artist Adel Abdessemed (b. 1971) refers to the two children, Vietnamese girl Phan Thị Kim Phúc in The Cry from 2013 and the Warsaw boy in Mon Enfant (My Child) from 2014 (Fig. 63), to deal with unjustified violence against children. He converted the photograph of the Warsaw boy into a three-dimensional standing ivory sculpture with an impressive presence in space. He detached the boy from the original context and made him a universal icon representing the children during the Holocaust and children who can be the victims of human madness.9

8 Chicago, Holocaust Project: from Darkness into Light, 134–135. 9 http://artetcinemas.over-blog.com/2015/12/adel-abdessemed-jalousy.html (accessed in January 11, 2017); Galya Lahav, Adel Abdessemed is looking for the boy from Warsaw Ghetto, http://www.haar

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Fig. 63: Adel Abdessemed, Mon Enfant (My Child), 2014, ivory, 133 × 70 × 40 cm. ©Adel Abdessemed.

Abdessemed presented this work at the Dvir Gallery in Tel Aviv in autumn 2014. Shva Salhoov wrote in the catalog: Abdessemed addresses a history with horror and pain, peeling it away from the artistic act in a way that is both ironically macabre and a demonstration of absolute, pure pathos. . . .What one sees now is an artistic act – a sculpture . . . – that places the figure at the heart of the present in which the testimony is being rewritten as a renewed claim, which is both ironic and dramatically filled with pathos. This new testimony is a history in the present tense, in which the viewer, turned father through the act of calling the sculpture . . . “my child,” becomes identified with traces of the horror. . . The re-writing or re-sculpting of this photograph brings to life the Nazi act of its production, thereby addressing those who are documenting the horrors that are taking place right now. This is your own child there, it implies, facing you with his arms raised in surrender. Such is art’s claim for recognition, defying the historical as an image of final testimony. Through the power of this removal from history, the present is evoked most powerfully as a time of destruction and murder.10

While Salhoov noted that the work was successful in linking the past with the present, Galya Lahav claimed that the piece is clinical in its execution and detached from the past:

etz.co.il/gallery/art/artreview/.premium-1.2440706 (accessed in January 11, 2017); the author’s correspondence with Rémi Amiot-Yana, assistant of Adel Abdessemed, December 2018. 10 Shva Salhoov, “My Child,” in Adel Abdessemed Mon Enfant (Tel Aviv: Dvir Gallery, 2014), unpaged. (Catalog, Hebrew and English).

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It is not “ironically macabre and a demonstration of absolute, pure pathos,” as Salhoov wrote about Mon Enfant, but a constant tactic of converting iconic historical photographs to threedimensional ivory with the addition of a sentimental name. . . Precisely in the realization of the three-dimensions, which is also the realization of infantile fantasy to animate, resuscitate and revive the child (for that matter feet appear that are not in the original frame), precisely in realizing an empty formula is obtained, a pathetic hysterical gesture of profound seriousness, which simultaneously is cynical and vulgar. Apart from the loss of the documentary validity of the photograph and the loss of the evidential status of standing in front of the Nazi and his camera, except those, Abdessemed simply turned the boy, now his son, to a prestigious manikin. This work generates an empty emotional operation.11

Jewish Holocaust survivor artist Gustav Metzger was born in Germany (1926–2017) and out of principle lived in England without citizenship.12 Metzger used the Warsaw boy’s image a few times in his series of installations, “Historic Photographs,” in the New York New Museum exhibition’s catalog, Lisa Phillips wrote: Metzger’s “Historic Photographs” have been created over the past twenty years and bring together a number of iconic images of the 20th Century’s most traumatic moments. The works turn these photographs into participatory sculptural installations that challenge our relationship to the past.13

One of the first subjects in “Historic Photographs” was the boy from the ghetto. Metzger stated: “For me there is a fusion between the image chosen and the subject and theme of the chosen image. There is a kind of lift off and conclusion.”14 In Liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, April 19–28 days, 1943, 1995/2011 (Fig. 64) he placed the enlarged infamous photograph with the boy from Warsaw against the wall and a pile of rubble in front of it, covering the lower part of it. Together these elements evoke a strong sense of destruction. Metzger worked under the shadow of Holocaust atrocities and horrific experiences from his childhood, when he was a twelve-year-old boy, almost the same age as the boy in the photograph. The photograph from Warsaw aims to warn the world of future disaster. The artist’s universal message here is that the world is still not safe from catastrophe.

11 Lahav, Adel Abdessemed is looking for the boy from Warsaw Ghetto, http://www.haaretz.co.il/ gallery/art/artreview/.premium-1.2440706 (accessed in January 11, 2017). 12 Gustav Metzger is a Holocaust survivor who escaped to England in 1939 at the age of 12, with his older brother in the Kindertransport (German for “children’s transport”). His parents and almost all his extended family were killed during the Holocaust. Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Giono, eds. Gustav Metzger (New York: New Museum, 2011), 24, 26, 44–45 (Catalog); Norman Rosenthal, “Survival,” in Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Gustav Metzger, Decades: 1959–2009 (London: Koenig Books, 2009), 11. 13 Carrion-Murayari and Giono, eds. Gustav Metzger, 6 (Catalog). 14 Ibid., 10.

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Fig. 64: Gustav Metzger, Historic Photographs: No. 1: Liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, April 19–28 days, 1943, 1995/2011, black and white photograph and rubble, 150 × 211 cm. Courtesy of the artist’s estate.

American Pop artist Michael James Toomy (b. 1964) inverted the Warsaw boy’s famous picture and focused only on the boy and the soldier (Fig. 65). He enlarged the boy’s face and upper body to put the viewer up close to him, thus bringing both into direct contact. Toomy placed the boy in front of a cattle car with a Nazi soldier standing on the left, looking on with a vacant expression. The artist expressed the boy’s helplessness and inability to prevail against the Nazis, so that his life ended prematurely. Toomy added: I chose the boy for one reason. He is universal, by that I mean he could be anyone’s son, brother or best friend. He seemed to me to be an identifiable figure that would connect immediately with the viewer. Hopefully, forcing the viewer to imprint their memories and feelings on the painting before they had a chance to realize the boy’s surroundings. I felt it is important to make the secondary images as recognizable as possible as icons of hate. A single innocent child alone, surrounded by pure evil.15

Japanese artist Setsuko Ono (b. 1941 in Tokyo, Japan) started to exhibit art professionally after a career of twenty-eight years at the World Bank, when she retired in 2003. To Professor Paul Gladston she said: “When I was in Europe I first heard about the Civil War of Spain, torture of the Jews and then the suffering of the

15 The author’s correspondence with Michael James Toomy, September and December 2015.

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Fig. 65: Michael James Toomy, The Ghosts of the Warsaw Ghetto III, 2007, a hand sketched and painted acrylic paint on canvas, 24" × 48". Courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 66: Setsuko Ono, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Victoire d’Une Defaite, 2009, charcoal and acrylic on canvas, 2 × 1.49 m. Courtesy of the artist.

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Palestinians I got furious.”16 Ono created a series of works reacting to these events, for example: Resistance to Overwhelming Force, 2009, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Victoire d’Une Defaite, 2009, Palestine, 2009. In one of her E-mails to the author she wrote: “My resistance series contains the struggle of the republicans in the Civil War of Spain, then the Warsaw Uprising, and finally struggles of Palestinians.”17 In Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Victoire d’Une Defaite she placed the Warsaw boy with his hands up in surrender in the center, and surrounded him with hands asking for help to represent the suffering Jews, and the faceless heads wearing green helmets signify their Nazi tormentors (Fig. 66). In the far background she depicted the ghetto houses and wall to emphasize the location of the scene. The artist wrote: With this title (Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Victoire d’Une Defaite) I am suggesting that as human beings carrying out one of the most courageous resistances in human history, morally those who fought in the Uprising won. Also, I hint about the future: The Jewish people won. I chose the image of the boy because it affected me very much: people should remember that not only adults, but children participated in the struggle.18

Ono used the boy’s image in a universal manner to convey her message that violence was also committed against children and to remind that children participated in struggle and resistance, as well. A wave of Holocaust denial intensified in 2012. For example, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, the leader of the political party Golden Dawn in Greece, denied the existence of incinerators and gas chambers in the Nazi extermination camps, as did other extremist leaders. There were also actual attacks on Jews in Europe, especially in France. As a reaction to this wave of Holocaust denial, Israeli caricaturist Moshik Lin (b. 1950) drew a caricature depicting the Warsaw boy stepping out of the front of the frame, out of the convoy, with three Nazi soldiers on the right, two of whom are aiming their machine guns at the boy, as the third one watches from behind (Fig. 67). The Hebrew text in the speech bubble above the boy’s head says: “And in the end someone will say that this is another Jewish invention.” By means of the Warsaw boy, who symbolically stands for all Holocaust victims, Lin protested against Holocaust denial, asking how far the deniers will go.19 There are artists who chose Anne Frank’s image to confront the atrocities of World War II as well.

16 Setsuko Ono in Conversation with Professor Paul Gladston https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= hr2dtNwKWIs (accessed in September 2, 2018). 17 The author’s correspondence with Setsuko Ono, September 2018. 18 Ibid. 19 The author’s correspondence with Moshik Lin, January 2015, October 2018.

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Fig. 67: Moshik Lin, And in the end someone will say that this is another Jewish invention, 2012, caricature. Courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 68: Werner Horvath, Anne Frank, 2007, oil on canvas, 70 × 50 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

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Fig. 69: Jacob Gildor, Target – Untitled, 2008, collage and acrylic on cardboard, 69 × 48 cm. Collection of the artist.

For example, Austrian painter Werner Horvath (b. 1949) chose the famous photograph of Anne Frank reading a book (Fig. 7) to symbolize World War II (Fig. 68).20 Anne Frank’s image emerges from a colorful, surrealistic landscape depicting vicious green creatures with large, sharp, blue bare teeth and red tongues sticking out, threatening her from the left. On the right, a blue theater-like scene emphasizes the rest of the world’s “normal” life ignoring the Jewish people’s fate represented by the green American Statue of Liberty. Anne’s book portrays black and white bald, naked and emaciated children’s figures. So, Anne Frank becomes the symbol for all the helpless innocent children murdered in the Holocaust. As in Guttuso’s painting, The Triumph of War, the strong colors and the creatures here symbolize the tumult and violence of war. The yellow patterns on Anne’s face and chest represent the yellow Star of David, the mark of disgrace Jews were forced to wear. Israeli artist and second-generation child of Holocaust survivors, Jacob Gildor (b. 1948) also chose Anne Frank’s image to symbolize World War II (Fig. 69).21 He approached Anne Frank’s fate by referring to the aggressors (Nazis) in a

20 Brutin, Anne Frank in the Artists Eyes, 7, 18. The author’s correspondence with Werner Horvath, December 2008, April 2009. 21 Brutin, Anne Frank in the Artists Eyes, 6, 16. The author’s interview with Jacob Gildor, January 2009.

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Fig. 70: Michael Knigin, Anne’s Stigma II, 2003, Print, 28" × 22". Courtesy of the artist’s estate.

symbolic and unique way. He depicted Anne Frank’s smiling face based on her photograph from 1942 (Fig. 3) as fragmented cut-outs on the background shape of a soldier with a smeared blood-red outline. By showing Anne’s scattered image, he emphasizes her vicissitude and fate, and by using the red color he reminds us of the Nazi brutality that caused her death. Knigin took a page from Anne Frank’s diary with her famous photograph integrated in it (Fig. 2), which he surrounded with a red line and a common warning sign of radioactivity. Knigin placed this on a photograph of an ochre-scorched, cracked earth as the background in Anne’s Stigma II (Fig. 70).22 Thus, the image of Anne Frank as an individual case becomes a universal warning sign for the possibility of repeated war, with the background war’s outcomes, destruction and emptiness. There are artists who have used Anne Frank’s image to deal with the loss of childhood’s dreams and the untimely loss of life of the children during the Holocaust. For example, Schloss was inspired by a specific page from Anne Frank’s diary with her photograph (Fig. 2) which she saw in the late 1970s in the exhibit of Anne

22 The author’s correspondence and telephone conversations with Michael Knigin, September– November 2009.

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Fig. 71: Ruth Schloss, Anne Frank, 1981, photographic print and acrylic on canvas, 100 × 81 cm. Courtesy of the artist’s estate.

Frank’s House in Amsterdam.23 In her artwork Anne Frank (Fig. 71), she doubled the diary page from October 10, 1942 on an uneven pink background, in which Anne Frank wrote under her own photograph (Fig. 2): “This is a photograph of me as I wish I looked all the time. Then I might still have a chance of getting to Hollywood. But at present, I’m afraid, I usually look quite different.”24 The artist marked with a pink marker the word Hollywood in Anne’s text. She also duplicated Anne Frank’s photograph four times, seen on the right, placed as a film roll. Anne’s face is blurred as it nears the word Hollywood, highlighted on a dark pink background, to stress and strengthen Anne’s dream that was never fulfilled. This portrayal conveys a sensation of an existence that is fading until it disappears. In addition, the pinkish colors in this artwork create a sensation of a dream scene.

23 The author’s interview with Ruth Schloss, Kfar Shmaryahu, February 5, 20, 2006. 24 Barnouw and van der Stroom, The Diary of Anne Frank, the Critical Edition, 282.

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Anne dreamed about movie stars and decorated her room’s walls with movie stars’ photographs, as she described in her diary on Saturday, July 11, 1942: Our little room looked very bare at first with nothing on the walls; but thanks to Daddy who had brought my film-star collection and picture postcards on beforehand, and with the aid of paste pot and brush, I have transformed the wall into one gigantic picture.25

Very often Anne imagined being an actress in Hollywood. The wish to become famous is a typical aspiration of many teenage girls. She also wrote a short story about it called: “Illusions of a Movie Star,” following Mrs. Van Pels’ never-ending question, “Why won’t you become a movie star?” In this story, Anne presents herself as a seventeen-year-old girl arriving in Hollywood as a guest of a famous movie star, but has no success. There are also artists and organizations that used Anne Frank’s image to deal with human rights in general and the stolen right to freedom of Anne Frank in particular. In 2008, William Rock (b. 1957) and Huang Xiang (b. 1941) collaborated on a mutual project named “The Century Mountain Project,” which included Anne Frank’s portrait, as one of the significant and influential figures of the twentieth century (Fig. 72). William Rock depicted Anne Frank’s smiling face in a pink garment on a sky blue background based on one of Anne Frank’s famous photographs (Fig. 7). On top of her dress is the calligraphy of NO You Have Not Died, an original Chinese poem by Huang Xiang: Anne Frank Oh God, Oh God I have faith in you, I call you to appear Be with me Be with those silent votive candles All things on earth that once have died must forge their way back through the bloody muck Under the clear sky Upon the earth To go on living Forever and forever Death is not for you You’re invincible Yes, you are I believe freedom will not stop breathing Truth won’t close its mouth There’ll come a day

Huang Xiang believes that his life experiences parallel the life and experiences of Anne Frank. He said:

25 Ibid., p. 217.

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Fig. 72: William Rock and Huang Xiang, Anne Frank, 2008, acrylic, Chinese ink on canvas, 5.5 × 3 feet. Courtesy of the artists.

I wish to see Anne Frank coming alive so that she can experience another life with happiness, peace and harmony. NO You Have Not Died was composed in memory of 4–5 Movement which happened on April 5, 1976 in Tiananmen Square in China’s capital. I picked this poem not only because the event which happened in China resembled what Anne Frank had experienced in her time, but also the deep connection and shared values of the human spirit at large. I believe Anne has achieved immortality. I believe all the living creatures on earth will never cease breathing and the voice of humanity will not be silenced under conditions of duress. All the victims like Anne in the Holocaust, as well as the lives lost in 4–5 Movement in China, will stand up in spirit from the pools of blood and come alive and they will serve as an inspiration for us to continue the journey to eternal happiness.26

26 “The May Fourth Movement was an anti-imperialist, cultural, and political movement growing out of student demonstrations in Beijing on May 4, 1919, protesting against the Chinese government’s weak response to the Treaty of Versailles, especially allowing Japan to receive territories in Shandong, which had been surrendered by Germany after the Siege of Tsingtao. These demonstrations sparked national protests and marked the upsurge of Chinese nationalism, a shift towards political mobilization and away from cultural activities, and a move towards a populist base rather than intellectual elites. Many political and social leaders of the next decades emerged at this time.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Fourth_Movement (accessed in February 11, 2009). From 1959 to 1997, Huang was incarcerated six times for political dissent and spent a total of 12 years in jail. He continued to write even though he was tortured for his work, which was completely banned in China. He has lived in exile in the United States since 1997. Huang has published poems and essays, and bilingual edition of his Out Communist China was published in 2003. The author’s interview with Huang Xiang and Rock William, February 2009.

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Fig. 73: View of the Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial, 2002, Boise, ID, USA.

When this author asked him for “a few thoughts from you about how you relate to what Anne Frank did, how your experience may compare to hers and what happened with her,” Huang Xiang answered: The ways and outcome of the persecution Anne and I received may be different, but their nature in terms of destroying life and disregarding humanity are the same. I was jailed six times for sticking to my own belief and have been deprived of freedom of liberty and expression until this day, and that is no different than execution, a bloodless killing of spirit. Anne Frank and I both wrote under extreme conditions and recorded the significant events happening in our lifetimes.27

The Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial in Boise, Idaho initiated by three Boise women, Leslie Drake, Reverend Nancy Taylor, and Lisa Uhlmann, designed by the architect Kurt Karst, is a park inspired by Anne Frank’s faith in humanity (Fig. 73).28 As Anne Frank wrote in her diary on Saturday, July 15, 1944, “ . . . in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”29 The park opened to the public in 2002. It is the only Anne Frank Memorial in the United States. It is also one of the only places in the world where the full Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is on public display. The park integrates the beauty of natural elements – water, stone, and native plants – with a message of hope, by exposing the visitors to human rights issues.30

27 The author’s interview with Huang Xiang, February 2009. 28 Brigitte Sion, “Anne Frank as Icon, from Human Rights to Holocaust Denial,” in Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory, eds. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012), 180. 29 Barnouw and van der Stroom, The Diary of Anne Frank, the Critical Edition, 694. 30 Boise Parks & Recreation maintain the park in partnership with the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights. https://parks.cityofboise.org/parks-locations/parks/idaho-anne-frank-humanrights-memorial/ (accessed in February 8, 2016).

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Fig. 74: Greg Stone, Anne Frank, 2001, cast bronze, life size. Courtesy of Boise, ID, USA.

A central element of the park is a low round platform. On it, there is an open environment with a two-dimensional replica of the floor plan of the Annex where Anne Frank was hidden, rendered in the form of saw cut markings on the ground. In addition, there are a symbolic stone bookcase and freestanding walls, including the life-size bronze statue of Anne Frank (Fig. 74) behind the front wall, created by the American sculptor, Greg Stone (b. 1952).31 He cast the image of Anne Frank standing on a chair, as if she were pulling back an imaginary curtain with her left hand and looking out a large window, as a reminder of the window in the family’s attic hiding place. The window in the attic was small and played an important role in the life of Anne and the other people hiding in the Annex. It was their connection to the outside world and the place to catch a bit of fresh air. She wrote in her diary on Wednesday, February 23, 1944: I looked out of the open window too, over a large piece of Amsterdam, over all the roofs and on to the far distance, fading into purple. As long as this exists, I thought, and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts, I cannot be unhappy. And the best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature, and God.32

31 Sion, “Anne Frank as Icon, from Human Rights to Holocaust Denial,” 183. 32 Barnouw and van der Stroom, The Diary of Anne Frank, the Critical Edition, 498.

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In her right hand, behind her back, Anne holds her precious diary. On the right of the large window there is an inscription: The Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial honors the triumph of the human spirit. In a world divided by differences of political doctrine and religious belief, we are humbled and emboldened by a child who wrote in her diary from the silence and dread of her family’s hiding place in Amsterdam during World War II. The diary is among the most widely read books in the world. It has been translated into more than sixty languages and is regarded by historians as one of the most important documents of the 20th century. In 1945, Anne Frank was imprisoned at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where she died of starvation, exposure, brutality, and disease. She was fifteen years old.

The text is general and without any reminder of Anne Frank’s Jewish identity. Moreover, nothing is said about the Nazi regime’s intention to annihilate all Jewish people by means of a plan for systematic murder. Throughout the site, sixty quotations are engraved on stone tablets. These texts are selected from the diary of Anne Frank and from human rights leaders throughout history such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela, as well as anonymous victims of discrimination in South Africa and the United States. Water features combine with serene landscaping to create a quiet and welcoming place for thought and inspiration.33 The open space park is to be understood as the opposite of Anne’s harsh living conditions, oppression, and fate. This raises the question of the purpose of using Anne Frank’s image in the park and naming the park after her. Is seems that Brigitte Sion’s statement provides the answer very well: In memorializing Anne Frank, the Boise memorial does not, in fact, do so primarily to recall the Holocaust. Rather, she serves as the point of entry to other concerns of the Idaho Human Rights Education Center, which are closer to contemporary local issues, including “equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Idahoans” and “justice for immigrant families.” Nothing in the Boise memorial’s mission statement, its official literature, or at the site itself directly identifies Anne Frank as a Jewish victim of the Holocaust or explains the reason for her hiding, let alone for her arrest, deportation, and death in a Nazi concentration camp.34

American-Jewish artist Linda Stein (b. 1943) dealt with Anne Frank’s image twice as part of the series Holocaust Heroes: Fierce Females from 2015–2016 (Figs. 75–76).35 Stein began to deal with female existence and heroism following a few personal experiences. Her childhood dream of “running, always running, But the bad guys never got me,” her experience of 9/11, when she and her assistants were running, holding

33 http://wassmuthcenter.org/the-memorial/ (accessed in February 8, 2016). 34 Sion, “Anne Frank as Icon, from Human Rights to Holocaust Denial,” 183. 35 Linda Stein, ed., Holocaust Heroes: Fierce Females, Tapestries and Sculpture by Linda Stein (Philadelphia, PA: Old City Publishing, 2016). (Catalog); the author’s interviews with Linda Stein, New York, NY, April 2016.

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Fig. 75: Linda Stein, Anne Frank 808, 2015, mixed media tapestry, 59" × 59" × 2". Collection of Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond Learsy.

hands as they fled her Lower Manhattan studio, in sight of the World Trade Center going up in flames; and as a result of her growing interest in her Jewish origins.36 In the series Holocaust Heroes: Fierce Females, the artist presented ten Jewish and nonJewish women highlighting each one of their heroic female actions during the Holocaust. When discussing the term fierce in the series title the artist stated: I define fierce as having intensity, being fervent, powerful, forceful, ardent, impassioned, fevered, strong – as in a fierce defender. I connect the word with hunger for something, a desire to take action. . . stand up for an idea, right a wrong. Can we speak of Anne Frank as being fierce? I think we can. She was very brave as she went about her daily chores in the face of such brutality. At a young age she fiercely pursued her writing while in hiding. This fierceness grounded the influence her words had on so many. In fact, learning about her was my own introduction to World War II and the Holocaust.37

36 Amy Stone, “Linda Stein, the making of an artist-activist, feminist Jew,” Na’amat Woman (Spring 2015): 18; the author’s interviews with Linda Stein, New York, NY, April 2016. 37 Linda Stein, “The Protector and Exemplar,” in Holocaust Heroes: Fierce Females, Tapestries and Sculpture by Linda Stein, ed. Linda Stein (Philadelphia, PA: Old City Publishing, 2016), 14 (Catalog).

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Fig. 76: Linda Stein, Anne Frank 839, 2015, mixed media tapestry, 59" × 59" × 2". Courtesy of the artist.

In both Anne Frank 808 and Anne Frank 839 from 201538 the artist presents photographs of Anne Frank alone and with her sister, with her parents, and in the hiding place, as well as photographs of Miep Gies and pages from Anne’s diary. Stein presented Anne Frank in a different and special manner, celebrating her as a universal hero and a female “warrior” who stood against the Nazis by surrounding her with images of popular animated female warriors. These include Pop icon Princess Mononoke, a female warrior helping the humans in their struggle against the gods of the forest, and Wonder Woman, a superhero created by William Moulton Marston in 1941 during World War II, who came to Earth to fight for peace, justice, sexual equality and love.39 In addition, there is Nausicaä, who believes in the value of life, and acts to stop war and bring peace to the world. Gloria Steinem, an American Jewish feminist, journalist, and social political activist, stated about this

38 A private collector purchased Anne Frank 808, so the artist created Anne Frank 839 to complete the Holocaust Heroes: Fierce Females series. 39 Stone, “Linda Stein, the making of an artist-activist, feminist Jew,” 19.

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Fig. 77: Alexsandro Palombo, Never Again, 2015. Cartoon. Courtesy of the artists.

work and the entire series: “In this special work, she is helping to restore the reality of women’s lives and actions during the Holocaust.”40 By universalizing the Warsaw boy and Anne Frank in the artworks discussed above, the artists could relay to viewers the violence and crimes against the weak and the “other,” especially children. Italian contemporary satirical artist and activist Alexsandro Palombo (b. 1973) used both the Warsaw boy and Anne Frank’s images in the series of drawings Never Again, mimicking characters from the long-running American sitcom animated television series The Simpsons created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company.41 He showed the characters as persons at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. By doing so, he linked iconography of the Holocaust with graphics of 20th and 21st century Western popular culture to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi death camps. By using the well-known Simpsons figures, the artist succeeded in immediately capturing the spectator’s full attention. In one of the cartoons, Palombo relied on the infamous photograph from Warsaw with the boy standing in the front of the convoy of Jews with his hands raised up. Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie Simpson are standing in the AuschwitzBirkenau death camp in front of a brown cattle car which was used by the Nazis to

40 Gloria Steinem, “Thoughts on Viewing Holocaust Heroes,” in Holocaust Heroes: Fierce Females, Tapestries and Sculpture by Linda Stein, ed., Linda Stein (Philadelphia, PA: Old City Publishing, 2016), 7. 41 Correspondence with Vanessa Esteban, assistant to Alexsandro Palombo, April 2016.

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transport the Jews to the camps (Fig. 77).42 The artist replaced the Jewish convoy in the original photograph with the Simpson family with frightened facial expressions, wearing yellow Stars of David with the word “Jude” on their chests, and Bart standing in the front replacing the Warsaw boy. On the right side, there are two Nazi soldiers with Nazi armbands with the swastika; one of them is depicted frontally, aiming his machine gun at Bart, who is the Warsaw boy. Palombo stated: “Never Again” is an invitation to reflection, an artwork to raise awareness, an indictment against intolerance, a punch to inhumanity. We must educate the new generations and tell them what happened. We have to do it without filters, bluntly, over and over again, through the memory of facts and terrifying images that reflect the horror of the Holocaust and the extermination of millions of human beings. It is only through memory that we are able to fight racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia and all forms of intolerance that threaten the society.43

In two other cartoons Palombo depicted Anne Frank, once in Auschwitz-Birkenau in front of the same brown cattle car (Fig. 78) where he had placed The Simpsons in the cartoon previously discussed. She is holding a sign saying Never Again. In the second cartoon Palombo placed Anne Frank in front of the notorious entrance gate to Auschwitz I, which bears the designation “ARBEIT MACHT FREI” (“work sets you free”) holding the same sign saying Never Again (Fig. 79). Anne Frank was a prisoner in Auschwitz concentration camp from September 6, 1944 until October 1944 before she was sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died. By placing Anne Frank at Auschwitz, the artist not only used her well-known image to draw attention to his message, but also emphasized that the Holocaust really happened and that humanity must learn its lessons from it, by using an image of a real victim who experienced the horrors of the death camp.

42 The cattle car stands since October 2009 on the platform of the camp, about 50 meters from the entrance gate of Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. It is an authentic car of the kind that transported Jews to their deaths in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. As a symbolic act, a sack of Tefillin (phylacteries) and a prayer shawl, to symbolize the ritual articles of Hugo Lowy transported from Hungary, were brought into the cattle car. Hugo Lowy was murdered in cold blood on the Birkenau platform by the rifle butt of an unfeeling SS man because of his concern for his ritual articles. The cattle car stands there as a symbol of the Hungarian Jewry that perished in AuschwitzBirkenau. http://auschwitz.org/en/museum/news/this-symbolic-railroad-car-should-be-here,688. html (accessed in April 21, 2010, February 8, 2016). 43 Jerusalem Post, https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Artist-draws-The-Simpsons-as-Jews-inAuschwitz-for-anniversary-of-camps-liberation-389169 (accessed in January, 2015).

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Fig. 78: Alexsandro Palombo, Never Again, Anne Frank in Auschwitz-Birkenau, 2015. Cartoon. Courtesy of the artist.

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Fig. 79: Alexsandro Palombo, Never Again, Anne Frank in Auschwitz I, 2015. Cartoon. Courtesy of the artist.

Particularly Jewish Iconography In contrast to the universal treatment of the subject by the artists above, other artists used a particularly Jewish approach in their depictions of the Warsaw boy and Anne Frank, thus emphasizing the uniqueness of the Holocaust. Several artists used both famous images of the boy and Anne to emphasize their Jewish identity by adding the yellow Star of David to their clothes, as we saw in the paintings by Stojka (Fig. 10) and Bak (Fig. 11). Some used biblical passages, while other artists referred to their figures’ Jewish identity in a veiled way. Jennifer Gottschalk, a Jewish artist (b. 1975) born in South Africa and living in New Zealand, depicted the Warsaw boy in a particularly Jewish manner. In her work Yellow Badge / Warsaw Boy, created in 2008 (Fig. 80),44 the dark shadow of the Warsaw boy and the yellow Star of David on his chest are seen. Above the shadow, close to the right edge of the work, there is a cut-off yellow Star of David and in it the

44 The initiative to create this work came from Zeev Barkan of Jerusalem, a researcher of the Star of David and the author of the Star of David Album http://magendavidalbum.blogspot.co.il/ (accessed in December 2014), who suggested to the artist that she create the shape of a Star of David and, employing a digital technique, fill it with names of Holocaust victims. The author’s correspondence with Jennifer Gottschalk, January 2009.

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Fig. 80: Jennifer Gottschalk, Yellow Badge / Warsaw Boy, 2008, digital art, 42 × 59.4 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

word Juif (French for “Jew”). On the left side, there is a large yellow Star of David, filling about two-thirds of the work and in it the word Jude (German for “Jew”). The image of the boy, the yellow stars, and the background comprised of 1,700 names of Holocaust victims (to commemorate at least a few of them) of different ages and places, were taken from Yad Vashem’s victim database. Although the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto did not wear a yellow Star of David but a white armband with a blue Star of David, through the image of the Warsaw boy with the prominent yellow Star of David the artist tried to represent all the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. By means of the full yellow Star of David with the word Jude and the partial yellow Star of David with the word Juif, the artist wished to teach us that the Holocaust happened not only in Germany but in other countries, such as France. Through the partial star in the top right corner that symbolizes continuity, the artist also conveyed the wide reach of the event. Gottschalk employed a technique reminiscent of micrography in ancient Hebrew manuscripts, but instead of words that explain the biblical text while creating shapes and images, she uses the names of Holocaust victims to create her work. Bak also combined the image of the Warsaw boy with the yellow Star of David in several of his paintings. For example, in Identification from 2007 (Fig. 81),45 he depicted

45 Danna Nolan Fewell and Gary A. Phillips. Icons of Loss: Recent Paintings by Samuel Bak (Boston: Pucker Gallery, 2008), 8,15 (Catalog).

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Fig. 81: Samuel Bak, Identification, 2007, oil on canvas 11" × 14". Courtesy of Pucker gallery, Boston, MA, USA.

the boy “buried” in the ground, with only his head and pierced, wounded hands emerging from the stone bricks. By depicting the boy’s wounded hands Bak is again using the pictorial tradition of the crucifixion of Jesus as representing the torments and murder of the Jews during the Holocaust, as he did in his Study B from 1995 (Fig. 11). The Warsaw boy is draped in an outline of the yellow Star of David, which looks as if it were made of yellow ribbon used to mark a crime scene; it surrounds the Warsaw boy to emphasize his Jewish identity, the reason for his harsh situation, and serves to remind us that being a Jew was his only “crime.” The boy’s stony look has the semblance of a statue or a monument representing the one-and-a-half million Jewish children murdered during the Holocaust. Danna Nolan Fewell and Gary A. Phillips wrote: But like the Warsaw photograph, a trophy celebrating a successful kill is, in Identification, transformed into a monument honoring a life taken. A Star of David hangs about the boy’s neck like a military war metal. But the youthful visage renders ironic the tribute. Is it to a life of service? Death given in-service? But service to what end?46

Bar Hama and Israeli illustrator Tamar Messer (b. 1961) used biblical sources in different ways. Bar Hama deals with Jewish existence from the past to current days. In Generation to Generation – Shoah, from 2005 (Fig. 82), he used the full photograph

46 Ibid., 8.

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Fig. 82: Avner Bar Hama, Generation to Generation – Shoah, 2005, print on canvas, 150 × 200 cm. Collection of the artist.

from the Stroop Report and divided it into two unequal parts. In the large part with a black frame, the Warsaw boy, other captives and a soldier aiming a rifle at the boy are seen. In the small part of the photograph, the young girl’s figure is conspicuous among the other expelled people. On the surface of the photograph and in the gaps between them, all the verses from the Bible containing the word “Generation” are seen, as Bar Hama used before in The Darkness of Europe 3 from 2004 (Fig. 15). This work points to the meaning and importance of passing on the story of the Holocaust from generation to generation so it will never be forgotten. Connecting the photograph to the biblical verses indicates the clear link between the expulsion of the boy and the other deportees from Warsaw and their being Jewish. In addition, the Bible is considered a source of the Jewish nation’s faith, unity and strength; despite the Holocaust, the Jewish nation survived, is alive and exists.47 Messer illustrated the relatively short Five Biblical Scrolls (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther), that are grouped together in Jewish tradition. Lamentations was the last one she illustrated because of its difficult text. Messer wrote, I pushed off illustrating the book of Lamentations for five years. I deliberated over how to relate to this difficult text. The colorful, detailed style that is typical of my earlier work was not appropriate in this case. After reading the text many times, I had a revelation and realized that

47 The author’s interview with Avner Bar Hama, July 2008.

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Fig. 83: Tamar Messer, Lamentations, 2:21, 2007, linoleum cut, 19 × 19 cm. Collection of the artist.

the book of Lamentations came to prophecy the destruction of European Jewry and in the end leads to hope – to the establishment of the state of Israel. Once this realization had come to me, the work flowed and each verse found its interpretation and visual solution. I decided that it would be most appropriate to draw it in black and white, except for the last verse of hope, which appears in color.48

In Lamentations, 2:21 Messer depicted the Warsaw boy’s image in white gouged out cuts on a black background (Fig. 83). His facial expression conveys oppression, sadness and hopelessness. The artist explained the reason for using the linoleum cut: “I chose to use linoleum cut, in order to intensify the concept. This technique produces illustrations with lines that have great intensity and it is reminiscent of the German Expressionism that was in practice in the period between the two world wars and which was criticized by the Nazis.”49 To the Warsaw boy’s left side the verse from Lamentations, 2:21, “My virgins and my young men are fallen by sword;

48 The author’s correspondence and telephone interview with Tamar Messer, December 2018. 49 Ibid.

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Fig. 84: Susan Keeter, Portrait of Anne Frank, 1996, oil on canvas, 61 × 51 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

you have slain them in the day of your anger; you have slaughtered without mercy,” is written to emphasize his Jewish identity.50 For Messer this biblical verse refers to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. On the one hand, “my virgins and my young men are fallen by sword” represents the young ghetto fighters, while on the other hand, the Warsaw boy and all the other Jews he represents are the reason for the revolt. The uneven letters of the biblical verse represent both the varied ages and backgrounds of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters, and the uncertain situation they were in. Some artists depicted Anne Frank’s image from a particularly Jewish perspective. American fine artist and illustrator Susan Keeter (b. 1958) was deeply impressed by Anne Frank’s diary as a child. In addition, the fact that her mother was born in 1929, the same year as Anne, made her realize that the story of Anne Frank is real, occurring in her mother’s time. Keeter believes that if Anne had survived, she would have become one of the influential female figures in the world, with her talent, wisdom and social consciousness.51 Keeter depicted Anne as a young girl with a big smile and joyful eyes sitting at a table with her diary open, one hand on it and the other hand holding a pen (Fig. 84). Anne is wearing an orange striped blouse and, on her chest, on the left, she is wearing a German Jewish yellow Star of David with the word “Jude” in its

50 Tamar Messer, Illustrator. Lamentations (Haifa: Gallery/Studio Tamar Messer, 2007), 21. 51 The author’s interview with Susan Keeter, Syracuse, New York, September 2007.

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center. Anne mentioned the yellow Star of David in her diary on Saturday, June 20, 1942. “After May 1940 good times rapidly fled: first the war, then the capitulation, followed by the arrival of the Germans, which is when the sufferings of us Jews really began. Anti-Jewish decrees followed each other in quick succession. Jews must wear a yellow star; Jews must hand in their bicycles; Jews are banned from trams and are forbidden to use any car . . . ”52 The gray-toned uneven background implies Anne Frank’s dismal situation that she and her family had to endure, while her beaming face expresses her joy at having a diary, where she can share her thoughts and happenings. For this portrait, Keeter contacted the administration of the Jewish school in Syracuse, which allowed her to choose a girl to pose for the portrait of Anne Frank. The artist also used photographs of Anne Frank. To depict Anne’s image the artist combined two photographs of Anne sitting by a desk with a notebook in front of her (Figs. 6–7): In one, she is seen with a pencil in her hand (Fig. 6), and in the other, she is wearing a watch (Fig. 7). Anne pasted the latter photograph to her diary and wrote above it: “Gorgeous photograph, isn’t it!!!!” Keeter did not include a watch on Anne’s wrist, and instead of a pencil, she gave Anne a pen. Artists used the German Jewish yellow Star of David with the word “Jude” since German Jews, like Anne and her family who fled to the Netherlands, were forced to wear the badge of their original place of birth, thus differentiating them from the local Jews and making them easily recognizable. American Jewish collage artist Mitzi Trachtenberg (b. 1929) depicted Anne Frank’s multiple images with a yellow Star of David with the word “Jude” to intensify Anne’s Jewish identity (Fig. 85). On a background with a collection of Anne’s handwriting from her diary, the artist posted 15 copies of Anne’s smiling image. On the top left, Anne appears without a yellow Star of David, but all the rest of her images are with the yellow Star of David. At the beginning, it looks like a medallion on a necklace, which grows and grows until it covers almost all her image. In this way, Trachtenberg shows that Anne’s Jewish identity was forced on her when in public and she could not escape it. The artist wrote, “I was actually born the same year as Anne Frank, as a Jewish woman in the United States. I have felt an identity because of that issue. I have been very interested in the history of Jews in Europe and on a trip there in 1995 it all came together.”53 To create this artwork, Trachtenberg used a xerox copy of a lesser known photograph of Anne Frank from 1940, which she saw on a poster torn from a wall in Budapest celebrating the 60th anniversary of the end of the war. In addition, she used a yellow Star of David with the word “Jude” from a photograph of fabric she took at the site of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

52 Barnouw and van der Stroom, The Diary of Anne Frank, the Critical Edition, 182–183. 53 A letter from Mitzi Trachtenberg to the author on January 4, 2016.

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Fig. 85: Mitzi Trachtenberg, Anne, 1995, collage and mixed media on canvas, 4" × 5". Holocaust Museum Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

The artist stated, “The story of Anne Frank is known throughout the world. The image of Anne wearing the yellow star is the reality of her life before she was forced into hiding with her family. With Anne, we have a face that can be singularly identified as the symbol for all of the millions who died.” Israel Bernbaum (1911–1993), a Holocaust survivor who lived in the United States, used the images of both Anne Frank and the Warsaw boy in Jewish Children in Warsaw Ghetto and in Death Camps, in the center of other imagery, to deal with the fate of the Jewish children during the Holocaust (Fig. 86).54 He wrote: Lines, shapes and color are my language. . . I want to talk through my paintings to all the people of the world. The story of the Holocaust must be of concern to everyone . . . My paintings are only a modest contribution to the moral obligation of telling about the Holocaust.55

54 Batya Brutin, Israel Bernbaum Painting His Story, In Commemoration of the 70th year Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Montclair, NJ: Montclair State University, 2013) (Catalog). 55 Israel Bernbaum, My Brother’s Keeper: The Holocaust Through the Eyes of an Artist (New York: Putnam, 1985), 7, 13.

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Fig. 86: Israel Bernbaum, Jewish Children in Warsaw Ghetto and in Death Camps, 1981, oil on canvas, 30⅜" × 82¼". Collection of Montclair State University, NJ, USA.

Anne Frank is shown sitting at her desk inside her hiding place, wearing a blue shirt with a white collar, writing in her diary. The depiction is based on a photograph of Anne Frank from 1941 (Fig. 6). Underneath, we see a boy and a girl with their arms raised in surrender with yellow Stars of David on their coats. Behind them, there is an endless convoy of more children wearing a yellow Star of David on their coats, to emphasize the large number of Jewish children that perished in the Holocaust and the great loss to the Jewish nation. The depiction of the children is based on the photograph of the boy from the Warsaw Ghetto (Fig. 1). The artist surrounded them with Hitler salutes on the left, right and center above them and placed an eagle with a swastika in the center surrounded by flames. On the upper left side children are led to the deportation cars while many trains arrive at Auschwitz-Birkenau’s infamous gate in the center. Children are seen in the death camp on the right side. On the lower right side we see children sitting and lying in the streets, on their own, begging for food. On the lower left side there is a depiction of children smuggling food into the ghetto, either over the wall or through holes in the wall. The child smuggler’s experience is expressed in the poem The Little Smuggler by Henryka Lazawert (1909–1942) of Jewish origin, written in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941. She perished in Treblinka concentration camp:

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Through walls, through holes, through sentry points, Through walls, through rubble, through fences: Hungry, daring, stubborn I flee, dart like a cat. At noon, at night, in dawning hours, In blizzards, in the heat, Hundred times I risk my life, I risk my childish neck. Under my arm a burlap sack, On my back a tattered rag; Running on my swift young legs With fear in my heart. Yet everything must be suffered: And all must be endured, So that tomorrow you can all Eat your fill of bread. Through walls, through holes, through brickwork, At night, at dawn, at day, Hungry, daring, cunning, Quiet as a shadow I move. And if the hand of sudden fate Seizes me at some point in this game, It’s only the common snare of life. Mama, don’t wait for me. I won’t return to you, Your far-off voice won’t reach. The dust of the street will bury The lost youngster’s fate. And only one grim thought, A grimace on your lips: Who, my dear Mama, who Will bring you bread tomorrow?56

Next to the depiction of little smugglers, we also see an underground scene depicting children learning while in hiding and a mother with her child. Some artists have addressed the Warsaw boy and Anne Frank’s Jewish origins in a shrouded, indirect manner.

56 The poem was translated by Patricia Heberer. Patricia Heberer, Children During the Holocaust (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2011), 343.

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Fig. 87: Judy Chicago, Grown Men Pointing Guns at Children, 1991, mixed media on rag paper, 76.2 × 101.6 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

In her 1991 work, Grown Men Pointing Guns at Children (Fig. 87), Chicago placed the photograph of the small and fragile Warsaw boy side-by-side with a drawing of a large Nazi soldier with a helmet on his head, an evil expression on his face, aiming a gun at the boy and threatening him. In the space between the two images she inserted an inscription in small letters: “The question is: how did we get to this point?” and in large letters: “Grown Men Pointing Guns at Children.” The images of the boy and the soldier are duplicated to emphasize the fact that there were many other children during the Holocaust in the same situation as the Warsaw boy, and many other Nazi soldiers who hurt defenseless Jewish children. As she states both visually and in words, Jewish children had no hope of staying alive because adults had decided to abuse their power and use violence against children. The artist outlines the soldier with a thick line, as if trying to interfere and stop his action. By doing so, she is trying to intervene and change the children’s fate, as we have seen in Teicher-Yekutiel’s artwork using Pinocchio (Fig. 20). The Russian-French Jewish painter Marc Chagall (1887–1985) depicted Anne Frank’s image in a frontispiece lithograph for the French limited edition of The

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Fig. 88: Marc Chagall, Anne Frank, 1958, lithograph, 27 × 21 cm.

Anne Frank Diary (Fig. 88).57 In the center, he posted Anne’s image with feathery hands merged with a white bird flying up to heaven. She is holding her open diary in her right hand close to her body, with the inscription: “Anne Frank 1958” on it, which is also the title of the artwork. On the bottom, we see the Jewish streets of Amsterdam with Jewish figures indicating the times before the war, while the burning buildings on the right represent the war times. Above Anne and the bird, we can assume that there are Anne’s dead family members and their hiding partners. The falling figure might be her father, the only family member who survived. The white bird symbolizes innocence and purity of a young Jewish girl who perished, like many others, just because she was Jewish. Flying up to heaven with a white bird makes Anne Frank a divine spirit.

57 Journal de Anne Frank, http://www.manhattanrarebooks-art.com/chagall_anne_frank.htm (accessed in December 2008).

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*** Some artists used the Warsaw boy and Anne Frank’s images as universal symbols to convey their attitude against violence, cruelty, and atrocities against humanity in general and children in particular. Guttuso, Horvath, Gildor, and Knigin refer to the trauma of World War II in general through the Warsaw boy and Anne Frank’s images, each in his own way. Guttuso chose the Warsaw boy’s image to symbolize the horrors of World War II in general and all innocent children murdered by the Nazis in particular (Fig. 60). He refers not only to the Holocaust but also to the Ardeatine massacre, showing the results of the Germans aggression toward the innocent civilian population during World War II. Horvath chose the image of Anne Frank to symbolize World War II (Fig. 68). He included a depiction of vicious green creatures as the Nazi aggressor, the green American Statue of Liberty as representative of the bystanders – the European countries and the United States of America which were passive to the Jewish people’s fate during the Holocaust contrasted with the black and white bald, naked and thin children’ figures representing Holocaust victims, especially the loss of the children. By representing this using the image of Anne Frank she became the symbol for all the vulnerable children murdered in the Holocaust. Both Gildor and Knigin presented Anne Frank’s image in a universal manner, as well. Gildor used Anne Frank’s image to emphasize the Nazi aggressors’ brutal behavior and its sad and deadly results (Fig. 69), while Knigin relied on Anne Frank’s image as a warning sign to the world of the result of fanatical violence (Fig. 70). In contrast, Schier referred to one particular event of Nazi aggression toward the Polish population (Jews and non-Jews alike) during World War II by “planting” the Warsaw boy’s image as a universal figure of the victims of the Nazi regime in general (Fig. 61). Chicago, Abdessemed, Metzger, and Ono depicted the Warsaw boy’s image not only to symbolize violence against innocent and vulnerable children during the Holocaust but also to emphasize the questions about what humanity has learned from the Holocaust. Chicago used the Warsaw boy’s image as a centerpiece to underscore the horrific atrocities committed against children in war, and surrounded it with images of abuse, neglect, malnutrition, and disease of children around the world in contemporary society in a universal approach (Fig. 62). By detaching the boy from the original context, Abdessemed made him a universal icon representing not only the children during the Holocaust but also children who are potential victims of brutal human behavior (Fig. 63). Through the Warsaw boy’s image, Metzger conveyed a universal message that the world is not safe from disasters such as the Holocaust (Fig. 64). Ono’s universal message is against violence in general and she shed light on children’s involvement in struggle and resistance (Fig. 66). Unlike the artists discussed above, the image of the child from Warsaw served Lin in protesting against the growing phenomenon of Holocaust denial, asking how far it will go (Fig. 67).

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Schloss and Toomy dealt with the untimely loss of life of the children during the Holocaust, those who had no opportunity to realize their dreams and aspirations. Schloss dealt with Anne Frank’s unfulfilled dreams by depicting her image from her diary where she wrote that she dreams of being an actress in Hollywood (Fig. 71). Toomy emphasized the Warsaw boy’s vulnerability, helplessness and lack of chances to overpower the Nazi soldier, so his life ended prematurely without experiencing his wishes, dreams or goals in life (Fig. 65). Through the image of Anne Frank, Rock, Xiang, and Karst explored the violation of human rights during the Holocaust. Rock and Xiang presented Anne Frank as a symbol of brave resistance to oppression by the perpetrators (Fig. 72). Xiang expressed his own experience of subjugation through Anne Frank’s image. Karst, on the other hand, designed the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial Park based on Anne’s strong faith that people are good at heart and belief in the triumph of the human spirit (Fig. 73). Anne Frank is one of ten fierce female heroes that Stein depicted (Figs. 75–.76). Stein considered Anne Frank’s writing while in hiding to be a very brave weapon against the Nazi oppressors. To express today’s enduring admiration for this young girl’s heroism, the artist surrounded her with images of female warriors known in contemporary popular culture. Palombo used both the Warsaw boy and Anne Frank’s well-known images from the Holocaust to remember this catastrophic happening and at the same time to evoke awareness of all forms of intolerance, such as racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia (Figs. 77–.79). Other artists highlighted the Warsaw boy’s Jewish identity to communicate the Nazis’ intention to eliminate the Jews, particularly the children, to thwart the continuity of the Jewish people. Keeter, Trachtenberg, and Gottschalk stressed the Jewish identity of both children by combining the yellow Star of David with the word “Jude” in its center with their images. To convey Anne Frank’s Jewish identity, Keeter portrays her wearing it on her colorful striped blouse (Fig. 84). By multiplying Anne’s image with a yellow Star of David that grows from one image to the other until it covers Anne’s face, Trachtenberg highlighted Anne’s Jewish identity and, at the same time, the artist emphasized the oppressive act of marking the Jews to humiliate and to exclude them from human society (Fig. 85). Using particularly Jewish iconography, Gottschalk highlighted the Warsaw boy’s Jewish identity with a yellow star on his coat, surrounded by the names of Jews killed by the Nazis and by co-opting large Jewish yellow badges, meant to be marks of disgrace, as badges of courage (Fig. 80). Unlike the above artists mentioned Bak used a symbolic yellow Star of David made of ribbons to highlight the boy’s Jewish identity, but at the same time to point out that the boy’s only “crime” was being a Jew (Fig. 81). Bernbaum broadened the scene by adding details about the fate of Jewish children during the Holocaust to emphasize their Jewish identity (Fig. 86). He depicted Anne Frank sitting at her desk inside her hiding place, a boy and a girl with their

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arms raised in surrender based on the Warsaw boy’s image, and yellow Stars of David on their coats, and the endless convoy of more children wearing yellow Stars of David on their coats. Chicago and Chagall addressed the Warsaw boy and Anne Frank’s Jewish origin in a concealed manner. For Chicago the Warsaw boy’s iconic image represented all Jewish children who had no chance to survive because Nazi adults used their power to inflict violence against them (Fig. 87). Chagall depicted Anne Frank’s Jewish identity through the Jewish figures on the bottom of the drawing (Fig. 88). Bar Hama and Messer used the Bible as a source to emphasize the Warsaw boy’s Jewish identity. Through the Warsaw boy’s image and the verses from the Bible containing the word “Generation,” Bar Hama emphasizes the importance of passing on the story of the Holocaust from generation to generation so it will never be forgotten (Fig. 82). Messer added the verse from Lamentations, 2:21 to the Warsaw boy’s image to stress his Jewish identity (Fig. 83).

4 Connection to the State of Israel A few artists described the Warsaw Ghetto boy and Anne Frank in connection with the establishment of the State of Israel as a result of the Holocaust. These two children are seen alongside known features and symbols representing Israel.

The Zionist Idea and the Establishment of the State of Israel Yehuda Leib Pinsker, a Polish-Russian Jewish physician and essayist, anonymously published in 1882, a pamphlet in German entitled Auto-Emancipation! in which he urged the Jewish people to strive for national consciousness and territorial independence. Pinsker’s call for auto-emancipation led to the Katowice Conference on November 6, 1884, at which the organized Zionist movement was effectively conceived. Twelve years later, in 1896, Theodor Herzl, the AustroHungarian Jewish journalist, today regarded as the founding father of modern Zionism, published his seminal book Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). In 1897, the First Zionist Congress was held in Basel, Switzerland. The Zionist idea was to reestablish a Jewish nation in the Land of Israel, to which the Jewish people from anti-Semitic Europe would immigrate. In the 1930s, a small part of the Jewish population left Germany because the Nazi movement came to power and excluded the Jews from society. Some of them were lucky to receive certificates to immigrate to the British Mandatory Land of Israel (then Palestine), while some others fled to other European countries and the Americas. Most of the Jewish population stayed in Europe and experienced the horrors of the Holocaust. In 1948, the Zionist idea was realized, and the State of Israel was reestablished. A few artists connected two significant past events that happened to the Jewish people: the Zionist vision of a Jewish State and the Holocaust, which prevented this vision from coming to fruition at that time. Israeli artist Drora Weitzman (b. 1956) links the Zionist vision of a Jewish State, embodied by Herzl’s portrait, and Anne Frank’s image, referring to the Holocaust (Fig. 89). By placing the two portraits together in a spotted plastic sunglasses frame the artist emphasizes their iconic popular status and the embellished white frame glorifies them.1 Weitzman stated, “For me, Anne represents creation and hope and Herzl stands for hope as well, but mostly for vision – the Zionist vision. There is a mixture of sacred and profane. On the one hand, two symbols are made accessible, and on the other hand, they are glorified so they will not be forgotten, since they are both the foundation of the rebuilding of the State of Israel – Zionism and the Holocaust.”2

1 Brutin, Anne Frank in the Artists Eyes, 9. 2 The author’s interview with Drora Weitzman, Netanya, Israel 2009. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110656916-005

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Fig. 89: Drora Weitzman, Herzl and Anne, 2005, photography and frame, 34 × 46 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Bar Hama tackles the Zionist-Nationalist point of view regarding the existence of a Jewish country in the land of Israel according to Herzl’s vision. In his work If You Will – State in the Way . . . (Fig. 90), he presents part of the photograph of the exiled Jews from Warsaw so that the Warsaw boy is seen prominently in the center. The figure of Herzl, the visionary of the Jewish State, is reflected in the photograph. In the integration between the two photographs – Herzl’s figure is vague and faded while the figures in the Warsaw photograph are vital – and the feeling obtained is that the Holocaust is dominant and overshadows the Zionist vision. Two essential events in the Jewish nation’s history are exhibited in this artwork: Herzl’s vision to assemble the Jews in a country for themselves, unrealized then; and the Nazi plan to eradicate the Jewish nation’s existence that was incompletely executed. The practical meaning to be construed from this is that if a Jewish state had been established at that time, most likely the murder of the Jewish people could have been prevented. In this he shows the need for the existence of a Jewish nation that would protect its citizens on one hand, and it

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Fig. 90: Avner Bar Hama, If You Will – State in the Way . . ., 2005, digital manipulated photograph printed on dibond, 80 × 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

would be a safe place for Jews to be able to come to in time of trouble, on the other hand.3 In the work Revenge of a Little Boy . . . from the same year, Bar Hama positioned two important Jewish historical photographs one above the other; one (below) depicts the little boy from Warsaw alone with his hands raised. The other (above) shows David Ben-Gurion flanked by members of his provisional government reading the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948 (Fig. 91). The artist does so to strengthen the connection between the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel as a cause and effect and as a Jewish historical continuity. Knigin described a visionary Zionist’s “fulfillment” in his work Dreaming (Fig. 92). He set up an imaginary scene in which Anne Frank is sitting at the bottom center at her desk writing with a pencil based on her photograph in the sixth form of the Montessori school in Amsterdam in 1941 (Fig. 6). The artist added a sphere of light above Anne’s image and colorful letters of the word “dreaming” above her head to emphasize that the vision in the background behind her is a dream. Anne’s image is set against the streets and a canal in Amsterdam at the bottom, which transforms into the landscape of Jerusalem the eternal capital city of the State of Israel.

3 The author’s interview with Avner Bar Hama, March 2010, November 2011.

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Fig. 91: Avner Bar Hama, Revenge of a Little Boy . . ., 2005, digital manipulated photograph printed on dibond, 125 × 90 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 92: Michael Knigin, Dreaming, 2008, montage, variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist’s estate.

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A window frame and shadows of trees are seen between Anne’s image and the background to symbolize her being in hiding. This scene embodies the Zionist dream of returning to the Land of Israel and rebuilding a Jewish nation. The letter “M” is large and gleaming – the artist in an implied manner put his personal dream of returning to Jerusalem into this artwork. The letter “M” is the first letter of the artist’s name – Michael. In 1974, the artist was invited by the Israel Museum and the Jerusalem Foundation headed by Mayor Teddy Kolleck to establish the first professional printmaking atelier in the Middle East. After completing this task, he returned to the United States but never stopped dreaming about coming back to Jerusalem, a dream he never fulfilled.4 The well-known Israeli graphic designer David Tartakover (b. 1944) integrated the Warsaw boy and Anne Frank’s images together in one of 21 collage plates about the Proclamation of the Independence of the Israeli state (Fig. 93).5 This plate visualizes the paragraph about the Holocaust in the declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel: The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people – the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe – was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the community of nations. Survivors of the Nazi Holocaust in Europe, as well as Jews from other parts of the world, continued to migrate to Eretz-Israel, undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland. In the Second World War, the Jewish community of this country contributed its full share to the struggle of the freedom- and peace-loving nations against the forces of Nazi wickedness and, by the blood of its soldiers and its war effort, gained the right to be reckoned among the peoples who founded the United Nations.6

On the right corner below, the shadow of the Warsaw boy is set against a red background, the upper part of the image is in black while the lower part is in white with the Haaretz newspaper’s print spread on him and on the red background and on Adolf Eichmann’s photograph from his trial in Jerusalem in 1961–1962. The boy represents the Jewish victims of the Holocaust; the newspaper’s fragment is the actual Haaretz newspaper from December 2, 1942 with the headline stating: “A day of mourning and fasting, prayer and cancellation of work through the entire country. Tel Aviv volunteers to rescue the children of Israel in Nazi Europe from destruction.” It represents the fact that the Yishuv (Jewish population of Israel prior to

4 The author’s interview with Michael Knigin, June 2009, Budapest. 5 David Tartakover, Ha’Hachraza al Hakamat Ha’Medina (Proclamation of Independence) (Tel Aviv: Modan, 1988). (Hebrew). 6 http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Peace+Process/Guide+to+the+Peace+Process/Declaration+of +Establishment+of+State+of+Israel.htm (accessed in December 12, 2018).

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Fig. 93: David Tartakover, Plate No. 6 from the project “Proclamation of Independence,” 1988, collage on paper, 70 × 50 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

establishment of the State) had information about the slaughter of the Jews in Europe and tried to organize help. Eichmann’s photograph represents the ability of Israel, the Jewish State, to bring to justice a Nazi criminal and to perform a fair and fitting trial, even for the perpetrator. Above the newspaper clipping there is a biblical phrase from Psalms 79, 10: “Before our eyes let it be known among the nations that You avenge the spilled blood of Your servants.” On the left, there is an image of the statue of Mordechai Anielewicz7 (at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai) representing the Jewish fighters during the Holocaust. In the center, Anne Frank’s face within a large yellow star to represent the Jews marked with a Jewish star and to remind us of the Jews in hiding. Both are placed on a black background as a sign of disaster and death. On the top is a small image of the infamous

7 Mordechai Anielewicz (1919/1920–1943) was the leading commander of the Warsaw Ghetto. About the monument see: Brutin, Living with the Memory: Monuments in Israel Commemorating the Holocaust, 20–25.

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Fig. 94: Avner Bar Hama, A Surprising Visit to the Western Wall, 2004–2009, digital manipulated photograph printed on dibond, 50 × 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

entrance to Auschwitz Birkenau with a cross-like look, to remind us of the Christian world’s response to the massacre of the Jewish people. It seems that the citation from the declaration and the depiction bind the helplessness, vulnerability and the extermination of the Jewish people by the Nazis to the necessity to establish a state for the Jewish nation.

The Western Wall A few artists added the feature of the Western Wall, a remnant of the Second Jewish Temple (between 516 BCE and 70 CE) and a significant symbol of Jerusalem, Israel’s eternal capital city,8 next to the images of the Warsaw boy and Anne Frank. For example, Bar Hama described a prayer scene in the present at the Western Wall in his artwork, A Surprising Visit to the Western Wall (Fig. 94). The entire evacuation photograph with the Warsaw boy is placed on the background of the prayer

8 It is called the Wailing Wall as well and the Kotel in Hebrew.

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Fig. 95: Hal Goldberg, Anne Frank at the Wall in Jerusalem, 1985, white Carrara marble, 24" × 14" × 14". Courtesy of the artist.

scene at the Western Wall. The boy and the Nazi soldier’s images are accentuated as if they appear from the past as a reminder of the horrific event of the Holocaust in the Jewish past, so it will not be forgotten. The artist stated that the Western Wall represents the destruction of the Second Jewish Temple, a momentous event in the distant Jewish past and the present as well, as a holy place for the Jewish people in their renewed country. While the Warsaw boy is a reminder of the Holocaust, a horrific event in the recent past, it all comes together in the present at the Western Wall as a historical timeline of the suffering of the Jewish people. Moreover, the figure on the right with his back to the spectator raises his hands and touches the wall in prayer as an echo to the Warsaw boy facing the viewers and raising his hands to emphasize the connection between them as Jews. In addition, the Nazi soldier’s image is placed above the highlighted man between them to declare that the Jewish people, even in their own country, are still victims of current events.9 American Jewish artist Hal Goldberg (b. 1940) used the image of the Western Wall as well. He describes an imaginary scene of Anne Frank at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Anne Frank’s image based on her photograph from 1941 (Fig. 7) is placed against the Wall. She is smiling and wearing an Israeli women soldier’s uniform (Fig. 95). The artist stated:

9 The author’s interview with Avner Bar Hama, March 2010, November 2011.

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Anne Frank is the most iconic of Holocaust themes and that is the key reason I chose to do a sculpture of her. My sculptures also portray events as they might have happened, rather than as they did happen. Therefore, the title Anne Frank at the Wall in Jerusalem envisions her surviving the Holocaust and going to Israel to fight for independence. She is dressed as a soldier.10

On his website, he added: My purpose was to join together two of the most symbolic remnants of the Holocaust – Anne Frank and her undying optimism about the goodness of Mankind, and the return of the Jewish people to Israel (Anne pasted a picture of Jerusalem on her attic wall). She is wearing the uniform of a Jewish soldier in her new homeland.11

The Flag of Israel The flag of Israel is white with a blue Magen David (six-pointed linear star known as the Star of David) centered between two equal horizontal blue bands near the top and bottom edges of the flag. It is statutory under the Flag and Emblem Law enacted in May 1949 regulating the legal and political status of the flag and the emblem of the State of Israel.12 Knigin added the feature of the flag of Israel as the symbol of the independent nation of the Jews next to the image of Anne Frank (Fig. 96). The flag of Israel depicts a blue hexagram on a white background, between two horizontal blue stripes.13 The artist placed in the center of the artwork Anne Frank’s photograph from 1941, sitting at her desk writing with a pencil (Fig. 6). He blurred it to look aged, as if it belongs to the past and he added a yellow star with the word “Jude” on her chest making her a symbol of the Holocaust. The background behind her is the flag of Israel. The artist placed the blue Star of David to the side of Anne’s head facing the yellow star on her chest. Both symbolize the Jewish people in different situations; the yellow one is reminiscent of the horrors of the Holocaust while the blue one represents pride and freedom. The red surface on the right above corner represents the Jews’ blood spilled during the Holocaust and in the War of Independence to establish the State of Israel and to preserve its existence. In the artwork, titled Fantasy, Knigin, like Goldberg, envisions Anne Frank surviving the Holocaust and coming to Israel to establish the Jewish state.

10 The author’s correspondence with Hal Goldberg, December 2008. 11 http://www.jewishsculpture.com/sculpturesiii.html (accessed in December 5, 2008). 12 http://www.archives.gov.il/en/chapter/flag/ (accessed in September 28, 2018). 13 According to the law of the flag, the state emblem and the national anthem of 1949, in the Israeli Book of Laws. For more information on the origins and meanings of the flag of Israel see: http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/aboutisrael/israelat50/pages/the%20flag%20and%20the%20emblem. aspx

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Fig. 96: Michael Knigin, Fantasy, 2008, montage, variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist’s estate.

*** It is no wonder that all artists mentioned in this chapter are Jewish, Bar Hama and Tartakover are Israeli Jews and Knigin and Goldberg are American Jews. They follow the integration of the Warsaw Ghetto boy and especially Anne Frank in Jewish and most of all in Israeli consciousness. It is important to remember that we do not know anything about the Warsaw Ghetto boy’s education from home, whether it was associated with the Zionist idea and the State of Israel or not, but he has become a symbol of the Holocaust and as such he represents all Jewish victims murdered by the Nazis only because they were Jewish. As for Anne Frank and her family, we know that they were assimilated Jews and had no intention of immigrating to Israel since they received a certificate to immigrate to the United States, although they did not make it. However, following the success of Anne Frank’s diary published as a book, the play on Broadway and the movie, the Jewish, mostly Israeli press and media emphasized her story as the story of the Jewish people during the Holocaust. Anne Frank was presented as the symbol of the Jewish victims, particularly the children murdered by the Nazis.14 On Tuesday, April 11, 1944, she wrote in her diary During that night I really felt that I had to die, I waited for the police, I was prepared, as the soldier is on the battlefield. I was eager to lay down my life for the country, but now, now I’ve

14 For more information about Anne Frank in the Israeli discourse: Sharon Geva, “A girl’s voice in the Holocaust: Anne Frank’s images in the public Israeli discourse,” Israel 12 (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2007): 81–105. (Hebrew).

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been saved again, now my first wish after the war is that I may become Dutch! I love the Dutch, I love this country, I love the language and want to work here. And if I have to write to the queen myself, I will not give up until I have reached my goal!15

As we see, she wanted to become Dutch after the war and she is willing to sacrifice her life for the country that is the Netherlands and not Israel. Moreover, she belittled Margot’s (her sister) dream when she wrote in her diary on Monday, May 8, 1944: “I’d adore to go to Paris for a year and London for a year to learn the languages and study the history of art. Compare that with Margot, who wants to be a midwife in Palestine.”16 As we saw, it has not prevented the Jewish, especially Israeli society, from emphasizing Anne Frank’s Jewishness. The artists depicted an imaginary connection between the images of the Warsaw Ghetto boy and Anne Frank and the establishment of the State of Israel through known features and symbols representing the State of Israel. Weitzman, Bar Hama, Knigin and Tartakover referred to the Zionist idea, the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel. By placing Herzl and Anne Frank’s images together as representatives of Zionism and the Holocaust Weitzman conveys the message of their importance as the foundation of the building of the State of Israel (Fig. 89). Bar Hama uses only the image of the boy. In one of his works, he connects Herzl’s Zionist vision to the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel (Fig. 90). In another work, the artist builds a connection between the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel as linked together and a part of a Jewish historical timeline (Fig. 91). Knigin conveys the idea of the connection between the Holocaust and fulfilling the Zionist dream of returning to the Land of Israel and building a Jewish nation by putting Anne Frank’s image with a changing background from the hiding place in Amsterdam to the landscape of Jerusalem (Fig. 92). Tartakover uses both images, the Warsaw boy and Anne Frank in his artwork. He also links between the Holocaust and the establishment of the Jewish State on a historical continuum (Fig. 93). Bar Hama and Goldberg used the image of the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Through an imaginary merging the image of the Warsaw boy – symbol of the Holocaust – with a contemporary photograph of the Western Wall – a symbol of the distant past – Bar Hama creates a historical sequence of vulnerability and sacrifice of the Jewish people (Fig. 94). Goldberg imagines that Anne Frank survived the Holocaust and came to the Western Wall as an Israeli soldier to participate in the building of the Jewish state (Fig. 95). Knigin, like Goldberg, imagined Anne Frank surviving the Holocaust and helping the establishment of the State of Israel. He does so by joining the flag of Israel and Anne’s image (Fig. 96).

15 Barnouw and van der Stroom, The Diary of Anne Frank, the Critical Edition, 601. 16 Ibid., 636–637.

5 Uniqueness of the Figures When examining the large collection of artworks depicting the unknown Warsaw boy and the well-known Anne Frank, we find that their portrayals are tied to their uniqueness. These children’s distinctive stories have inspired artists to let them stand for ideas in disparate ways. The Warsaw boy’s anonymity has allowed for the use of his image in a general way, whether to politically criticize Israel, to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or in the context of internal Israeli political issues. On the other hand, the image of Anne Frank, arguably more identifiable, is specifically affixed to her memorable life story; her picture is used explicitly to represent the fate of the Jews. Anne’s image is a reminder of her hiding place and her diary; sculptures in public spaces commemorate this particular Jewish girl and by extension the fate of her people. Since her image is so closely linked to her well-known biography, Anne Frank’s image does not lend itself as easily to ideas and messages detached from her story; the figure of the nameless Warsaw boy is a more pliable symbol. The boy’s anonymity makes him uniquely universal; Anne Frank’s universality is attached to the specific and singular narrative of her life.

The Warsaw Boy – Political Messages The Warsaw boy’s image has been used by artists to convey political statements or to provide commentary. For instance, a few have referred to the dangerous collaboration between capital and authority, as was the case in the Nazi regime, which created a disastrous outcome; others have addressed the contemporary IsraeliPalestinian conflict. In The Austrian Rider, created in 1990 (Fig. 97), Trachtman depicted Hitler in a rigid, vain pose and, to his right, the image of the helpless boy with his hands raised, tilted sideways, one foot on the railway tracks and one outside them. The feeling is that the boy is hanging between life and death and his fate is in the hands of the menacing images of Hitler and the people behind him. On the second level, there are images of factory owners and wealthy individuals who supported Hitler’s regime financially; they used the Jews as a cheap labor force who were then worked until exhaustion and death. On the one hand, it seems that the railway tracks surround the group of images and encircle it; on the other hand, it appears that the group of images is moving the tracks, which resemble spider webs. The railway tracks represent the efficient train system used by the Nazis to transport Jews to their deaths. They not only symbolize the fortunes of the wealthy and their ability to move the system but are also reminiscent of the way the Jews were led to their deaths. By following the railway tracks, our gaze is led to the background, to the

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110656916-006

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Fig. 97: Arnold Trachtman, The Austrian Rider, 1990, acrylic on canvas, 137.16 × 162.56 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

concentration and extermination camps represented by the smoking chimneys; in between the chimneys are the names of the factories whose owners supported and assisted Hitler and the Nazi regime. By positioning the infamous image of the Warsaw boy between Hitler and the wealthy, the artist sought to remind us of the connection between the industries (the wealthy) and National-Socialism (Hitler), as well as the horrible outcome of the Holocaust. Robert Poor wrote that “Arnold Trachtman attacks the perpetrators, converting newspaper images of German industrialists and Hitler’s henchmen into bold pictorial indictments.”1 By doing so, the artist is warning the US authorities, as well as the established Western world order, of the dangerous collaboration between capital and government that can lead to a humanitarian disaster, as happened during World War II. No modern civilization, according to the artist, is protected from this disastrous situation and therefore we all must be aware of it. He also conveys the message that a maledominated society, by its nature, uses force, violence, and oppression against the weak, as evidenced by history.

1 Robert Poor, “Picturing Death, Better This Than Silence,” in Absent / Presence, Critical Essays on the Artistic Memory of the Holocaust, ed. Stephen C. Feinstein (Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 10–11.

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Fig. 98: Adolf Hitler, Albert Vögler, Fritz Thyssen and Walter Borbet during a visit to the Corporate Thyssen Industries, photograph, 1938. © Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz.

Trachtman stated: . . . For whom were the trade unions crushed and slave labor instituted? Who were these men in suits with carefully manicured hands who freely chose to use slave labor? There was no law that compelled them to do so. Most manufacturing corporations in Germany participated in this voluntary genocide. Both Krupp and I. G. Farben built factories inside concentration camps. Why were they dealt with less severely? Not one of them was executed. They stood in dock with clean hands. Within ten years they were all back in business, helping to create the “Free World.”2

By using strong yellow and red colors the artist’s intention is to evoke the viewer’s attention, while at the same time the yellow symbolizes the yellow Star of David that Jews were forced to wear in the ghettos; the red represents death. The depiction of the industrialists’ images was adapted from a documented photograph taken in 1938 of Adolf Hitler, Albert Vögler, Fritz Thyssen, and Walter Borbet during a visit to the corporate Thyssen Industries that were later nationalized by the Nazi regime (Fig. 98). Hitler is depicted in the artist’s work with his hand on his hips, in order to illustrate his arrival from Austria as a “knight” to rescue the defeated Germany after World War I. According to Trachtman, he relied on a depiction of a knight riding a white horse in Rembrandt’s The Polish Rider (1655) that he saw in the museum of The Frick Collection in New York (Fig. 99).3

2 Stephen C. Feinstein, ed., Absent / Presence, The Artistic Memory of the Holocaust and Genocide (Minneapolis, MN: Katherine E. Gallery and University of Minnesota, 1999), 57 (Catalog). 3 The author’s correspondence and telephone conversations with Arnold Trachtman, October 2008, November 2011.

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Fig. 99: Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, The Polish Rider, 1655, oil on canvas, 114.9 × 135 cm. Copyright The Frick Collection, New York, NY, USA.

António Moreira Antunes (b. 1953), a cartoonist from Portugal, used the entire photograph with the Warsaw boy to convey a political and critical message concerning the Israeli army’s invasion of Lebanon. In 1983, he was awarded the first prize of the twentieth International Salon of Cartoons in Montreal, Canada, for his cartoon Expresso (Fig. 100).4 He depicted the Jewish group in the original photograph from Warsaw as Arabs, each wearing a keffiyeh, emphasizing their raised hands and highlighting the boy’s face in the center. Instead of the Nazi soldiers, he depicted two Israeli soldiers with a Star of David on their helmets. The one on the right has a distorted face with protruding lips. The artist protested the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. By using the image of the group from Warsaw with the boy in the center, Antunes reminded the world of the horrors that the Jews experienced during the Holocaust and suggested that when invading Lebanon, they acted with force towards civilians as if they had not learned from the past.

4 Twentieth International Salon of Cartoons 1983, Man and his World (Montreal, Canada, 1983), 195 (Catalog).

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Fig. 100: António Moreira Antunes, Expresso, 1983, Cartoon. Collection of the artist.

Brazilian political activist and cartoonist Carlos Latuff (b. 1968) and Israeli artists Alan Schechner and Bar Hama used the iconic photograph of the Warsaw boy to convey political and critical messages concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from opposite points of view. Latuff is a Brazilian of Lebanese ancestry and considers himself as having “Arab roots.” He is best known for his images depicting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Arab Spring events on Indymedia websites and private blogs, posted mostly by himself.5 Some of Latuff’s cartoons compare Israel’s practices to Nazism to protest, object to, and criticize Israel’s actions in Gaza from his point of view. In Gaza Ghetto of 2008, which appeared on the Indymedia site, he clearly meant to rely on the iconic Holocaust photograph with the little Jewish boy from the Warsaw Ghetto (Fig. 101). Instead of the Jewish group, the artist depicted a group of Palestinians, three men (one is wearing a keffiyeh) and one woman. The men raise their hands in surrender, while the woman stands defeated, with a sad expression on her face looking at the boy in the front. The boy is also raising his hands in surrender holding in his right hand a plate and in his left hand a fork to emphasize the shortage

5 The author’s correspondence with Carlos Latuff, September-October 2018. http://resistart.ir/en/ artists/carlos-latuff/ (accessed in October 4, 2018).

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Fig. 101: Carlos Latuff, Gaza Ghetto, 2008, pen on paper, variable sizes. Collection of the artist.

of food in Gaza. The boy is wearing a keffiyeh to identify him as a Palestinian. On the right and in the back are soldiers with helmets. One of the soldiers with the word “Israel” on his chest to identify him clearly, is aiming at the boy with a machine gun and has a look of pleasure as he terrorizes a Palestinian child.6 On the wall above the soldiers, Latuff added the sign “Gaza Ghetto” reminiscent of the Jewish ghettos during the Holocaust, at the same time characterizing the closed, controlled and oppressive situation in Gaza. The reason the artist used an obvious reference to the Warsaw boy’s image in this caricature was to immediately capture the spectator’s attention, directing the viewer’s awareness to the cartoon and its meaning and message. Moreover, he wanted to imply the question of how a nation which is home to countless citizens

6 “Gaza Ghetto,” DC Indymedia, 24 December 2008, http://dc.indymedia.org/usermedia/image/12/ large/gaza_ghetto.jpg; Adam Levick, “Anti-Semitic Cartoons on Progressive Blogs.” September 2, 2010, http://jcpa.org/article/anti-semitic-cartoons-on-progressive-blogs/

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Fig. 102: Alan Schechner, The Legacy of Abused Children: from Poland to Palestine, 2003, digitally altered photographs & DVD projection. Courtesy of the artist.

who had suffered the horrors of the Holocaust can now use its power as a state to hurt a weaker group of people.7 Israeli and British artist Alan Schechner (b. 1962) is torn between his devotion to his country (Israel) and its political institutions’ behavior towards the Palestinians. In Schechner’s The Legacy of Abused Children: From Poland to Palestine, created in 2003 (Fig. 102), the infamous image of the young Jewish boy being forced out of the Warsaw Ghetto under armed guard is manipulated to show him holding an image of a young Palestinian boy in his hand; the Palestinian boy has wet himself out of fear while being hauled off by Israeli soldiers. He, too, holds an image in his hand – that of the Jewish boy in the Warsaw Ghetto. In this video, Schechner explored links between the Holocaust and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. He explained:

7 The author’s e-mail correspondence with Carlos Latuff, September-October 2018.

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I served in the Israeli army from 1981–1983 with active duty both in the occupied territories and in Lebanon. During that time, I became very aware of how the Israeli government and other Zionist institutions used the Holocaust to justify some of the more unsavory aspects of their own policies. Whilst I have no interest in comparing the two events – the Holocaust and the Intifada – to see which was the most horrific, who was persecuted more, who had more victims, etc., I am interested in exploring the very real links between them. For example, the State of Israel was set up to a large extent by Holocaust survivors, that very declaration of statehood is directly linked to the Palestinian Exile in 1948. In this project, I am using the theory that abused children, unless treated, often become abusers themselves. By applying this to the current situation in Israel / Palestine where both Israelis and Palestinians are victims who replicate and repeat the abuse they have suffered, the possibility for constructing solutions to this terrible conflict become more real.8

Bar Hama took an opposite approach in several of his artworks, as for instance in Hands Up! – Generation to Generation 2- Continuity (Fig. 103). This work is centered on the theme of hand gestures: it features the black-and-white photograph of the boy from Warsaw, while the foreground is dominated by an image of Palestinian whose hands are raised in a gesture of victory. The bottom part of the composition features an image of a Palestinian girl found by the artist on a proPalestinian Internet site: the girl’s raised hands have been dipped in red paint, and she is flanked by a model of the Dome of the Rock and by the colors of the Palestinian flag. The upper part of the composition features the horrifying image of Aziz Saaha raising his hands, which are covered with real blood, during the lynching of the two Israeli reserve soldiers, Yossi Avrahami and Vadim Nurzhitz, which took place in Ramallah in 2000. Bar Hama explained that by juxtaposing the Palestinian photographs with the photograph of the boy from the Warsaw Ghetto, he wished to present his unilateral viewpoint: I present mine – our side. I clarify the differences between them, and us and between Islam and Judaism. On the one hand, the memory on which we educate is “Never Again!” and on the other hand, the Palestinian girl is being educated to more slaughter and more murder.9

Children represent the future, and their education is crucial to shaping their opinions and behavior. In this work, the artist emphasizes the differences he sees between the education of the future generations of Jews and Palestinians – differences that exacerbate the schism between these two peoples.

8 http://www.dottycommies.com/holocaust10.html (accessed in July 4, 2010); the author’s interviews and correspondence with Alan Schechner, Netanya, Israel, summer 2010, December 2011. 9 David Sperber, Bein Yisra’el La’amim (Between Israel and the Other Nations) (Ramat Gan: BarIlan University, The Faculty of Jewish Studies, The Leiber Center for Jewish Art Exhibitions, 2007), 30–32 (Catalog) (Hebrew); Berger, “‘In Every Generation. . .’: The Holocaust in the Works of Avner Bar Hama,” 8–9; the author’s interviews with Avner Bar Hama, July 2010, Nov. 2011.

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Fig. 103: Avner Bar Hama, Hands Up! – Generation to Generation 2 – Continuity, 2005, digitally manipulation photograph on dibond, 140 × 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

The artist conveys this feeling into a few other artworks. In Generation to Generation – Continuity – Pure Hands! (Fig. 104) Bar Hama blurred the entire blackand-white photograph from Warsaw and placed on top of it a photograph of a bearded Palestinian father with blood on his forehead, carrying a child on his shoulders, who is dressed up in a military shirt of a soldier, holding a Qur’an in his right hand and a large toy rifle in his left hand. The tip of the toy gun barrel is in red, symbolizing the bloody struggle. Both boys are highlighted with the color green; the Palestinian boy’s bandanna is green with an Arabic inscription to emphasize his image and a green stripe on the Warsaw boy’s figure to accentuate his image. There is no doubt that the artist purposely used the colors of the Palestinian flag.

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Fig. 104: Avner Bar Hama, Generation to Generation – Continuity – Pure Hands !, 2005, digitally manipulation photograph printed on dibond, 50 × 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

The artist’s intention was to compare them to each other; even though both are raising their hands, the artist shows the helplessness and vulnerability of the Warsaw boy as opposed to the Palestinian boy who is active and aggressive. In these artworks, the artist deals again with the subject of education given to the Palestinian children growing up in an environment of hatred against Jews and Israelis. The child from Warsaw is a symbol of the death of innocent Jewish children, who were targeted just because they were Jewish. The suggestion is that Palestinian children are indoctrinated to hold the same belief. In two other artworks, Bar Hama chose to contrast the famous photograph of the Warsaw boy and Muslim leaders, whom the artist loathes. They are known for their hatred, threat toward or harming of innocent Jewish Israeli civilians, among them young children. In Children’s Lover! (Fig. 105) Bar Hama integrated the entire photograph of the Warsaw boy with a photograph from the mid-1990s in Gaza, which shows Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat (1929–2004) hugging his daughter Zahwa. The artist emphasizes Arafat’s keffiyeh on the left, a signifier of his Palestinian identity, as we saw in Latuff’s artwork where he characterized the boy as Palestinian through the keffiyeh (Fig. 101). For Bar Hama, Arafat symbolizes a child-murderer, who killed innocent Israeli children in Palestinian terror attacks. His face is merged with the woman’s figure to underscore the contrast between them. The woman in the Warsaw Ghetto is a victim of Nazism and cannot protect the helpless child, while

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Fig. 105: Avner Bar Hama, Children’s Lover!, 2005, digitally manipulation photograph printed on dibond, 65 × 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Arafat has the power and has used it to harm innocent Israeli children. The face of Arafat’s daughter is blended with the Warsaw boy’s image to stress the different fates of these children. The artist explained: “a loving father as Arafat is presented in the photograph is not supposed to hate and kill children.”10 This sentiment is also present in Bar Hama’s 2009 work Holocaust Denial – Arbeit Macht Frei – Hands Up! (Fig. 106). The background of this work features a blurred image of the entrance gate to Auschwitz I, which bears the caption “ARBEIT MACHT FREI” as a reminder of the crimes committed by the Nazis. The Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (from 2005–2013), who repeatedly denied the Holocaust, occupies the foreground of the image; his left hand is raised up in the air, while his right hand covers his genitalia. Ahmadinejad’s figure overlays the shapes seen in the original photograph, while the image of the boy himself merges with the Iranian leader’s jacket. The visual emphasis in this image is on the position of Ahmadinejad’s hand, on the woman in the crowd of Jewish deportees, and on the boy with raised hands. By conflating these images with one another, Bar Hama confronts Ahmadinejad’s denial of the Holocaust with tangible

10 The author’s interviews with Avner Bar Hama, July 2010, November 2011.

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Fig. 106: Avner Bar Hama, Holocaust Denial – Arbeit Macht Frei – Hands Up!, 2009, digitally manipulation photograph printed on dibond, 50 × 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

evidence of its horrors. Furthermore, Ahmadinejad’s raised arm is reminiscent of photographs of Hitler gesturing in the course of his hate-filled speeches. By creating a visual and conceptual parallel between these two enemies of the Jewish people, the artist calls to mind the words of the Passover Haggadah: “And it is this promise that has been the support of our forefathers and of us all. For not one alone has risen to destroy us, but in every single generation there are those who rise against us to destroy us, but the Holy One, blessed be He, has delivered us out of their hands.” In this manner, the artist states that the only way to fight Holocaust deniers is to study and commemorate this historical event.11 In the early 2000s, following the second intifada, which began at the end of September 2000, the situation in the occupied territories in the West Bank became very complicated and Israeli soldiers were forced to encounter the Palestinian people in face-to-face clashes. Due to military regulations, Israeli soldiers were not able to defend themselves by shooting back. In April 2014, soldiers from Battalion 932 of the Nachal Brigade12 were sent on a policing and security mission in Hebron, where an angry Palestinian youth

11 The author’s interview with Avner Bar Hama, March 2010, November 2011. 12 Nachal – acronym of Noar Halutzi Lohem (Fighting Pioneer Youth) refers to an IDF military Nachal Brigade.

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confronted David Adamov, one of the soldiers. During a disruptive argument, when the Palestinian boy did not respond to the soldier’s order, he cursed the boy and aimed his rifle at him threatening to shoot him and another boy running behind him holding brass knuckles in his left hand. After the event, the soldier explained that he felt threatened and acted out of fear for his life. The entire scene was filmed by a Palestinian organization called “Youth against the Settlements” and other individuals; it was posted on the Internet and shown on Israeli Channel 10 news. It caused an uproar and much reverberation on the Web; most respondents strongly supported the soldier and created “The protest of David Nachlawi” in response to the IDF’s “negative” attitude toward David Adamov’s action. As part of the protest, IDF soldiers and Israeli citizens posted photographs of themselves with shirts or signs with captions like “I am also with David Nachlawi,” “I am also with the Nachlawi” and “I would cock as well.”13 The media was divided in its response to the soldier’s behavior. The left-wing media repeatedly protested the curses of the soldier. In contrast, the right-wing media was angry with him for not responding to the Palestinian boy’s behavior by shooting. On April 30, 2014, Israeli illustrator, animator and caricaturist Yossi Shachar (b. 1987) presented two situations, in contrast to each, in the caricature “Nachlawi” 1 (Fig. 107) on Channel 7’s Facebook page in response to this event. On the right side of the cartoon, we see a boy standing in the center with a yellow star with the letter “J” on his chest, raising his hands up with fear in his eyes, based on the infamous photograph of the Warsaw boy. Three barrels of machineguns peek into the frame on the upper right, reminiscent of the Nazi soldiers aiming at the boy in the original photograph from Warsaw. In the background, there is a Nazi soldier and a view of a Nazi camp. On the left part of the cartoon, an Israeli armed soldier with a machinegun is standing in the center raising his hands with fear in his eyes, as a reflection of the boy on the right side of the cartoon. On the upper right side three kinds of cameras are seen, a regular camera, a video camera and a cell phone camera. The artist emphasized that the soldier is afraid of being filmed by the media, thus he surrendered himself and had not acted properly as a soldier should. In the background there is a Palestinian holding a slingshot and a view of a refugee camp.14 On his Facebook page, Shachar wrote, “In the past we could not defend ourselves. Today we are afraid.” On August 30, 2015, Shachar presented another caricature “Nachlawi” 2 (Fig. 108) on the Facebook page of Channel 7, based on the previous one with

13 https://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4514982,00.html (accessed in April 30, 2014) (Hebrew). 14 The author’s telephone interview and correspondence with Yossi Shachar, October 2018.

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Fig. 107: Yossi Shachar, “Nachlawi” 1, 2014, caricature. Courtesy of the artist.

significant changes.15 On the upper right side of the cartoon, one machinegun barrel is peeking out from the edge, reminiscent of the Nazi soldier aiming at the boy in the original photograph from Warsaw. In the panel next to it is an IDF legal advisor’s hand holding the form of “Open-Fire Regulations.” On the left part of the cartoon, the Israeli armed soldier with a machinegun is characterized as a commando soldier by his special head cover.16 On his Facebook page, the artist wrote “Another moment and we are lost.” This caricature roused a strong wave of reactions and harsh criticism on the Internet, saying how dare the artist to compare the IDF legal advisers to the Nazis. As a result of this powerful response, the cartoon was deleted from the Facebook page of Channel 7 in less than an hour after it came up. But it remained on the artist’s Facebook page. Shahar said in response:

15 https://www.mako.co.il/nexter-news/Article-a581584d4be7f41006.htm?partner=tagit; http://rot ter.net/forum/scoops1/242841.shtml (accessed in September 24, 2016). 16 The author’s telephone interview and correspondence with Yossi Shachar, October 2018.

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Fig. 108: Yossi Shachar, “Nachlawi” 2, 2015, caricature. Courtesy of the artist. I do not see here any comparison of the IDF, nor of legal advisers, to the Nazis. I see an exiled Jew who raises his hands and the gentiles threatening him with a weapon, because he has no ability to defend himself, and on the other side is an IDF soldier who can defend himself from the Arab weapon that is being directed at him together with the IDF legal adviser’s form of “Open-Fire Regulations” that forbids them from defending themselves. Anyway, it is certain that those who aim with guns, then and now, are the enemies – the Nazis then and the Arabs today. The legal advisers are just castrating the army and preventing it from defending itself. I certainly did not come to compare them to the Nazis. . . Anyway, I may not have been clear enough. I had to put the weapon on the left side, and not on the same side of the hand that holds the open-fire regulations.

On February 12, 2018, Shachar posted a caricature called Humiliating Examination (Fig. 109) on his Facebook page.17 He reacted to an incident that happened on that day in which an Israeli military vehicle with two male soldiers and one female soldier accidentally entered Jenin, a Palestinian city in the northern West Bank. Angry and furious Palestinian civilians attacked the soldiers. The soldiers were rescued, but the woman soldier was wounded and evacuated to a hospital for treatment.

17 https://www.facebook.com/shaharyosi/photos/a.132193503650036/842904142578965/?type= 3&theater (accessed in February 12, 2018).

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Fig. 109: Yossi Shachar, Humiliating Examination, 2018, caricature. Courtesy of the artist.

This event evoked in the artist’s mind the lynching of the two Israeli reserve soldiers, Yossi Avrahami and Vadim Nurzhitz, which took place in Ramallah in 2000 that Bar Hama referred to, as we saw (Fig. 103). In this caricature, Shachar used the same structure of side-by-side depictions. Even though the Warsaw boy’s image is not seen in this caricature, his gestures of raising hands up and a look of fear in his eyes are featured. This caricature concentrates on the theme of hand gestures as Bar Hama did. On the right side of the caricature, placed against a blue “cloud,” the artist depicted an armed Israeli soldier performing a security inspection of a Palestinian who stands with his hands up and has a fearful facial expression reminiscent of the Warsaw boy. Above the scene, the artist added the caption: “Arab in Israel = humiliating examination.” While on the left side of the caricature, against the backdrop of a red “cloud,” the artist described a lynching scene. In a window one sees an image of a Palestinian, whose hands are covered with dripping blood raised in a gesture of victory. In front of him are the two bloodied legs of an Israeli soldier falling out of the window. Above the scene, the artist added the caption: “Israeli in an Arab village = a respectable lynching.”18 On his Facebook page, Shachar wrote “It is worth remembering the female soldier’s face very well for the next time we will hear about the suffering of the Arab workers at the checkpoints.”

18 The author’s telephone interview and correspondence with Yossi Shachar, October 2018.

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On January 22, 2018, Yehonatan Geffen (b. 1947), an Israeli author, poet, songwriter, journalist, playwright, satirist, television host and translator, posted a short poem on his Instagram about Ahed Tamimi, the Palestinian young woman best known for her appearances in images and videos in which she confronts Israeli soldiers loudly and aggressively.19 In one of the films, she is shown slapping an Israeli soldier’s face. She was imprisoned for eight months and paid a monetary penalty of 5,000 New Israeli Shekels. She was released on July 2018 and became very popular in the Palestinian society, seen as a role model for Palestinians youngsters. Next to his poem, Geffen posted the photograph showing Tamimi slapping an Israeli soldier’s face. In his poem, Geffen compared Tamimi to David who slapped Goliath, to Anne Frank, to Hannah Szenes and to Jeanne d’Arc. The poem generated strong controversy and public reactions, and a week later Geffen apologized for his words. On January 25, 2018, Lin cynically responded to Geffen’s post on his Instagram (Fig. 110). He described a smiley Geffen with his son Aviv,20 showing him the notorious photograph of the Warsaw boy and saying: “It is really terrible what we do to these poor Palestinians . . . ” as if he cannot tell the difference between the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Lin expressed his criticism about the comparisons in the poem, the use of the Holocaust to convey a political and critical message. In this caricature, he protested the use of the Holocaust in general and in Geffen’s poem in particular, because he thinks that these two events are not the same and are not comparable.21 Artists have used the Warsaw boy’s image to respond to Jewish-Israeli internal conflicts. Israeli caricaturist Guy Morad (b. 1975) and Lin used the iconic photograph of the Warsaw boy to convey a political and critical message concerning the demonstration by ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem on Saturday night, December 31, 2011. The demonstrators, mostly the children, wore a yellow Star of David. According to the organizers, the protest was about what they called “media incitement” against the ultra-Orthodox Jews following the rise in the headlines of violence against women in public spaces. They also said that the use of the yellow Star of David reflects the ultra-Orthodox community’s feelings that the secular population behaves “like Nazis” towards them.22

19 https://www.instagram.com/p/BeQwx9RgSRH/ (accessed in January 22, 2018). 20 Aviv Geffen (b. 1973) is an Israeli rock musician, singer, songwriter, producer, keyboardist, and guitarist. 21 The author’s telephone conversations with Moshik Lin, October 2018. 22 Yehudim be’Germania al hafganat ha’haredim: “mitbayyshim” (Jews in Germany about the ultra-Orthodox demonstration: “we are ashamed”) http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L4170817,00.html (accessed in January 1, 2012) (Hebrew).

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Fig. 110: Moshik Lin, It Is Really Terrible What We Do to These Poor Palestinians . . ., 2018, caricature. Courtesy of the artist.

Both caricatures deal with the conflict between the Neturei Karta faction of ultra-Orthodox Jews and Israeli state authorities and society. Neturei Karta does not recognize Israel’s existence as a state and objects to its representatives – the police. The use of Holocaust symbols by the demonstrators led to harsh criticism in Israeli society and the political system. Here are a few examples: Avner Shalev, Chairman of Yad Vashem, said: “This is provocation and teasing and I believe that [Israeli] society will know how to denounce this phenomenon.”23 Tzipi Livni, at the time leader of the Kadima Party, posted the following on Facebook on Sunday morning, January 1, 2012: “With all due respect to the right of groups in the Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] world to protest, and it is an elementary right, putting yellow badges on children is a gross offense to Holocaust remembrance.” Independence Party leader Ehud Barak said in a statement issued that same morning: “Prisoner uniforms and yellow badges with the word ‘Jew’ written in German are appalling and shocking. The use of the yellow badge and young children holding their hands up in defeat is crossing the line.”24

23 Ibid. 24 “Israeli politicians decry ultra-Orthodox protesters’ use of Holocaust imagery.” http://www. haaretz.com/jewish-world/israeli-politicians-decry-ultra-orthodox-protesters-use-of-holocaustimagery-1.404855 (accessed in January 1, 2012).

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Fig. 111: Guy Morad, Find the Differences, 2012, caricature. Yediot Ahronot, January 2, 2012, p. 21. Courtesy of the artist.

An example of the reactions of the ultra-Orthodox is that of Mordechai Hirsch, one of the leaders of the extreme Neturei Karta faction (who served as a minister in the Palestinian government and took part in the protest wearing a yellow badge): “Of course I justify it. Yes, it’s from the Holocaust and it’s legitimate. There’s no question about it. This protest reflects the Zionists’ persecution of the Haredi public, which we see as worse than what the Nazis did. The Germans just killed the body, but these people want to kill the soul, the spirit.”25 In Find the Differences from 2012 (Fig. 111), Morad shows two situations, the same tactic Shachar used (Figs. 107–108). One setting is from the Holocaust, when the Nazi soldier aimed a gun at the little Jewish child to kill him, and the other from the present, when the little Jewish ultra-Orthodox boy, positioned exactly like the Warsaw boy, points his finger at the unarmed Israeli policeman, accusing him of being a Nazi.26 The artist presents the point of view of both sides: secular Jews remember what the Nazis did to all Jews during the Holocaust while the ultraOrthodox public likens the representatives of the Jewish secular state to Nazis. Lin used the infamous photograph and changed it calling it Zionazis from 2012 (Fig.112). On the left, the Warsaw boy is seen apart from the crowd behind him, not

25 http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4169412,00.html (accessed in January 1, 2012). 26 Published in Yedioth Ahronot, January 2, 2012, 21; the author’s telephone conversations with Guy Morad, February 2012.

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Fig. 112: Moshik Lin, Zionazis, 2012, caricature. Ma’ariv, January 2, 2012, p. 23. Courtesy of the artist.

with his hands raised but covering his eyes. On the right side, instead of the Nazi soldiers stands an ultra-Orthodox Jew with a yellow Star of David on his coat holding a sign that reads “Zionazis.” The artist uses the dichotomy created in the original photograph (the good – the helpless Jewish boy, and the evil – the Nazis) to convey his own critical message by replacing the Nazi soldiers with the ultra-Orthodox Jew. He criticizes the ultra-Orthodox world that views secular Jews as enemies and therefore Nazis. For him, the ultra-Orthodox represent the evil side of the story because they are Jews using the image of the boy against other Jews. The Warsaw boy represents the secular Jews who are, in the artist’s eyes, the real Jews. He covers his eyes in shame because he does not want to see a Jew calling another Jew “Zionazi.”27 Both artists, Lin and Morad, adopted the Warsaw boy’s image because it is well known, very powerful, and strongly conveys abuse of helpless children. They both also used the word Nazis because it is commonly employed throughout the Jewish world to convey evil or injustice, since the Nazis represent evil incarnate. The artists used these two elements, the Warsaw boy’s image and the word “Nazi,” to deal with a current conflict in Israeli society; because of the sensitivity of the Israeli

27 Author’s telephone conversations and e-mail correspondence with Moshik Lin, January 2015.

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Fig. 113: Michael (Mysh) Rozanov, The Problem of Self-Image, 2012. Digital illustration. Courtesy of the artist.

public to the Holocaust they understand these symbols and both sides of the political spectrum can relate to them. Another Jewish-Israeli internal conflict has been the problem of the many African refugees in Israel illegally. In 2012, racist and violent confrontations with these refugees intensified by residents of the neighborhoods, mainly in south Tel Aviv, where they live, with the hostilities erupting because of politicians’ incitement against the refugees. Israeli graphic artist Michael (Mysh) Rozanov (b. 1977) responded on his Facebook page to these events with his caricature, The Problem of Self-Image (Fig. 113). He portrayed a giant bully, his upper body exposed, looking in the mirror in front of him. The frightened little boy from the Warsaw Ghetto with his hands up and yellow Star of David with the word “Jude” on his jacket is reflected in the mirror. The inscription above the mirror says, “The problem of self-image.” On the back of the giant figure are tattoos of racist and malicious expressions used towards various groups in Israel, such as “What does not go by force, goes by violence,” “a good Arab is a dead Arab,” “Ethiopians go back to Ethiopia,” and a large inscription in bold letters saying “Death to the Sudanese.”28

28 The author’s telephone conversations and E-mail correspondence with Michael (“Mysh”) Rozanov, September 2016.

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Rozanov explained: I looked for a way to express the very clear contrast, in my view, between the history of the Jews as refugees depending on the mercy of other peoples and between the total inability of those Jews to see the “other” who is in a similar situation. It connected for me with the victimization perpetuated in Israeli mentality, which enables an Israeli in every situation to see himself as weak, persecuted, threatened. From here, the road was short for an illustration of a violent bully who cannot understand that it is himself, because in the mirror he sees himself as “the boy from Warsaw.” The moment I understood that I wanted to link the trauma of the Holocaust and the victimizing perception that enabled Israel to use disproportionate force without realizing it, I knew that I was looking for a clear and very well-known icon of the Jewish victim in the Holocaust. Of all the iconic images, the little boy who raises his hands in fear, surrounded by frightening soldiers, is the most appropriate image. Moreover, the position of the child with his raised hands corresponds with the position of the giant that “makes muscles,” which creates a stronger connection between the two images and emphasizes the aspect of the great force that is still perceived as weakness. As far as I was concerned, it was important for me that the little boy should not be ludicrous – he is a real and tragic victim. The problem is that the Israeli of today still sees himself this way.29

This caricature caused such a public outcry that Rozanov’s Facebook account was suspended for 24 hours as a “punishment” for depicting the violent Israelis who assaulted African refugees in Tel Aviv and by using an ultimate Holocaust image. Another sensitive topic in Israeli society that one artist referred to is the state’s treatment of Holocaust survivors. There have been many newspaper articles telling stories of Holocaust survivors not receiving proper care and rights they deserve. According to data from the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs (2016), about a third of the survivors in Israel live in poverty and receive a small income support benefit. Some survivors remained alone in the world, neglected, lacking geriatric medical care or proper medical equipment, and sometimes they have no contact with the surrounding community. They need to deal with the authorities that are supposed to help them, fill out many forms that they cannot properly complete due to failing health or language difficulties. The Authority for Holocaust Survivors’ Rights together with the National Insurance Institute must fulfill a moral obligation and significantly improve the treatment of the survivors, certainly of the poor and the sick. This is not a matter of kindness, but of moral social justice that the survivors deserve and is their right by law. On Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day, April 24, 2017, Israeli caricaturist, comic book artist and writer Uri Fink (b. 1963) objected to the situation described above with a caricature published in the Ma’ariv daily newspaper (Fig. 114).

29 The author’s e-mail correspondence with Michael (“Mysh”) Rozanov, September 2016.

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Fig. 114: Uri Fink, Untitled, 2017, caricature. Ma’ariv, April 24, 2017, Deot (Opinions). Courtesy of the artist.

He depicted the Warsaw boy, the symbol of the Holocaust, as an adult survivor with his hands up in despair; many forms are scattered around him as he leaves the closed door bearing the sign of the National Insurance Institute. Fink expressed sensitivity and compassion toward the survivors of the Holocaust, and at the same time, he protested the disrespectful treatment they receive.30

Anne Frank – The Secret Annex Turning to Anne Frank, there are numerous artworks dealing with her hiding in the annex, showing her with her diary, sitting at the table writing in it, and holding it as her attribute. Among the art depicting the diarist the statues erected in public spaces with Anne’s image as a young girl serve as a reminder of her innocence as a victim. Anne Frank described the hiding place in her diary on Thursday, July 9, 1942, as follows: The hiding place itself would be in the building where Daddy has his office. It will be hard for outsiders to understand, but I shall explain that later on. . .to the right of the landing lies our “Secret Annexe.” No one would ever guess that there would be so many rooms hidden behind that plain door painted gray. There’s a little step in front of the door and then you are inside.

30 The author’s telephone conversations and e-mail correspondence with Uri Fink, October 2018.

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There is a steep staircase immediately opposite the entrance. On the left a tiny passage brings you into a room, this room was to become the Frank family’s bed sitting room, next door an even smaller room, study and bedroom for the two young ladies of the family. On the right a little room without windows, containing the washbasin and a small w. c. compartment, with another door leading to Margot’s and my room. If you go up the next flight of the stairs and open the door, you are simply amazed that there could be such a big light room in such an old house by the canal. There is a stove in this room (thanks to the fact that it was used before as Kugler’s laboratory) and sink. This is now the kitchen as well as bedroom for the v. P. couple, besides being general living room, dining room and scullery. A tiny little corridor room will become Peter v. P.’s apartment. Then just as on the lower landing there is a large attic. So there you are I have introduced you to the whole of our beautiful “Secret Annexe!”31

In the end of the text, Anne added a detailed sketch of the three-story house. Previously, we discussed several artworks depicting Anne Frank’s secret annex and gloomy place with a faint light coming from the small attic window behind her as part of Anne Frank’s cruel experience and fate (Fig. 25). In two of her artworks Keeter showed Anne’s hiding place; in one she described the staircase to the annex and the bookshelf sealing the entrance (Fig. 27). In the other one, she depicted Anne and her father busy arranging the objects in the attic (Fig. 28). Berger placed the staircase leading to the hiding place and the bookcase in the center of other scenes in Anne Frank’s short life (Fig. 29). We also discussed one of Weinshall Liberman’s wall hangings in which she referred to Anne Frank’s hiding place. She dealt with the feeling of the claustrophobia from hiding, based on Anne Frank’s quotation from her diary (Fig. 31). Israeli artist and daughter of a Holocaust survivor mother Ayana Friedman (b. 1950) read Anne Frank’s diary repeatedly, trying to understand and imagine what has been the main thing that Anne expressed, and what she missed the most while in hiding. A few of Anne’s remarks in the diary made Friedman come to the realization that what Anne missed the most was the possibility to go outside, experience nature and breathe a bit of fresh air. For example, on August 10, 1943, Anne wrote in her diary “When I get up in the morning . . . I jump out of bed thinking to myself: . . . go to the window, take down the blackout, sniff at the crack of the window until I feel a bit of fresh air, and I’m awake.”32 In the installation Fresh Air for Anne, two videos are projected side by side simultaneously (Fig. 115). The soundtrack is combined for both and relates intermittently to the visuals. One of the videos shows the beauty of nature, manifested in wind blowing through treetops, the murmur of the sea and the waves breaking onto the beach, a heavy rain, and a red sunset that unites the two films in the same ending. At the beach, rocks are covered with algae and a white egret runs into shallow water in its attempt to catch fish but shrinks back and recoils from the waves.

31 Barnouw and van der Stroom, The Diary of Anne Frank, the Critical Edition, 211, 214. 32 Ibid., 393.

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Fig. 115: Ayana Friedman, Fresh Air for Anne, 2009, installation, varied dimensions, various dimensions. Courtesy of the artist.

The second film shows the shadowy attic of the artist’s parents’ home in Haifa. In this attic, there were small low-ceilinged cubicles, and in parts of the building one could only move forward by crawling. From the window of the sloping roof, one could see the nearby neighbors’ yards. In a scene from the film, the artist is heard talking to herself, in her native language – German, when she returns to a childhood memory in which she encourages herself with the fact that there is a place to hide when the Nazis come to look for them. The empty swings in the movie, swinging in the wind and rain, suggest the children that were and are no more. They represent the lost childhood of both the children who perished in the Holocaust, and the children who grew up in Holocaust survivor parents’ homes where they absorbed the horrors and fears of war. On October 29, 1943, Anne Frank wrote, “I wander from one room to another, downstairs and up again, feeling like a songbird who has had his wings clipped and who is hurling himself in utter darkness against the bars of his cage. ʽGo outside, laugh, and take a breath of fresh air,ʼ a voice cries within me.”33 Anne’s desire to breathe fresh air, and these sentences were the motive for the commemoration of the elements of nature that we can enjoy without fear. The basic enjoyment of raindrops on the face, wind, the sound of waves, and the egret’s dance are life’s little luxuries the artist treasures the most; they are like a gift for her, even if they were paid for elsewhere with intense pain and loss of life. In the video showing Friedman’s parents’ attic, we see the train car anchored in the yard of the Yad Vashem Museum, the same tightly packed car that transported hundreds of Jews to the death camps. In the attached explanation, the words “some air” refer to the most basic thing given to human beings, that which was most

33 Ibid., 411.

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lacking during the hiding period of Anne Frank and her family, as well as on the way to extermination. Anne notes the ring of the Westertoren bell in her diary on Saturday, July 11, 1942: “Daddy, Mummy, and Margot can’t get used to the sound of the Westertoren clock yet, which tells us the time every quarter of an hour. I can. I loved it from the start, and especially in the night it’s like a faithful friend.”34 She mentioned it once again on Tuesday, August 10, 1943: “For the last week we’ve all been in a bit of a muddle about time, because our dear and beloved Westertoren clock bell has apparently been taken away for war purposes, so that neither by day nor night do we know the exact time.”35 Since the Westertoren clock played an important role for Anne Frank and her family, the artist has chosen to accompany the videos with a soundtrack that plays the sound of bells. Next to the video, a photograph of a window is placed through which trees are seen in the background. A copy of a photograph of Anne appears on the lower left side, as she looks from the outside in on her life in hiding. Next to the window swings hang frozen in place, their seats covered with white cloth, lined like the inside of a fancy Christian coffin. They illustrate the fact that no one will sit on them, thus they will not get dirty. They symbolize lost childhood. Unlike them, the blue plastic swings in the playground, in the video in heavy rain, symbolize life, the elements, the children who jumped off because of the rain that started to fall, and are still swinging from inertia. The photographs of the sealed train car in front of raindrops splashing on the ground of the playground are illustrative of the conflict between life and death. The window in the Haifa attic, facing the sky and the outside, surrounded by darkness, is the artist’s attempt to feel the “nothingness” in hiding. It is opposed to a feeling of “being” enjoyed by all others, but not by Anne. Through a symbolic portrayal of nonbeing Friedman attempts to compensate for the loss of Anne Frank.

Anne Frank with Her Diary Anne Frank’s wartime diary was one of the first to be published after World War II and was mostly a story of a young girl, her family and the other people who were in hiding in Amsterdam during the war. There are only a few remarks about the war itself and the destiny of the Jews. It contains Anne’s relations with her family members and the other people in hiding, but it mostly tells about Anne’s thoughts, faith in humans, and a process of development from a child into a teenager. Therefore, Anne Frank’s diary touched readers’ hearts around the world. The diary became her ultimate attribute.

34 Ibid., 216. 35 Ibid., 393.

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Alongside Anne Frank’s depiction in various contexts, several artists linked Anne’s image with her diary in artworks that we already discussed. Maor, Masser, and Hanuka used the 1940 photograph of Anne Frank in the fifth grade of the Montessori school in Amsterdam, seated at her desk and writing in her notebook (Fig. 5). Maor placed it on a yellow background to symbolize in a veiled manner the yellow Star of David the Jews were marked with during the Holocaust (Fig. 41). Masser depicted herself and Anne, both sitting in the same position, writing in a notebook to express the artist’s identification with Anne Frank (Figs. 54–55). Hanuka merged his own face into Anne Frank’s picture in order to examine his feelings about the Holocaust and his Jewish identity (Fig. 59). Twice, Knigin used Anne Frank’s 1941 picture taken in the sixth grade of the Montessori school in Amsterdam (Fig. 6), first, to deal with the Zionist dream of returning to the Land of Israel and rebuilding a Jewish country (Fig. 92), and second, to envision Anne Frank surviving the Holocaust and coming to Israel to help with the establishment of the Jewish state (Fig. 96). Horvath relied on the 1941 photograph of Anne Frank in Amsterdam, reading a book (Fig. 7). He used her image to symbolize World War II and the Holocaust that occurred under the umbrella of the war, in particular using images of skeletal children’s figures (Fig. 68). Unlike most, Keeter combined two photographs of Anne sitting by a desk with a notebook in front of her (Figs. 6–7): in one, she is seen with a pencil in her hand (Fig. 6) and in the other, she is wearing a watch (Fig. 7). Keeter depicted Anne as a happy and joyful girl wearing a yellow Jewish Star of David with the German word “Jude” in its center, sitting at a table with her diary open, to emphasize both her being Jewish and her hiding in the annex (Fig. 84). British sculptor Doreen Kern (b. 1931) chose to cast Anne Frank in a bronze bust (Fig. 116). Anne is sitting at her desk; her diary is open, and both her hands are resting on it while she is holding a pencil in her right hand. Anne is looking forward with a slight smile on her lips and with a happy gaze in her eyes. Anne is dressed in a garment with a collar that has a ribbon tied in a bow. Anne’s prominent breasts emphasize her femininity, referring to texts in the diary where Anne is dealing with her sexual identity. Kern wanted to emphasize the teenager’s happiness when she is writing in her diary. To depict Anne’s image, the artist relied on Anne Frank’s 1941 photograph of her in the sixth grade of the Montessori school in Amsterdam (Fig. 6).36 British illustrator June Allan (b. 1949) portrayed Anne Frank sitting at her desk in her room; her diary is open, and one of her hands touches the diary while the other hand is holding a pen close to her smiling face. On the wall in the background are pictures Anne hung to brighten up her room (Fig. 117). Anne looks contented to spend her time writing in her diary. Like Keeter, Allan combined two photographs of

36 The author’s correspondence with Doreen Kern, July, October 2007.

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Fig. 116: Doreen Kern, Anne Frank, 1995, bronze, 50 cm height. Courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 117: June Allan, Anne Frank, 2002, acrylic on paper, 19 × 16 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Anne sitting at a desk with a notebook in front of her, the one photographed in the sixth grade of the Montessori school in Amsterdam in 1941 (Fig. 6) and the other taken of Anne Frank in Amsterdam in 1941 (Fig. 7). Allan wrote of the portrait she had made,

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Fig. 118: Alexsandro Palombo, Never Again, Anne Frank, 2015, cartoon. Courtesy of the artist.

This smiling but silent girl in the photos has always interested me – she was a real living girl caught up in an horrific conflict. . . I wanted to show that this was an ordinary girl, full of life and using her diary to make sense of her world. The background was also important because again it chimed with our modern age when teenagers are fascinated by celebrities and film stars.37

In one of the cartoons in the series of drawings, Never Again, Palombo depicted Anne Frank sitting at a desk, writing in her dairy (Fig. 118), relying on the 1940 photograph of Anne Frank in the fifth grade of the Montessori school in Amsterdam (Fig. 5). Unlike Kern and Allan, Palombo illustrated Anne gazing at the spectator with a serious demeanor to attract attention to the gravity of her situation in hiding from the Nazis, writing her thoughts and her life story. The neutral background makes the portrayal symbolic and timeless; it can happen anywhere and at any time. Palombo used the image of Anne Frank to symbolize the Holocaust and at the same time as a warning that an event like the Holocaust should not occur again – Never Again! Israeli sculptor Sam Philipe (b. 1960) depicted a life size Anne Frank sitting at a desk in the annex, writing in her diary as well (Fig. 119). She is wearing a blue dress and brown boots; her hair is gently falling on her shoulders and with a serious expression on her face she is looking down at her diary. A high metal structure composed of four columns and a roof with a lamp in the center surround her, creating an intimate space. The artist relied on the 1940 photograph of Anne Frank in the fifth grade of the Montessori

37 The author’s correspondence with June Allan, Summer 2007.

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Fig. 119: Sam Philipe, Anne Frank, 2015, bronze, various dimensions. Collection of Kalman and Malki Samuels at Shalva, Jerusalem.

school in Amsterdam (Fig. 5). On one of the diary pages, the artist added a quotation in Dutch from Anne’s diary written on Tuesday March 7, 1944: Dinsdag, 7 Maart 1944. “En wie gelukkig is, zal ook38 anderen gelukkig maken, wie mode en vertrowen heeft, zal nooit in de ellende ondrgaan! Je Anne.” [“And whoever is happy will make others happy too. He who has courage and faith will never perish in misery! Yours Anne.”]39 It all began with a small personal bronze sculpture 20 inches high that the artist created out of a feeling that he wanted to tell about the Holocaust through a wellknown symbol and at the same time to fight anti-Semitism. For Anne’s figure the artist used his daughter as a model since she resembles Anne. Today this small sculpture is in the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust collection.40 The large bronze Anne Frank sculpture was set at the entrance to the Mamilla Mall in Jerusalem, for the public to look at and remember the Holocaust (Fig. 119). After a while, Philipe with his friend Jerry Klinger41 explored options for a permanent

38 Anne Frank, Het Acchterhuis (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bert Bakker, 2009), 190. In this version of the diary the Dutch the word “ook” (too) does not appear. 39 Barnouw and van der Stroom, The Diary of Anne Frank, the Critical Edition, 520. 40 The author’s correspondence and telephone conversations with Sam Philipe, November – December 2018. 41 Jerry Klinger is the founder and president of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation, an American non-profit organization. He is the son of Buchenwald and Bergen Belsen survivors.

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place for this sculpture. They approached memorial sites such as the Bergen Belsen Memorial, as well as Jewish or Holocaust Memorial groups in Berlin, Frankfurt, Landsberg am Lech – all organizations rejected the sculpture. The only place to accept it was Shalva (the Israel Association for the Care and Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities), Jerusalem. The Anne Frank statue was placed in the educational and learning library, in honor of Judy Klinger. The artist connected the purpose of the place with the description of young Anne writing in her diary. A dedicatory plate for Jerry’s wife Judy is near the statue of Anne Frank: “In Honor of Judy Klinger, a delivery room nurse. She always made sure every mother, baby, and family mattered.”42 A high metal structure surrounding Anne could not fit into the space, so Philipe painted an environment around Anne’s figure, including a blue sky with white clouds, a few buildings on the right to symbolize the city of Amsterdam, and a tree on the left to represent the chestnut tree. Anne wrote about the chestnut tree in her diary three times. On Wednesday, February 23, 1944: “From my favorite spot on the floor I looked up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind.” On Tuesday, April 18, 1944: “Our chestnut tree is already quite greenish and you can even see little blooms here and there.” In addition, on Saturday, May 13, 1944: “Our horse chestnut tree is in full bloom, thickly covered with leaves and much more beautiful than last year.”43 The artist added a three-sided brown wooden structure, and a lamp hanging in the center to create a place resembling the attic in Amsterdam. Only a few artists depicted Anne Frank holding her diary to emphasize it as her attribute. We saw an example in the statue of Anne by Stone at the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial in Boise, Idaho. There, Anne is seen holding her precious diary in her right hand behind her back (Fig. 74). Another example is Kaplan’s depiction, where Anne is shown with a pensive gaze while holding her diary and writing in it (Fig. 25). Lawrence Holofcener (1926–2017), an American-British sculptor, poet, lyricist, playwright, novelist, actor and director, also created a bronze relief of Anne Frank holding her diary in her hands (Fig. 120). The artist depicted Anne Frank’s face radiant and happy, a smile on her lips as she holds her diary closer to her heart. The gesture expresses Anne Frank’s great love for her diary. At the beginning of the diary, she wrote, “I hope that I will be able to confide in you completely, as I have never been able to do in anyone before, and I hope that you will be a great support and comfort to me. Anne Frank. 12 June 1942.”44

42 https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/anne-frank-where-have-you-gone-the-death-of-holocaustmemory/ (accessed in October 15, 2018). 43 Barnouw and van der Stroom, The Diary of Anne Frank, the Critical Edition, 497, 614, 648. 44 Ibid., 177.

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Fig. 120: Lawrence Holofcener, Anne Frank, 2000, bronze relief, 25.5 × 17.5 × 5 cm. Courtesy of the artist’s estate.

Holofcener served in the U.S Air Corps in the Pacific during World War II. As an American and as a Jew, he was shocked by the Nazis’ actions toward the Jews. In the early 2000s, he worked on the series 20th Century Icons, a collection of sculptures and reliefs depicting people who took part in shaping the 20th century. He wrote, “I felt that Anne Frank was one of them and therefore I created her relief as part of the series.”45 In preparation for creating the relief, the artist and his wife visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam in order to get an impression of her life story and personality. It seems that for his relief of Anne Frank, the artist relied on her photograph taken in Amsterdam, May 1942 (Fig. 4), which he apparently saw during the visit. In another cartoon in the series of drawings, Never Again, Palombo depicted Anne Frank behind a barbed wire fence, wearing a striped prisoner’s uniform with a yellow Star of David with the word “Jude” on it. Anne is holding onto the fence with her right hand and her red diary in her left hand (Fig. 121). Anne looks sad and frightened behind the barbed wire fence, but by highlighting the diary and depicting Anne holding it close to her heart, Palombo emphasized the strong bond she had with the diary that gave her comfort and strength during hiding. The American twin artists Mike and Doug Starn (b. 1961) dealt with the strong bond between Anne and her diary in Anne Frank Grave Marker from the Anne Frank Series of 1989 created for Anne Frank’s 60th birthday (Fig. 122). They chose two elements to describe the uniqueness of Anne Frank: a random page from her diary and six passport photographs from the series taken in Amsterdam in 1939 (for example see Fig. 2). In the background, they placed vertically the last text Anne wrote in her diary on August 1, 1944 and integrated the sequence of six photographs into the

45 The author’s correspondence with Lawrence Holofcener, Summer 2007.

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Fig. 121: Alexsandro Palombo, Never Again, Anne Frank, 2015, cartoon. Courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 122: Mike and Doug Starn, Anne Frank Grave Marker, 1989, mixed media, 45 × 50 cm. Collection Cornelis Suuijk, Anne Frank Center, USA.

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text. By putting these two elements together, the artists conveyed the essence of Anne Frank as an iconic symbol – her image and diary.46 Caroline Blum commented, “The photographic sequence shows a maturing of style and concept, mixing documentary materials with a fragile expressionism . . . The Anne Frank Series shows that the Starn Twins are now making work that is historically intelligent and technically sophisticated.”47

Anne Frank – Statues in Public Spaces The public space is the epitome of all human activities carried out in public, outside the family framework. The German sociologist, philosopher and cultural scholar Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) coined the term “public space” in 1962.48 Ariella Azoulay claimed, “In principle, the individual leaves his house and is in the public space. In order to enter the public space, he must therefore pass through the exit gate that connects and separates the private from the public, a gate located at the private space exit.”49 However, various philosophers in the field of social sciences and philosophy have attributed this concept with diverse meanings. We will discuss sculptures of Anne Frank placed in public spaces, in city streets and parks as a symbol and at the same time a link between the memory of the past to present society and environment. There are several statues depicting Anne Frank in public spaces, each one conveying a special meaning and message. We saw Schepp’s bronze statue in Merwedeplein, Amsterdam that presents Anne Frank, who just before leaving for her hiding place looks back once more at her home in Merwedeplein (Fig. 30). Before placing the statue in Merwedeplein, Amsterdam as mentioned in chapter 1, the municipality of Purmerend, the Netherlands, purchased it in 1996, and placed it on Anne Frank Boulevard in that city. The meaning here is different, as it only presents Anne Frank’s fate of going into hiding from the Nazis, and the description is detached from the place the event occurred (Fig. 123). We also discussed Anne Frank’s statue in the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial in Boise, Idaho created by Greg Stone (Fig. 74). The statue is located in the center of a low round platform, the central element in the park. The

46 From a letter, Mike and Doug Starn wrote to the author, March 23, 2007. 47 Caroline Blum, “Celebrating Photography,” Art International 9 (1989): 54–56. 48 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought), trans. T. Burger (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, [1962] 1989). 49 Ariella Azoulay, Training for Art, Critique of Museal Education (Bnei Brak: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1999), 80 (Hebrew).

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Fig. 123: Jet Schepp, Anne Frank, 2005, bronze statue. Courtesy of the city of Purmerend, The Netherlands.

sculptor emphasized Anne Frank’s hiding place and highlighted her image as a diary writer. The first statue in a public space was made by the Dutch sculptor Pieter d’Hont (1917–1997) who depicted Anne Frank as a young innocent girl hunted by the Nazis, captured and imprisoned until she died (Fig. 124). She stands on a base with her name on it, erect in confidence with her legs slightly apart and her hands behind her back with a look of determination on her face.50 The statue was purchased by the municipality of Utrecht, the Netherlands and placed at the Janskerkhof Square. The Dutch sculptor Andriessen Mari Sylvester (1897–1979) erected a statue of Anne Frank in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 1977 (Fig. 125). He depicted her as an adolescent girl, standing upright, looking straight and clasping her right arm with her left hand behind her back. She is wearing a dress, her hair draped over her shoulders, looking ahead with a determined gaze and an easy smile on her lips. Her narrow waist and prominent bosom accentuate her femininity. On the base on which she is standing, there is the inscription “Anne Frank 1929–1945” to mark the year of her birth and the year of her death.

50 Jan Teeuwisse, Taco Slagter, and Mirjam Beerman, Beeldhouwer Pieter d’Hont Leven en Werk 1917–1997 (Utrecht: Het Spectrum, [1997] 1999), 42.

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Fig. 124: Pieter d’Hont, Anne Frank, 1960, bronze statue, 125 cm. Courtesy of the city of Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Fig. 125: Andriessen Mari Sylvester, Anne Frank, 1977, bronze statue, 26.2 × 7.5 cm. Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Courtesy of the city of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

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Anne Frank was very aware of the physical changes to her body in the transition from childhood to adolescence. On March 8, 1944 she wrote in her diary, There’s no one in the world I’ve told more about myself and my feelings than you, so I might as well tell you something about sexual matter too . . . when I had just turned 11, they told me about having a period, but how it really came about or what it meant I didn’t find out until much later. When I was 12½ I heard some more, because Jacque was not nearly as stupid as I was. I had sensed myself what a man and a woman do when they are together; at first I thought the whole idea completely crazy, but when Jacque confirmed it for me I was quite proud of my intuition!51

The statue stands on Westerkerk Plaza, near the Western Church of Westerkerk, next to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. The church clock tower could be seen from a side window of the attic in Anne Frank’s hiding place. The location of the statue has symbolic significance because Anne often mentioned the clock tower in her diary. This statue can be considered as part of the visit to the Anne Frank House since it serves as a reminder that she was just a little girl who went through so much. Another statue of Anne Frank stands in the Rose Garden of the Holocaust Education Center in Fukuyama City in Japan. Reverend Makoto Otsuka, the initiator, met Otto Frank in 1971 when both visited Israel. He was inspired by Mr. Frank’s wish to spread awareness of the Holocaust in Japan and to promote peace in the world; he opened the Center in his church in 1995. The roses in the church garden dedicated to Anne Frank surround a bronze statue of her (Fig. 126).52 Anne Frank, depicted as a young innocent girl, is standing on a stone base in a gentle pose, her legs are very slightly apart, and her arms are tenderly stretched down by her sides. She is wearing a short sleeved dress with a collar reminiscent of the dress she wore in her photographs (Figs. 5–6). Her hair hangs over her shoulders, her head is slightly tilted, and her gaze is modestly lowered. The Dutch sculptor Josephus (Joep) G. M. Coppens (b. 1940) erected a statue of Anne Frank in Asten, the Netherlands, on behalf of the theater group “Het Achterhuis” in 1995 (Fig. 127). They played the story of Anne Frank in an open space and wanted a statue as the background for their performance. Coppens had read the diary of Anne Frank in his childhood. He and his wife Els visited the Anne Frank House and were very much impressed by her story. The girl who played Anne Frank was the artist’s model for the sculpture since she naturally resembled Anne Frank. Coppens depicted a barefoot teenage girl in a knee length dress with short sleeves emphasizing her narrow waist and breasts to accentuate her maturation. The

51 Barnouw and van der Stroom, The Diary of Anne Frank, the Critical Edition, 545. 52 http://en.japantravel.com/hiroshima/holocaust-education-center-fukuyama/6801 (accessed in November 2013).

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Fig. 126: Statue of Anne Frank in Rose Garden, Fukuyama City, Japan, late 1990s. Courtesy of Reverend Makoto Otsuka, pastor of a Fukuyama church.

Fig. 127: Josephus (Joep) G. M. Coppens, Anne Frank, 1995, bronze statue on marble base, 71 × 17 × 13 cm. Asten, The Netherlands. Courtesy of the city of Asten, The Netherlands.

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Fig. 128: Sara Pons Arnal, Anne Frank, 2001, bronze, life-size. Barcelona, Spain. Courtesy of the city of Barcelona, Spain.

figure is leaning back, her head tilted to the sky and her hands with the palms up are bound in front of her. The depiction conveys a feeling of distress, helplessness, and a cry for help. The front panel of the base on which she stands bears a metal plate with the inscription: “But despite everything I kept believing in the goodness of the people,” words taken from Anne’s diary written on Saturday, July 15, 1944.53 It was Toon Hoefnagels who recommended adding this inscription.54 Coppens made two other statues of Anne with some modifications. In 2008, one was fashioned at the request of Costa Rica’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. The second was commissioned by Aruba’s Prime Minister Mike Eman and erected in Aruba’s capital, Oranjestad, in 2011. The Catalan sculptor Sara Pons Arnal (b. 1970) placed a statue of Anne Frank in the Gràcia district, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Barcelona; it can be found in a small square called “Plaça d’Anna Frank” (Fig. 128). A life-size figure of Anne lying over the edge of the canopy is affixed to the entrance of a cultural center dedicated to imparting and preserving Catalan music and dance. Anne is wearing a short dress with short sleeves and light weight shoes, and her hair falling softly over her shoulders. She is holding her diary with the inscription “Anne Frank” in

53 Barnouw and van der Stroom, The Diary of Anne Frank, the Critical Edition, 694. 54 Toon Hoefnagels is a Dutch writer, who was involved with the “Het Achterhuis” theater group. The author’s correspondence with Josephus (Joep) G. M. Coppens, November 2018.

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her left hand and a pen in her right hand. Her head is leaning on her right hand with a contemplative gaze on her face. On the wall next to the sculpture, on a plank in the shape of an open bronze book there is an inscription: Cuando ya ni los nombres quedan de los verdugos. Ella sigue viviendo. Pero que nunca vuelva aquella larga sombra y el torrente de sangre y llanto y barro y luto que ahogó tanta belleza cuyo símbolo era una muchacha en flor. Sara Pons Arnal. Gener 2001. [When the names of the executioners are no longer known – she is still living. But may they never return: the long shadow, the torrent of blood, the tears, the mud and mourning that drowned so much beauty whose symbol is a girl in bloom. Sara Pons Arnal. January 2001.]55 The artist connects the memory of a talented young Jewish girl, whose life was severed at a young age by the Nazis only because she was Jewish, with the need to preserve the Catalan heritage, so it will not be suppressed and made to disappear. *** To convey political messages and statements artists used the powerful Warsaw boy’s image, referring to the era of the Nazi regime as well as to contemporary conflicts. By placing the Warsaw boy’s image between Hitler and the wealthy industrialists, Trachtman drew attention to the dangerous collaboration between capital and government that can generate a humanitarian tragedy (Fig. 97). Unlike Trachtman, Antunes used the entire photograph of the group of Warsaw Jews dressed like Arabs, and the Israeli soldiers as Nazis, to protest in a critical and political way the Israeli army invasion of Lebanon (Fig. 100). Latuff, Schechner and Bar Hama used the iconic photograph of the Warsaw boy to convey a political and critical message concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from opposite points of view. Latuff used an approach similar to Antunes’ by using the Jewish convoy dressed like Arabs and the Israeli soldiers replacing the Nazis to raise the question of how the Jewish nation that had experienced the Holocaust could suppress another nation (Fig. 101). Schechner displayed links between the Holocaust and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank to present his theory that abused children often become abusers themselves. Therefore, by stopping victimization of children on both sides (Israelis and Palestinians) he posits the conflict could be solved (Fig. 102). Bar Hama focuses on the differences between the education of future generations: Jews educating their children to heed the watchwords “Never Again!” while Palestinians incite their children to more slaughter and more murder. This situation exacerbates the schism between these two peoples (Figs. 103–105). Furthermore, Bar Hama confronts Holocaust denial with tangible evidence of Holocaust atrocity (Fig. 106).

55 https://monuments.iec.cat/fitxa.asp?id=770 (accessed in November 8, 2018).

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Several artists expressed their opinions about Israeli internal issues through the image of the Warsaw boy. Responding to the event in Hebron on April 2014, Shachar compared the Warsaw boy from the past who could not resist the Nazi soldiers with the Israeli soldier of the present, able to react but afraid to be accused by the media of being a violator of the weak (Fig. 107). In a caricature that looks almost the same as the previous one, the artist dealt with the IDF legal adviser’s Open-Fire Regulations that restricts Israeli soldiers from responding with fire against Palestinians who may be attacking them (Fig. 108). In another caricature, Shachar reacted to an incident in which Palestinians attacked three lost Israeli soldiers who accidently drove into Jenin, a Palestinian city, saying that when Arabs come into Israel they go through a humiliating examination; when a Israeli enters an Arab village, even by mistake, he is confronted by a respectable lynching (Fig. 109). Lin used the entire photograph from Warsaw to protest Yehonatan Geffen’s comparison of Tamimi the Palestinian girl slapping an Israeli soldier’s face to David who defeated Goliath, to Anne Frank, to Hannah Szenes and to Jeanne d’Arc. The artist asserted that the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are not the same and are not comparable (Fig. 110). Morad and Lin referred to the demonstration by ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem on Saturday night, December 31, 2011, by using the iconic photograph of the Warsaw boy. Morad presents the points of view of the secular Jews and the ultra-Orthodox in confrontation with each other. The first group remembers the Nazi atrocities committed against all Jews during the Holocaust, while the second group likens the representatives of the secular Jewish State to Nazis (Fig. 111). Lin treated the clash between secular and ultra-Orthodox Jews as well. He criticizes the ultra-Orthodox view of secular Jews as the enemy when calling them “Zionazis” (Fig. 112). Rozanov dealt with the internal Jewish-Israeli conflict regarding the many illegal African refugees in Israel by using the iconic image of the Warsaw boy. He expressed clearly the contrast between the image of the banished and vulnerable Jew and the aggressor he became toward the refugees who now need his sympathy and help (Fig. 113). Fink addressed another internal Jewish-Israeli issue pertaining to the inadequate care of Holocaust survivors by the National Insurance Institute, showing the Warsaw boy as an adult survivor (Fig. 114). As for Anne Frank, artists used her image from her famous photographs to describe her uniqueness in diverse ways. One manner is by way of describing Anne’s secret annex. Inspired by Anne’s diary descriptions of her hiding place, artists depicted her in the secret annex, often making references to a text from her diary. We saw in previous chapters, Kaplan (Fig. 25), Keeter (Figs. 27–28), Berger (Fig. 29) and Weinshall Liberman’s (Figs. 31–32) various descriptions of Anne’s hiding place. In this chapter, we discussed Friedman’s installation in which she emphasized lost childhood, the feeling of being trapped in the annex and Anne’s desire to breathe fresh air (Fig. 115).

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Another approach is to depict Anne with her diary. Several artists linked Anne’s image and her diary in artworks that we already discussed in previous chapters; most of them relied on Anne’s photographs. Maor (Fig. 41), Masser (Figs. 54–55) and Hanuka (Fig. 59) portrayed her sitting at her desk and writing in her diary. They relied on the photograph of Anne Frank in the fifth grade of the Montessori school in Amsterdam (Fig. 5). Twice, Knigin depicted Anne writing in her diary, once to focus on the Zionist dream of returning to the Land of Israel (Fig. 92), a second time to envision Anne surviving the Holocaust (Fig. 96), based on Anne’s 1941 picture taken in the sixth grade of the Montessori school in Amsterdam (Fig. 6). Horvath used Anne’s image to symbolize World War II and the Holocaust (Fig. 68); his source is a photograph of Anne reading a book, taken in Amsterdam in 1941 (Fig. 7). Keeter and Allan depicted Anne as a happy and joyful girl, who although in hiding, enjoyed writing in her diary (Figs. 84, 117). They combined two photographs of Anne sitting at a desk with a notebook in front of her (Figs. 6, 7). Kern, like Keeter, depicted Anne’s happiness with writing in her diary and at the same time the artist drew attention to her ripening into womanhood, which is portrayed in the diary (Fig. 116). Kern based her work on Anne Frank’s sixth grade photograph taken in 1941 at the Montessori school in Amsterdam (Fig. 6). Palombo (Fig. 118) and Philipe (Fig. 119) relied on the photograph of Anne Frank in the fifth grade of the Montessori school in Amsterdam, 1940 (Fig. 5). Both artists depicted Anne sitting at a desk, writing in her dairy with a serious look on her face. Holofcener and Palombo depicted Anne holding her diary close to her heart. Holofcener depicted her face illuminated and happy when holding the diary (Fig. 120) while concurrently Palombo showed her holding her diary while standing behind a barbed wire fence, wearing a prisoner’s uniform (Fig. 121). Mike and Doug Starn emphasized the strong bond between Anne and her diary by combining a page from her diary and six photographs of her taken in Amsterdam in 1939. By merging text and persona, the artists conveyed the essence of Anne Frank as an iconic symbol – her image and diary (Fig. 122). Lastly, artists used Anne Frank’s image to describe her uniqueness through statues in public spaces. We discussed Schepp’s bronze statue in Merwedeplein, Amsterdam, showing Anne carrying suitcases, ready to go to the hiding place, looking one last time at her home in Merwedeplein, Amsterdam (Fig. 30). Prior to this statue, a smaller scale of the same statue was erected in the city of Purmerend, the Netherlands (Fig. 123). We also discussed Anne Frank’s statue created by Greg Stone for the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial in Boise, Idaho, depicting Anne Frank’s figure holding her diary standing in her hiding place (Fig. 74). In statues of Anne Frank by d’Hont and Sylvester, as well as the statue in the Rose Garden, in Fukuyama City, Japan, or the statue by Coppens, she is cherished, standing on a base raised to be seen from afar. Also, d’Hont depicted Anne standing with confidence, displaying a look of determination on her face (Fig. 124). Sylvester

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portrayed Anne as a determined adolescent girl (Fig. 125). The Japanese statue shows Anne as a gentle, young and innocent girl (Fig. 126). Unlike the previous statues, Coppens fashioned a tortured teenage girl, handcuffed and leaning back to cry out (Fig. 127). Unlike the other statues, Pons Arnal placed Anne Frank’s statue on a canopy affixed to a building, where she is lying over its edge holding her diary, gazing at all below in solemn contemplation (Fig. 128).

6 Dissolving Memory . . . bits of life torn pieces of memory, cut sentences words. to put together tiny bits falling apart and to knead again Hana Shir1

Memory enables human beings to collect the fragmented bits and pieces of images and words accumulated over time in the course of innumerable life experiences and to store them, while attempting to weave them together into a cohesive whole. We distinguish between private memory, which represents the personal stories of individuals, and collective memory, which is stamped both by historical events and by their spiritual, ideological, and moral significance. As Amnon Shamosh has written, “Each of us remembers different things, or remembers the same things differently.”2 “Memory,” Shamosh explains, “may select, beautify, or cover up for one thing with another. It is always personal, unique, and subjective; like a fingerprint of the soul.”3 As Shamosh added, “The boundary between imagined and actual memories of early childhood experiences is never clear cut. The first memories are those that you were told about repeatedly, until they became fixed in your consciousness as if you yourself had experienced and remembered them. The influence of such memories is no less than that of real memories.”4 By means of using the images of the Warsaw Ghetto boy and Anne Frank as iconic symbols of the Holocaust, artists have examined the boundaries of memory, our ability to order and organize the memory of the Holocaust, asking what will happen to all Holocaust memories. Will they be fragments in our collective memory or will they, to our deep sorrow, vanish through the years? In his poem, The Polish Boy, Ralph Haskins Elizondo (b. 1958, Monterrey, Mexico. Today, he lives in McAllen, Texas) deals with the uncertainty of the memory of individual stories from the Holocaust, such as the fate of the little boy from the Warsaw Ghetto who became an icon. The Polish Boy I wish I knew your name. Was it Ytzhak? Was it Jacob?

1 Hana Shir and Honi Hameagel, To Feel Again (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1983), unnumbered (Catalog) (Hebrew). 2 Amnon Shamosh, Past Revisited Memoirs (Tel Aviv: Aviv, 2007), 43 (Hebrew). 3 Ibid., 48. 4 Ibid., 79. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110656916-007

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I shall call you Ido. In your life’s early spring your hands were raised high, trying desperately to pick the fruits off the tree of safety, but the tree was barren. In this blizzard of history’s winter their bullets broke your body. It has been seven decades down, my dear Ido. You should be old today, and yet your image holds, frozen, in tons of grey, and I the old man now, with chills I gaze on your eternal frightened childhood, the ice inside me melting, and flowing down my face.5

In a letter to the author, Haskins Elizondo wrote: My connection with Holocaust victims began when I was a high school student. I worked one summer at a local drugstore. I noticed that my manager, Mr. Jake Levine, had a tattoo on his forearm. He was the first Holocaust survivor I had ever met. Both, he and his wife Clara, victims of the Holocaust, moved me deeply. In the summer of 2011, I was finally able to visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. It was there where my own children were able to meet and talk to other survivors. It was there where I experienced my next spiritual shake up, the vision of that child with his arms raised, fear clearly visible in his face. As the father of two sons I saw them in this photograph. This innocent, terrified boy became my child! I had to write his poem. My writing is a process that takes weeks to complete, and this poem, especially, tore my heart apart. By the end of summer 2011, the poem was complete. I had no clue as to the boy’s name, so I decided to make him a symbol for others who died in the Holocaust. I also wanted to honor my old manager, Mr. Levine, so I looked for those victims who shared his name. I began my search in the Holocaust museum’s website and that led me to the Yad Vashem website. It was there that I found Jacob, Ytzak, and little Jdo. And it was through them and the boy in the picture, that the poem came to life . . . My present and future connections to the Holocaust are to stand with you and with others and say, “never again.”6

Facelessness of the Iconic Images In previous chapters we discussed several artworks by Samuel Bak, presenting the faceless figures of the Warsaw boy. Bak emphasized that down the years the Warsaw boy’s image became an anonymous victim, icon of all children murdered in the

5 With permission of Ralph Haskins Elizondo. http://labloga.blogspot.co.il/2011/08/final-mentalmenudo-on-line-floricanto.html (accessed in March 9, 2015). 6 The author’s correspondence with Ralph Haskins Elizondo, March 2015.

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Fig. 129: Samuel Bak, Study D, 1995, oil on Canvas, 25⅝" × 21⅛". Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA, USA.

Holocaust, by showing him without facial features (Figs. 44–45). In order to reinforce the idea of anonymity of the Warsaw boy Bak continued to depict the solitary figure of the Warsaw boy. For example, in Study D the faceless boy with a yellow badge on his coat emerges from the ruins representing the Holocaust.7 The background is in flames reminiscent of the horrors and atrocities committed during Holocaust; the burning of Jewish books and synagogues, the burning of Warsaw Ghetto buildings and burning the Jews in the crematoriums (Fig. 129). This faceless anonymous boy is represented as the iconic innocent Jewish child victim of the Holocaust, killed only because he was Jewish. In From Ashes (Fig. 130), the wooden Warsaw boy’s figure stands nailed in the midst of broken rocks reminiscent of broken tombstones in front of a graveyard’s stone gate, with a single tombstone beside it. Like a gatekeeper, the boy’s image appears at the threshold, guarding the memory of the graveyard’s dead. His faceless image is a reminder particularly of the countless anonymous Jewish victims, their suffering and murder during the Holocaust.

7 Samuel Bak, The Landscape of Jewish Experience (Washington, DC: B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum, 1997), 3 (Catalog).

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Fig. 130: Samuel Bak, From Ashes, 2006, oil on canvas, 14" × 11". Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA, USA.

In their study, Icon of Loss: Recent Paintings by Samuel Bak, Danna Nolan Fewell and Gary A. Phillips remark that Bak’s boy himself serves as an intermediary between past and present: “The boy – Bak’s psychopomp who escorts us across a landscape of loss – becomes the keyhole, a doorway, a threshold (From Ashes) that guides us into a fragmentary past that resists being remade whole.”8 The Dutch artist Marjolein Rothman (b. 1974) is the only artist I found who depicted the faceless image of Anne Frank as part of a series of paintings portraying famous figures in history. The artist attempted to give a new dimension to the way we look at them. Rothman is interested in what history has made of these famous people and the measure of their public status. Moreover, she was interested in how famous figures differ from us, as well as from herself.9 In Disappearance, the multiplied image of Anne Frank appears on a gray background, without facial features, sometimes completed and sometimes fragmented (Fig. 131). At first, the artist tried to depict Anne’s face, but soon she realized that it was impossible for her to reconstruct Anne’s face. She tried to “find” the girl Anne Frank, but in fact she “disappeared” because she became a symbol of the Holocaust. The painting expresses this loss by the lack of Anne’s facial features. The artist noted that: “In a sense, I was saddened that I did not find a way to describe Anne Frank as

8 Fewell and Gary Phillips, Icon of Loss: Recent Paintings by Samuel Bak, 6, 16. 9 The author’s correspondence with Marjolein Rothman, August 2007.

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Fig. 131: Marjolein Rothman, Disappearance, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 60 × 40 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

I described the other characters; ʽto bring her backʼ and make her ʽone of us,ʼ this painting speaks about this attempt.”10 The choice of shades of gray to portray Anne’s image and background fits well with the lack of her facial features and it reinforces the message that Anne Frank today is a symbol of Holocaust events. It also emphasizes the fact that sometimes it is forgotten that she was a real girl with her own personality and dreams. This painting is based on the known 1939 series of Anne Frank’s small photographs. Anne had cut off some of them and attached them to her diary (for example Fig. 2).

Disappearance of the Iconic Images Several artists used the image of the Warsaw Ghetto boy to examine the convolutions of the memory of the Holocaust. They dealt with the danger of disappearance of the Holocaust from our collective memory and the fear it will be forgotten.

10 Ibid.

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Fig. 132: Samuel Bak, Walled In, 2008, oil on canvas, 30" × 24". Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA, USA.

In the painting Walled In of 2008, Bak integrated the faceless Warsaw boy’s figure into the brown brick wall, thus making him become part of it (Fig. 132). The boy’s image almost vanishes, and all that remains to identify him is his silhouette, his hat and blank face, both his hands bearing stigmata, a distorted yellow star on his jacket and his wounded legs.11 As discussed above (Figs. 129–130), the Warsaw boy’s blank face turns him into an anonymous boy, icon of all children who were victims of the Holocaust. The brick wall symbolizes the Warsaw Ghetto wall and by integrating the boy’s figure into it, thus making him part of it, the wall functions as a memorial wall. The boy from the Warsaw Ghetto perished, but his image as a symbol of many other children with the same fate will forever be remembered. AmishaiMaisels reinforced the issue of the fragility of Holocaust memory in Walled In by Bak, explaining that “his imprint has become part of the excavated and restored ghetto walls, whose varying structures suggest that the wall was built in different periods. He is gone, but he is forever enshrined in the ghetto.”12 Bak was in the Vilna Ghetto, where the two parts of the ghetto were surrounded by a barbed wire fence with gates and not with a wall.13 Nevertheless, it is possible that Bak

11 Fewell and Gary Phillips, Icon of Loss: Recent Paintings by Samuel Bak, 6, 41. 12 Amishai-Maisels, “The Disappearance of the Identity of the Holocaust Victim in Art,” 416. 13 http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/he/research/ghettos_encyclopedia/ghetto_details.asp?cid=320 (accessed in March 9, 2019).

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Fig. 133: Avner Bar Hama, Fractures, 2009, digitally manipulated photograph printed on dibond, 50 × 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

connected the boy’s image to the Warsaw Ghetto wall as a collective symbol of all ghettos and the imprisonment of the Jews. Bar Hama similarly examined the nature of memory in a series of artworks from 2009, called Fractures. He combined the entire photograph from Warsaw with an image he took of the cobblestones in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. In the 1930s, the square was used as a backdrop for the ostentatious parades held by the Nazi army lead by Hitler, and it was a symbol of the power and rule of the Third Reich. The Warsaw photograph gradually melds into the square stones. The feeling the depiction evokes can be interpreted as a process of disappearance, the vanishing of memory of Holocaust events, and by extension is evocative of the attempt to erase the Jewish nation’s existence from the world. In Fractures, the people in the photograph from Warsaw are shattering, almost disintegrating, except for the boy and the woman in the front, who are still holding on (Fig. 133). The feeling in this image is that cracks in the memory of this event are appearing. In Fractures Disappear, the people in the photograph are being absorbed into the cobblestones. (Fig. 134). The feeling in this image is that the stones and fissures

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Fig. 134: Avner Bar Hama, Fractures Disappear, 2009, digitally manipulated photograph printed on dibond, 50 × 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

are soaking up and erasing the memory of the Holocaust. However, the photograph from Warsaw exposes the historical truth, which cannot so easily be suppressed, even by thousands of cobblestones. In Fractures Do Not Disappear, the people in the photograph have been crushed into the stones in the square, and they look like mosaic stones, though its parts, especially the boy, are emerging from the pavement stones in a stubborn refusal to disappear (Fig. 135). It seems that the figures depicted are calling from the depths of the ground, and crying out to the Germans of today, who walk daily on those cobblestones. It is as if they were asking today’s pedestrians to remember and confront the cruel and inhuman deeds committed toward the Jewish people by their Nazi ancestors, in order to prevent these events from happening again. A few stones are colored in blue, especially in the Warsaw boy’s image and around him, to symbolize the existence of the State of Israel and its endeavor to mend the fractures through the ingathering of the exiles.14

14 The author’s interview with Avner Bar Hama, March 2010, November 2011. Brutin, “Avner Bar Hama: Between Private and National Memory,” 90 (Hebrew & English).

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Fig. 135: Avner Bar Hama, Fractures Do Not Disappear, 2009, digitally manipulated photograph printed on dibond, 50 × 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Gustav Metzger also probed the durability of Holocaust memory in Historic Photographs: Liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, April 19–28 days 1943 from 1995, though with a different approach (Fig. 136). Like Bar Hama, he uses the entire photograph of the Warsaw Ghetto liquidation, placed in the back of two metal tracks with horizontal wooden planks installed before them as if the photograph were imprisoned behind them.15 The artist expressed the danger that the memory of this historic event could well vanish, by hiding parts of the photograph with wooden planks. It looks like a window that will close on the picture and hide it, making it disappear from public consciousness. As for Anne Frank’s image, we previously discussed Weinshall Liberman’s Anne Frank’s Journey that also deals with memory fading away, in which Anne’s image appears repeatedly and becomes fainter, almost disappearing as she nears her death in Bergen Belsen (Fig. 24).

15 Sophie O’Brien, “Transformation and Transcendence,” in Gustav Metzger, Decades: 1959–2009, ed. Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist (London: Koenig Books, 2009), 60, 66 (Catalog).

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Fig. 136: Gustav Metzger, Historic Photographs: Liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, April 19–28 days 1943, 1995, bromide print, wooden shuttering, galvanized steel channel stock 150 × 184 cm. Courtesy of the artist’s estate.

Israeli painter and poet Noam Lahav (1929–2016) examined the continuity of Holocaust memory using a different approach in two of his paintings Auschwitz: The Annunciation (Anne Frank) (Figs. 137–138). Lahav was a professor of physical chemistry. He was very influenced by his scientific work in his choices of color and subject in his artworks. In the first painting, there is a red yellow “time tunnel,” on the right and on the left, there are hourglasses and an unborn embryo in the front (Fig. 137). In the background, there is an incomplete and barely noticeable face of Anne Frank; Anne’s haunted eyes are highlighted observing the scene in front of her. The depiction and the title suggest that Anne Frank represents other Jewish women victims of the Holocaust that the Nazis sought to deny the right and opportunity to have children as the continuity of the Jewish people, the embryo that is the “Annunciation.” It implies that those who survived the Holocaust gave birth to a new generation as compensation for the murdered Jews during the Holocaust.16 Amishai-Maisels suggests a different explanation for this painting.

16 Author’s interviews with Noam Lahav, Jerusalem, February-March 2009.

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Fig. 137: Noam Lahav, Auschwitz: The Annunciation I (Anne Frank), 1992, oil on canvas, 100 × 80 cm. Courtesy of the artist’s estate.

Fig. 138: Noam Lahav, Auschwitz: The Annunciation II (Anne Frank), 1992, oil on canvas, 100 × 80 cm. Courtesy of the artist’s estate.

Here the haunting eyes and barely perceptible face are those of Anne Frank, whose spirit hovers over the infant about to move through the birth canal into the light of day. On the one hand, it replaces the unborn babies that victims such as Anne Frank never had . . . the title suggests that what is involved here is a rebirth: it announces that better times will come under the aegis of those who died in Auschwitz.17

In the second painting, like Bar Hama, Lahav integrated Anne Frank’s face into the heavenly blue background as almost unseen except of her prominent eyes and halfclosed mouth (Fig. 138). There is a disconnection in the umbilical cord from the embryo underneath Anne’s disappearing face, suggesting that the memory of the Holocaust is severed and that future generations might not remember the Holocaust.18 The red and blue colors might reflect the chemical reactions of particles that create these colors. Amishai-Maisels explained that “the title suggests that what is involved here is a rebirth: it announces that better times will come under the aegis of those who died at Auschwitz.”19

17 Amishai-Maisels, “Haunting the Empty Place,” 141. 18 Author’s interviews with Noam Lahav, Jerusalem, February-March 2009. 19 Amishai-Maisels, “Haunting the Empty Place,” 141.

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Moreover, the title refers to Gabriel’s Annunciation to the Virgin Mary that she will be with child and that this child will be the Son of God and will be regarded as the Savior of His people. In the context of this work, the Jewish children who will be born after the Holocaust are the saviors of Jewish continuity. They are the redemption of the Jews who perished in the Holocaust.

Fragmented Memory Israeli figurative painter Haya Graetz-Ran (b. 1948) is the only artist I found who dealt with the fragmented collective memory of the Holocaust through the image of Anne Frank (Fig. 139). The fragments of Anne’s face, her eyes, her smile, her hair, part of her clothing are painted as a puzzle in three oval sections. Graetz-Ran expressed her concern about the memory of the single story of Anne Frank’s experience during the Holocaust as an example of what can happened to the memory of the events of the Holocaust. She stated, “I wanted to mark the fracture, the dismantling of the complete. . . . The missing piece will never be found.”20

Fig. 139: Haya Graetz-Ran, Without A Name, 2008, oil on canvas, 3 oval pieces 20 × 30 cm. each. Courtesy of the artist.

20 The author’s interview and correspondence, March 2003; Haya Graetz-Ran’s statement, 2009. Brutin, Anne Frank in the Artists Eyes, 7 (Catalog).

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Anne Frank’s image in the two upper pieces is based on Anne’s photograph from 1942 taken in Amsterdam (Fig. 2) while in the lower oval the artist used Anne’s photograph taken in Amsterdam in 1941 (Fig. 7).

Disintegration of the Iconic Image of the Warsaw Boy In their treatment of the image of the Warsaw Ghetto boy, Samuel Bak and Daniela Ament went even further in dealing with the process of Holocaust memory in their artworks. Bak portrayed the Warsaw boy’s figure as disintegrating, almost disappearing. For example, in Into the Trees (Fig. 140), the wooden fragments of the blank faced Warsaw boy’s image are nailed to the trees that “complete” the missing parts of his body. The trees are reminiscent of Ponary, a pastoral forest about 10 kilometers south of Vilna, which the Nazis turned into a valley of massacre for the Jews of the city and the surrounding area, including Bak’s relatives.

Fig. 140: Samuel Bak, Into the Trees, 1995, oil on linen, 161⁄8" × 13". Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA, USA.

To reinforce the idea of disintegration, Ziva Amishai-Maisels wrote, “However, his image disappears as the memory of this place of slaughter is forgotten by transient

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Fig. 141: Samuel Bak, Absence, 1997, oil on linen, 201⁄8" × 201⁄8". Courtesy of Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA, USA.

visitors to the site, such as the blue birds perched uncaringly in the hole where his body should be.”21 In Absence (Fig. 141), the Warsaw boy’s image has almost disappeared, and all that is left is his featureless face, his hat, half of his yellow badge and his shoes. His body has disintegrated and what is left is an empty silhouette of his corpus and his raised hands.22 Reminiscent of the atrocity of the Holocaust and the concentration camps are the boy’s striped cap and a piece of striped cloth above it. In the foreground on a pile of stones are discarded used children’s shoes representing the murdered children during the Holocaust. Moreover, the entire scene emphasizes the absence of both the dead children and the memory of them. Like Bak, Israeli sculptor Daniela Ament (b. 1945) is concerned with the dissolving of Holocaust memory in Vanishing Memory from 2007 (Fig. 142). It all began in 2005, two years before she finished this installation, when Dr. Shmuel Boris Korn, a Holocaust survivor living in Kiryat Tivon, Israel, came to the artist

21 Ziva Amishai-Maisels, “Disappearance of the Identity of a Holocaust Victim in Art,” 415. 22 The Art of Samuel Bak: Memory and Metaphor (Durham, New Hampshire: University of New Hampshire Art Gallery, 2006), 12. (Catalog); Ziva Amishai-Maisels, “Disappearance of the Identity of a Holocaust Victim in Art,” 415–416.

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Fig. 142: Daniela Ament, Vanishing Memory, 2007, bronze, rusted iron and acrylic glass, various dimensions. Courtesy of the artist, Israel.

with the photograph of the little boy from Warsaw Ghetto. He asked her if she could make a sculpture of this boy to commemorate his cousins, whom he last saw walking like the Warsaw boy to the train that took him and others from the ghetto. The artist prepared a model, which she showed Dr. Korn, and they both decided on the full-size image. Ament stated that “I never did any work about the Holocaust until I met Boris because of my difficulties in coping with such an emotionally loaded subject. I started my work with extreme caution. It was most important to be able to deliver the atmosphere and the horror of the scene than the reality of lines.”23 The sculpture was ready in clay after six weeks, but unfortunately Dr. Korn had died without seeing the sculpture. Ament continued, So there I was with this sculpture and it felt as if I was left with a will. The thought was constantly in my mind – the memory of those children, was now lost, with the death of the only survivor who knew them. I decided to make a mold to ensure the existence of the sculpture so I took the clay sculpture home to disassemble it for recycling. In the middle of breaking it – suddenly it expressed so much more than what I was trying to convey, just by being partly incomplete. It took 2–3 months of seeing it daily, until I made another mold. All that time I didn’t really know what to do with those two sculptures, and it took a couple of months again until, suddenly. . . I understood that what bothered me all that time was the idea of those children and so many more like them losing all traces of memory, and that

23 Artist’s statement: https://www.ament-daniela.com/copy-of-vanishing-memory?lightbox= dataItem-joq34s3t2 (accessed in February 7, 2015); The author’s telephone interviews with Daniela Ament, February 2015, December 2018, February 2019.

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gave me the feeling of the “vanishing memory.” Suddenly I saw the vanishing so clearly the way it should be made to bring people to think about the danger of losing the memory of those horrors of the Holocaust. So the third and fourth sculptures I made working with wax. Careful not to hurt or shock anybody that they would turn away, but to be very clear in what I want people to see and think and remember, because that is the most important thing – never forget.24

This installation contains two parts; on the right there is a large (2 × 1 meters) photograph on canvas, part of the original picture, revealing the Warsaw boy, the soldiers and part of the convoy framed in black to convey a mourning atmosphere.25 Ament explained that, “I used only the relevant part of the child and the Nazi soldiers, only to connect the installation to the time and place of which it talks about.”26 The second part includes four figures of the Warsaw boy in a different stage of disintegration. The first figure of the boy is complete and is close to the large photograph. Ament made a great effort to portray the boy as closely as possible to the boy in the photograph. Nevertheless, there are some differences, such as the almost closed eyes and the wide-open mouth in the sculpture, compared to the photograph in which the boy’s eyes are wide open and his mouth only slightly agape. The facial features in the boy’s sculpture convey a cry of distress and helplessness. Ament used the MIRS (Military Intelligence Research Section) copy of the original photograph now at the NARA (National Archives and Records Administration) in Washington D.C., which has a few stains on it.27 She translated the stain on the coat to the right as a golden button with a Star of David, to emphasize the Warsaw boy’s Jewish identity. The second, third and fourth images of the boy are gradually missing parts from the bottom up, and at the same time the figures grow taller. Each of the boy’s images are standing on a rusty elliptical iron “puddle.” Three of the “puddles” have a prominent Hebrew inscription, Zikaron Holech Ve’nelam (Memory is disappearing), while the last “puddle” is comprised of an elliptical hole to emphasize the danger of the disappearance of Holocaust memory. Ament concluded that, “The vanishing of material, the vanishing of color and the vanishing of words. That is the vanishing memory.”28

24 Artist’s statement: https://www.ament-daniela.com/copy-of-vanishing-memory?lightbox= dataItem-joq34s3t2 (accessed February 7, 2015); The author’s telephone interviews with Daniela Ament, February 2015, December 2018, February 2019. 25 Courteously of Yad Vashem Museum. 26 The author’s telephone interviews with Daniela Ament, February 2019. 27 Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint, 29–30. 28 Artist’s statement: https://www.ament-daniela.com/copy-of-vanishing-memory?lightbox= dataItem-joq34s3t2 (accessed February 7, 2015); author’s telephone interviews with Daniela Ament, February 2015, December 2018, February 2019.

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*** To express their concern about the place of the Holocaust in the collective memory of future generations, artists used the images of the Warsaw Ghetto boy and Anne Frank. Both Bak and Rothman depicted a faceless figure. Bak portrayed the faceless Warsaw boy in several of his paintings (Figs. 44–45, 129, 130). By doing so, he emphasized the fact that the Warsaw boy is anonymous among the Jewish children killed by the Nazis. He added Jewish symbols, such as the yellow badge and the broken tombstones, to stress the Warsaw boy’s Jewishness. Rothman portrayed the multiplied image of Anne Frank (Fig. 131) to express the “disappearing” of Anne’s facial features from her own memory. This way, Rothman reminds the viewer that as an icon Anne Frank has lost her own identity and personhood. Bak, Bar Hama and Metzger are concerned that the Holocaust will disappear from our collective memory. Bak depicted the boy’s silhouette as almost vanishing into the brown brick wall (Fig. 132). However, Bar Hama used the entire photograph from the Warsaw Ghetto to show how it was gradually absorbed into the cobblestones in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin (Figs. 133–135). Bar Hama is alerting us to pay attention to the process of forgetting the Holocaust and the attempt to erase the Jewish nation’s existence from the world. Like Bar Hama, Metzger showed the entire photograph of the Warsaw Ghetto, capturing it between wooden planks. In almost covering it (Fig. 136), the artist alludes to the danger that the memory of the Holocaust may disappear from the world’s collective memory. In using Anne Frank’s image, another approach to examining the continuity of Holocaust memory was taken by Noam Lahav (Figs. 137–138). By connecting Anne’s face with an embryo in a woman’s womb, and by giving the paintings the title Auschwitz: The Annunciation, Lahav suggested that the Nazis prevented Jewish women victims of the Holocaust from having children, as bearing children meant the continuity of the Jewish people. Thus, the Nazis had sought to erase the Jewish people from the world. There would be no future generations to remember the Holocaust. Unlike the above artists, Haya Graetz-Ran expressed her misgivings about the memory of the events of the Holocaust through the individual story of Anne Frank (Fig. 139). To express her idea, the artist showed Anne’s fragmented face, which can never be completed and made whole. Lastly, Bak and Daniela Ament were concerned with the process of the dissolving Holocaust memory, showing the disintegration of the image of the Warsaw Ghetto boy. Bak depicted the Warsaw boy’s figure disassembling into a tree (Fig. 140), and almost disappearing with only a few items left, such as his shoes, the faceless head with a hat and piece of the yellow badge (Fig. 141). Ament presented a large part of the photograph from the Warsaw Ghetto on one side, and four fragmented sculptures of the Warsaw boy on the other in different stages of disintegration (Fig. 142).

Epilogue The unknown boy from the Warsaw Ghetto and well-known Anne Frank have become icons of the Holocaust. By means of their recognizable photographs, they have come to represent the innocent Jewish children murdered during the Holocaust, in art as well as in general. Researchers have claimed that what the camera captures reflects only a narrow slice of reality, and therefore photographs do not fully explain the event or provide the knowledge required to wholly interpret the images. Furthermore, they suggest that in discussing Holocaust pictures there are two representations, the denotative and the connotative. The denotative representation describes the event from an historical point of view, while the connotative representation shows an interpretive point of view in which the image progressively distances itself from the historical origin and thus becomes a symbol.1 The use of the Warsaw Ghetto boy and Anne Frank’s photographic images in works of art is a worldwide phenomenon. Artists from diverse backgrounds, various ages, and different genders have conveyed an assortment of meanings and messages through these two children’s images. Artists used the Warsaw Ghetto boy and Anne Frank’s photographs as inspiration to express their thoughts, emotions and perceptions of the Holocaust in general and, at the same time, to cope particularly with the fate of these two victims. Working with these images has widely allowed artists to examine their own feelings about the fate of one-and-a-half million vulnerable and helpless Jewish children murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. Some of the artists who depicted the Warsaw Ghetto boy’s image isolated his figure from the convoy in the photograph and portrayed him in various ways. Arnold Trachtman and Yala Korwin presented a dark image emphasizing his vulnerability and helplessness (Figs. 8, 9). Samuel Bak painted the Warsaw boy marked with a target to indicate that Jewish children were marked to be eliminated according to Nazi ideology (Fig. 11). Muriel Nezhnie Helfman reminded us of the Warsaw boy’s fate by adding the German declaration that “The Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no more.” At the same time, she pointed out that the responsible Nazi criminals were caught and brought to justice in the Nuremberg trials by showing the stamp of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg (Fig. 13). To express his deep feelings for the innocent Jewish children murdered during the Holocaust, Aaron Morgan placed a citation from Barbara Sonek’s poem Holocaust on the Warsaw boy’s figure (Fig. 14). Avner Bar Hama combined numerous biblical verses

1 Sontag, On Photography, 3–4; Milton, “The Camera as Weapon: Documentary Photography and the Holocaust,” vol. I, 45; Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, Interpretation of the Evidence, 4; Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” 226–227. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110656916-008

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that all contain the word “generation,” and the Angel of Death with the anonymous Warsaw boy’s image to convey the fate of the Jewish children during the Holocaust and to transmit the memory of the Holocaust from one generation to the next generation (Fig. 15). In another artwork, Bar Hama portrayed the Warsaw boy as a symbol of the helpless children as victims of the Nazis amid a pile of bars of soap to reveal his feelings of danger and death (Fig. 16). Ben Rotman was even more precise in pointing to the Warsaw boy’s fate, placing him in the center of a pile of large colorful skulls. To emphasize the boy’s Jewish identity the artist added a yellow star on his hat (Fig. 17). Karl Stojka and Michael Knigin added a single Nazi soldier aiming his machine gun at the Warsaw boy to emphasize the boy’s inevitable fate. Stojka stressed the boy’s Jewish identity with a yellow Star of David including the letter “J” in the center on the boy’s coat (Fig. 10). Knigin intensified the scene by adding a dramatic background with a blurred train, ruins in vibrant colors that look like burning flames (Fig. 18), or two white doves with their wings spread (Fig. 19). Unlike the artists discussed above, Rolanda Teicher-Yekutiel, Avner Bar Hama and Jacky Yarhi depicted only part of the original scene in the photograph from Warsaw, with additional elements to express their emotions about the fate of the Jewish children during the Holocaust. Teicher-Yekutiel used the familiar character of Pinocchio as an outsider savior of the boy from the Nazis (Fig. 20). Bar Hama placed a loaf of bread, dry, moldy, full of worms on the copy of the cut off photograph from Warsaw in order to depict the children’s hunger in the ghetto (Fig. 22). Yarhi, unlike the artists mentoned above, showed part of each element of the photograph from Warsaw: part of the convoy, part of the Nazi soldier, and part of the boy in the front center, with a Star of David with the word “Jude” on his coat, to treat the fate of the Jewish children in the Warsaw Ghetto (Fig. 23). Contrary to the Warsaw boy’s anonymity, Anne Frank became famous because of her diary in which she integrated her photographs. Many artists worldwide have used her photographic image in artworks to deal with her fate. She, in the same way as the Warsaw boy, became an icon of the Holocaust. Artists portrayed Anne Frank’s image based on her photographs to present their cultural perceptions, feelings, and thoughts of Anne’s fate, each one of them in an individualistic artistic style. Judith Weinshall Liberman, Samuel Kaplan, Susan Keeter and Iris Anne Berger portrayed Anne Frank’s short, cruel life story. On the outline of the map of Europe and with the boxcars in the background, Weinshall Liberman placed multiple images of Anne, marking the path and places she was forced to travel to until she died (Fig. 24). In Kaplan’s depiction we view a collage of scenes from Anne’s life where she appears afraid, distressed and lonely (Fig. 25). Keeter showed three stages of going into hiding, as well as the beginning of hiding, that emphasized Anne’s fate and the rapid change from normal life to a dangerous and frightening life (Figs. 26–28). Berger depicted a collection of milestones in Anne’s short life passing a sense of horrific atmosphere (Fig. 29).

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Jet Schepp, Judith Weinshall Liberman, Brett S. Kaufman, Bill Fink and Iris Anne Berger depicted individual scenes from Anne Frank’s short life story. Schepp portrayed Anne Frank taking a last glance of goodbye at her home before she left for the hiding place (Fig. 30). Weinshall Liberman concentrated on Anne Frank’s hiding place, emphasizing its claustrophobic atmosphere in the annex and in the city of Amsterdam (Figs. 31–32). Both Kaufman and Fink used glass to convey the fragility of freedom in Anne Frank’s life. Kaufman portrayed Anne looking at her own life in the annex through a broken glass window (Fig. 33). Fink enshrined Anne’s image in glass to refer to the denial of freedom she experienced in hiding and in the camps (Fig. 34). Berger referred to two major stages in Anne’s life, the hiding place and Auschwitz, by placing their images on the outline of Anne’s head (Fig. 35). Very little is known about Anne’s experience in the camps. Nevertheless, Marie Helene Ardaen, Ruth Schloss, Oleg Djimbinov, Iris Anne Berger and Aaron Morgan imagined her fate in the camps, daring to visualize her as a prisoner behind bars, barbed wire or merged into the mound of corpses. Ardaen portrayed Anne in a prison cell, wearing a striped prisoner’s garment and gazing sadly through the barred window (Fig. 36). Schloss also visualized Anne as a camp prisoner wearing a striped camp uniform, with her head shaved, a collar around her neck and a sad expression on her face. But she emphasized the dramatic change in Anne’s appearance (Fig. 37). Djimbinov depicted Anne as a camp prisoner as well, but his approach was very direct. Anne, a full-size figure, is standing on a blurry background behind barbed wire, dressed in a striped prisoner’s garment and watched by German soldiers (Fig. 38). Berger and Morgan portrayed Anne’s face among other prisoners’ faces. Berger showed Anne’s face behind the camp fence (Fig. 39), while Morgan went a step further when he depicted Anne’s ghostly appearance merging with a mound of corpses (Fig. 40). We saw that some artists personally identified with the Warsaw Ghetto boy and Anne Frank by depicting themselves as if they were the boy or Anne. Among these artists are survivors who personally experienced the horrors of the Holocaust. Samuel Bak, for example, expressed his ongoing identification with the boy’s fate, connecting it to his own fate and the fate of many other children like him during the Holocaust in several paintings (Fig. 41). In using the boy’s image, Bak also expressed his feeling of guilt that he survived while other Jewish children perished during the Holocaust (Fig. 42). In addition, Bak showed the murdered children’s shadows that constantly haunt him, through the boy’s image (Fig. 43). Bak integrated his self-portrait into a group of figures; once he shows his mask like a selfportrait incorporated in the Warsaw boy’s figure and then, again, his self-portrait is shown as the Warsaw boy himself (Figs. 44–45). In these two artworks, Bak intensified his identification with the Warsaw boy’s fate, seeing it as a symbol of all the children who experienced the Holocaust, including himself. Other artists, who lived outside of Europe during the period of the Holocaust also identified with the Warsaw Ghetto boy or Anne Frank. Amnon Shamosh and

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Weinshall Liberman’s identification with Anne Frank was affected by the fact that, like Anne Frank, both were born in 1929. Shamosh and Haim Maor collaborated on creating the work Anne and I, where Shamosh’s portrait appears behind the depiction of Anne, as if following her example (Fig. 46). Weinshall Liberman expressed her identification with Anne Frank by showing Anne’s schematic image, on which the artist drew her own eye superimposed on Anne’s left eye to “complete” her face (Figs. 47–48), and by merging her own face and Anne’s face (Fig. 49). Artists born after the Holocaust identified with the Warsaw Ghetto boy or Anne Frank as well. Some of them are second generation descendants of Holocaust survivors. They expressed their identification with the Warsaw Ghetto boy or Anne Frank by using their self-images to describe themselves in situations that happened in the Holocaust, as if they were “there.” For example, Michel Kichka portrayed himself as the Warsaw boy, as if he himself were experiencing the evacuation from Warsaw during the Holocaust (Fig. 50). Bar Hama and Nir Hod had no personal connection to the Holocaust but were gripped by the image of the little boy from the Warsaw Ghetto. Bar Hama merged his self-portrait with the Warsaw boy’s photograph in order to identify with the boy’s fate (Fig. 51). The artist confronted his own identification with the boy by depicting an imaginary meeting with him, in order to solve the question of what he would have done if he had been a child during the Holocaust (Fig. 52). Hod identified with the Warsaw boy in a unique and singular way by masquerading as the boy himself (Fig. 53). Second generation descendants of Holocaust survivors Zehava Masser, Anat Masad and Dvora Morag were deeply impressed by reading Anne Frank’s diary, which led them to identify with her. Masser and Masad placed their own images next to that of the young diarist (Figs. 54–56), while Morag merged Anne’s image and her own likeness with other elements referring to the Holocaust (Figs. 57–58). Asaf Hanuka presented a very different point of view from that of the artists discussed above. He combined Anne Frank’s image with his own face to examine his feelings about the Holocaust and its place in his Jewish identity as a Mizrahi Israeli (Fig. 59). To depict violence, cruelty, and atrocities against humanity, particularly children in other parts of the world, some artists used the Warsaw Ghetto boy and Anne Frank’s images as symbols representing the Holocaust in a universal context. Furthermore, they did so to demonstrate that even after the Holocaust these acts continue, as if the lessons of the Holocaust have not been learned. Renato Guttuso, Werner Horvath, Jacob Gildor and Michael Knigin refer to the trauma of World War II in general through the Warsaw boy and Anne Frank’s images, albeit each in his own way. Guttuso chose the Warsaw boy’s image to refer not only to the Holocaust but also to the Ardeatine massacre, emphasizing the results of the German’s aggression toward the innocent civilian population, including blameless children, during World War II (Fig. 60). Horvath chose to create a large

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image of Anne Frank together with black and white bald, naked and emaciated children’s figures to symbolize World War II and all the vulnerable children murdered in the Holocaust. The artist surrounded Anne Frank with vicious creatures representing the Nazi aggressors, and with the American Statue of Liberty, as representative of the bystanders who remained passive to the plight of the Jewish people during the Holocaust (Fig. 68). Both Jacob Gildor and Michael Knigin presented Anne Frank’s image in a universal manner, as well. Gildor used Anne Frank’s image to emphasize the Nazi aggressors’ brutal behavior and its tragic and deadly results (Fig. 69), while Knigin used Anne Frank’s image as a warning sign to the world, pointing to the result of fanatical violence (Fig. 70).In contrast, Otto Schier “planted” the Warsaw boy’s image into the convoy of the Polish population (Jews and non-Jews alike) captured by the Nazis during World War II, making him a universal symbol of the victims of the Nazi regime (Fig. 61). Judy Chicago, Adel Abdessemed, Gustav Metzger and Setsuko Ono used the Warsaw boy’s image not only to symbolize violence against innocent and vulnerable children during the Holocaust, but also to emphasize questions about humanity raised by the Holocaust. By presenting the Warsaw boy’s image with the Nazi soldier aiming his machinegun at him as a centerpiece, and by surrounding it with images of wounded children from around the world in contemporary society, Chicago took a universal approach toward the Holocaust (Fig. 62). Abdessemed made the Warsaw boy a universal icon representing not only the children during the Holocaust but also children who were potential victims of brutal human behavior by detaching the boy from the original context (Fig. 63). Metzger used the Warsaw boy’s image to transmit a universal message that the world is not safe from catastrophes such as the Holocaust (Fig. 64). The Warsaw boy’s image served Ono to make a universal statement against violence in general and children’s involvement in struggle and resistance (Fig. 66). Unlike the artists discussed above, Lin used the image of the child from Warsaw to protest against the growing phenomenon of Holocaust denial, asking how far it will go (Fig. 67). Ruth Schloss and Michael James Toomy considered the untimely loss of life of the children during the Holocaust, who had no opportunity to realize their dreams and aspirations. Schloss dealt with Anne Frank’s unfulfilled dreams of being an actress in Hollywood (Fig. 71). Toomy addressed the inability of the helpless Warsaw boy to overpower the Nazi soldier and indicates that the boy’s short life ended without an opportunity for him to realize his dreams, goals or wishes (Fig. 65). The image of Anne Frank served William Rock, Huang Xiang, and Kurt Karst to explore the violation of human rights during the Holocaust. Rock and Xiang showed Anne Frank as a symbol of courageous resistance to oppression by the perpetrators, for Xiang an opportunity for him to realize his own experience of subjugation (Fig.72). Karst, on the other hand, was inspired by Anne’s strong faith that

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people are good at heart when designing the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial (Fig. 73). Linda Stein chose the image of Anne Frank as one of ten fierce female heroes, seeing Anne’s writing while in hiding as a very brave weapon against the Nazi oppressors (Figs. 75–76). Alexsandro Palombo used both the Warsaw boy and Anne Frank’s well-known images from the Holocaust to arouse awareness of all forms of intolerance, such as racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia, while at the same time remembering the Holocaust (Figs. 77–79). Other artists present the Warsaw Ghetto boy and Anne Frank with emphasis on their Jewish identity. They use characteristic Jewish symbols or in an implied manner underscore the intention of the Nazis to eliminate the potential continuation of the Jewish people – through the children. Susan Keeter, Mitzi Trachtenberg, and Jennifer Gottschalk stress the Jewish identity of both children by combining the yellow Star of David with the word “Jude” in its center with their images. Keeter portrayed Anne Frank wearing it on her colorful striped blouse (Fig. 84). Trachtenberg emphasized Anne’s Jewish identity and at the same time the oppressive act of marking, humiliating and excluding the Jews from human society, by adding the growing yellow Star of David on the multiplied image of Anne Frank (Fig. 85). Gottschalk highlighted the Warsaw boy’s Jewish identity by including a yellow star on his coat and by spreading the names of Jews killed by the Nazis on the background as well as creating the two large yellow Jewish badges from the victims names. She conveyed the idea that the Jewish yellow badges were not a mark of disgrace, but rather badges of courage (Fig. 80). By using a symbolic yellow Star of David made of ribbons Samuel Bak highlighted the Warsaw boy’s Jewish identity and the fact that the boy’s only “crime” had been that he was a Jew (Fig. 81). Israel Bernbaum, like Palombo, used both the Warsaw boy and Anne Frank’s well-known images from the Holocaust. However, unlike Palombo, he combined them into one artwork. Bernbaum used the yellow Star of David on the children’s coats in the front of the picture and in the convoy at the back to emphasize the fate of Jewish children during the Holocaust (Fig. 86). Judy Chicago and Marc Chagall addressed the Warsaw boy and Anne Frank’s Jewish origin in an obscured manner. Chicago used the Warsaw boy’s iconic image to represent all the disempowered Jewish children who came to a violent end at the hands of mighty Nazi adults (Fig. 87). In Chagall’s depiction, he refers to the Jewish identity of Anne Frank through the Jewish figures on the bottom of the drawing (Fig. 88). Avner Bar Hama and Tamar Messer used phrases from the Bible to emphasize the Warsaw boy’s Jewish identity. Bar Hama incorporated verses from the Bible containing the word “generation” with the full photograph of the Stroop Report to stress the importance of passing on information about the Holocaust from generation to

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generation, so it will never be forgotten (Fig. 82). Messer added one verse from Lamentations 2:21 to the Warsaw boy’s image to emphasize his Jewish identity (Fig. 83). Jewish artists from both Israel (Avner Bar Hama and David Tartakover) and the United States (Michael Knigin and Hal Goldberg) used images of the Warsaw Ghetto boy and Anne Frank to make imaginary connections between these figures and the establishment of the modern State of Israel. They used known features and symbols representing the State of Israel, even though nothing is known about the Warsaw Ghetto boy’s association with the Zionist idea of creating the state; Anne Frank and her family were assimilated Jews and had no intention to immigrate to Israel. The artists imagined these two children living in the new Jewish nation; there, as icons of the Holocaust, they indeed remain ever present in Israeli consciousness. Drora Weitzman, Avner Bar Hama, Michael Knigin and David Tartakover related to the Zionist idea, the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel. Weitzman placed Herzl and Anne Frank’s images side by side, both important to the foundation of the State of Israel, as representatives of Zionism and the Holocaust (Fig. 89). By merging the Warsaw boy’s image and Herzl’s figure, Bar Hama connected Herzl’s Zionist vision to the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel (Fig. 90). In another work, the artist constructed a link between the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel on the Jewish historical timeline (Fig. 91). Through the image of Anne Frank on a background changing from the hiding place in Amsterdam to the landscape of Jerusalem Knigin created the connection between the Holocaust and the fulfillment of the Zionist dream of rebuilding the Jewish nation (Fig. 92). Tartakover uses both images of the Warsaw boy and Anne Frank in his artwork to link the Holocaust and the establishment of the Jewish State as milestones on the Jewish historical timeline, as well (Fig. 93). Avner Bar Hama and Hal Goldberg used the image of the Western Wall in Jerusalem. By combining the image of the Warsaw boy from the Holocaust and a contemporary photograph of the Western Wall Bar Hama creates a historical continuity of vulnerability and sacrifice of the Jewish people (Fig. 94). Goldberg depicted Anne Frank in an imaginary scene of surviving the Holocaust and coming to the Western Wall as an Israeli soldier to participate in the rebuilding of the Jewish state (Fig. 95). Knigin, like Goldberg, imagined Anne Frank as having survived the Holocaust, and, by depicting the flag of Israel in the background, he connected Anne to the establishment of the State of Israel (Fig. 96). We saw that the unknown Warsaw Ghetto boy and the well-known Anne Frank are connected to their uniqueness. The Warsaw boy’s anonymity has enabled artists to use his image in diverse ways. Artists used his powerful image to convey political messages and statements, whether to refer to the era of the Nazi regime or to contemporary conflicts. Arnold Trachtman placed the Warsaw boy’s image between Hitler and the wealthy industrialists to make the point that collaboration between capital and government can cause a humanitarian catastrophe (Fig. 97). Unlike Trachtman,

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António Moreira Antunes used the entire photograph of the convoy of Warsaw Jews to protest the Israeli army’s invasion of Lebanon in a critical and political way, by showing all the people dressed like Arabs and the Israeli soldiers as Nazis (Fig. 100). In order to communicate a political and critical message regarding the IsraeliPalestinian conflict from opposite points of view, Carlos Latuff, Alan Schechner and Avner Bar Hama used the iconic photograph of the Warsaw boy. Latuff, like Antunes, depicted the Jewish convoy dressed like Arabs and the Israeli soldiers as Nazis, asking how the Jewish nation that had experienced the Holocaust could suppress another nation (Fig. 101). By making a connection between the Holocaust and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Schechner presented his idea that abused children often become abusers themselves. Thus, he suggested that by preventing victimization of children on both sides (Israelis and Palestinians) the conflict might be resolved (Fig. 102). Bar Hama referred to the differences in the education of future generations in the Jewish and Palestinian societies that exacerbates the schism between them. His claim is that Jews educate their children to follow the watchwords of “Never Again!,” while Palestinians incite their children to more slaughter and more murder (Figs. 103–105). In addition, Bar Hama challenged Holocaust denial by using tangible photographic evidence of the Nazis’ atrocious crimes in his work (Fig. 106). Several artists used the image of the Warsaw boy to state their opinion about internal Israeli issues. Yossi Shachar responded to the incident in Hebron on April 2014 in two caricatures. In the first set of drawings, he compared the Warsaw boy from the past, who was not able to resist the Nazi soldiers, with the Israeli soldier of the present, able to fight back but afraid to be accused by the media of being a violator of the weak (Fig. 107). In the second set of illustrations, which looks almost the same as the previous caricatures, the artist dealt with the IDF legal adviser’s Open-Fire Regulations that restrict Israeli soldiers from replying with fire against Palestinians’ aggressive behavior toward them (Fig. 108). In another caricature, Shachar reacted to an occurrence in which Palestinians attacked three lost Israeli soldiers, who accidently drove into a Palestinian city, stating that when Arabs come into Israel they go through a humiliating examination; when a Israeli enters an Arab village, he is confronted by a “respectable lynching” (Fig. 109). Moshik Lin used the entire photograph from Warsaw in his criticism of Yehonatan Geffen’s poem, in which Geffen compared Ahed Tamimi, the Palestinian teenager who slapped an Israeli soldier’s face, to David who slapped Goliath, relegating Tamimi to the ranks of Anne Frank, Hannah Szenes and Jeanne d’Arc. The artist, Moshik Lin, asserted that the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are not the same and are not comparable (Fig. 110). Guy Morad and Moshik Lin used the iconic photograph of the Warsaw boy in referring to the demonstration by ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem. In order to comment on the confrontation between secular Jews and ultra-Orthodox Jews, Morad placed two drawings next to each other. One illustration shows the Nazi soldier aiming at the Warsaw boy, a reminder of the Nazi atrocities against Jews during the Holocaust, while the other portrays a little Jewish ultra-Orthodox boy, positioned exactly like the Warsaw boy, pointing his finger

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at the unarmed Israeli policeman, accusing him of being a Nazi (Fig. 111). Lin criticized the ultra-Orthodox attitude toward secular Jews, seeing them as the enemy when calling them “Zionazi” (Fig. 112). The Warsaw boy’s iconic image served as a vehicle for Michael (Mysh) Rozanov to refer to the internal Jewish-Israeli conflict regarding the many illegal African refugees in Israel. The artist emphasized the contrast between the image of the banished and vulnerable Jewish boy and the aggressor he became toward the refugees, who now need his attention and help (Fig. 113). Uri Fink referred to another internal Jewish-Israeli issue connected to the inadequate care of Holocaust survivors by the National Insurance Institute by portraying the Warsaw boy as an adult survivor (Fig. 114). With regard to Anne Frank, artists have used her image from her famous photographs in several ways to describe her uniqueness. One approach has been for artists to depict Anne’s secret annex, relying on her diary descriptions of her hiding place, often making references to the text from her diary. In previous chapters, we discussed Samuel Kaplan (Fig. 25), Susan Keeter (Figs. 27–28), Iris Anne Berger (Fig. 29), and Judith Weinshall Liberman’s (Figs. 31–32) varied depictions of Anne’s hiding place. In her installation, Ayana Friedman also addressed Anne’s feeling of being trapped in the annex and her desire to breathe fresh air (Fig. 115). Another artistic treatment was to show the connection between Anne and her diary. I have discussed several artworks linking Anne’s image and her diary in previous chapters. Haim Maor (Fig. 46), Zehava Masser (Figs. 54–55) and Asaf Hanuka (Fig. 59) portrayed her sitting at her desk and writing in her diary. Knigin depicted Anne writing in her diary, once to emphasize the Zionist dream of returning to the Land of Israel (Fig. 92), a second time to imagine Anne surviving the Holocaust (Fig. 96). Horvath used Anne’s image to symbolize World War II and the Holocaust (Fig. 68). Susan Keeter and June Allan showed Anne as a happy and joyful girl, who, although in hiding, enjoyed writing in her diary (Figs. 84, 117). Doreen Kern also depicted Anne’s happiness in writing in her diary and at the same time she drew attention to Anne’s growing into womanhood, which is portrayed in the diary (Fig. 116). Alexsandro Palombo (Fig. 118) and Sam Philipe (Fig. 119) presented Anne sitting at a desk, writing in her diary with a serious look on her face. Lawrence Holofcener and Palombo portrayed Anne holding her diary close to her heart. Holofcener focused on Anne’s illuminated and happy face when holding the diary (Fig. 120), whereas Palombo showed Anne holding her diary as a camp inmate wearing a prisoner’s uniform behind a barbed wire fence (Fig. 121). Mike and Doug Starn stressed the essence of Anne Frank as an iconic symbol, melding her image and diary by merging text and persona (Fig. 122). There are artists who created statues of Anne Frank in public spaces to express her uniqueness. We previously discussed Schepp’s bronze statue in Merwedeplein, Amsterdam, showing Anne Frank looking one last time at her home in Merwedeplein,

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Amsterdam, before going to the hiding place (Fig. 30). Prior to this statue, a smaller scale of the same statue was placed in the city of Purmerend, the Netherlands (Fig. 123). We also addressed Anne Frank’s statue created by Greg Stone for the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial in Boise, Idaho, portraying Anne Frank’s figure standing in her hiding place holding her diary (Fig. 74). In addition to the statues by Jet Schepp (Figs. 30, 123), many other sculptures of Anne Frank show her positioned on a raised base, such as in those works by Pieter d’Hont, Andriessen Mari Sylvester, Josephus (Joep) G. M. Coppens, as well as the statue in the Rose Garden in Fukuyama City, Japan. The elevated sculpture not only allows viewers to see the statue from afar, but also glorifies Anne Frank by placing her on a pedestal. In d’Hont’s statue, Anne is standing with confidence, with a look of determination on her face (Fig. 124). Sylvester portrayed Anne as a determined adolescent girl (Fig. 125). The Japanese statue presents Anne as a gentle, young and innocent girl (Fig. 126). Unlike the previous statues, in Coppens’ depiction Anne is shown as a tortured teenage girl, handcuffed and leaning back, crying out (Fig. 127). In Sara Pons Arnal’s statue, a life-size sculpture of Anne Frank is placed on a canopy affixed to a building. Anne is lying over the edge of the canopy holding her diary, gazing ahead in solemn contemplation (Fig. 128). Artists used the images of the Warsaw Ghetto boy and Anne Frank to examine the boundaries of memory and our ability to organize the memory of the Holocaust. They expressed their concern about the place of the Holocaust in the collective memory of future generations. Will the memory of the Holocaust always be part of our collective sorrow, or will it vanish through the years? One way the artists chose to deal with the fragile memory of the Holocaust was by depicting faceless figures of the Warsaw boy and Anne Frank. Samuel Bak portrayed the Warsaw boy faceless in several of his paintings (Figs. 44, 45, 129, 130) to emphasize the fact that he is an anonymous victim, an icon of all Jewish children killed by the Nazis. He combined Jewish symbols, such as the yellow badge and the broken tombstones, to highlight the Warsaw boy’s Jewish identity. Marjolein Rothman depicted the multiple images of Anne Frank (Fig. 131) to convey her own feelings and concern about the fact that, as an icon, Anne had lost her identity and personhood. Another concern expressed by Samuel Bak, Avner Bar Hama and Gustav Metzger was that the Holocaust will disappear from our collective memory. Bak showed the isolated boy’s silhouette as almost vanishing into the brown brick wall (Fig. 132). Bar Hama demonstrated how the entire photograph from the Warsaw Ghetto is gradually disappearing into the cobblestones in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, alerting us to pay attention to the process of forgetting the Holocaust (Figs. 133–135). Metzger presented the entire photograph of the Warsaw Ghetto as well, capturing it between wooden planks, almost covering it, referring to the danger of the disappearance of the memory of the Holocaust (Fig. 136).

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A unique approach to examining the continuity of Holocaust memory was taken by Noam Lahav (Figs. 137–138). He connected Anne’s face with an embryo in a woman’s womb, and he gave the paintings the title Auschwitz: The Annunciation. Lahav pointed out that by preventing Jewish women victims of the Holocaust from having children the Nazis meant to stop the continuity of the Jewish people – there would be no future generations to remember the Holocaust. Haya Graetz-Ran expressed her concern about the memory of the Holocaust through the individual story of Anne Frank (Fig. 139), presenting Anne’s fragmented face, which can never be restored and made whole. Lastly, Samuel Bak and Daniela Ament used the disintegrating image of the Warsaw Ghetto boy to represent their worry that the process of dissolving Holocaust memory is taking place. Bak showed the Warsaw boy’s figure disassembling into a tree (Fig. 140) and almost disappearing with only a few items left (Fig. 141). Ament presented a large part of the photograph from the Warsaw Ghetto, and next to it four fragmented sculptures of the Warsaw boy in different stages of disintegration (Fig. 142). As an icon of the Holocaust in art, the Warsaw boy sometimes is shown in the entire photograph from the ghetto; sometimes he appears with the Nazi soldier pointing his submachine gun at him, but most frequently, he is shown alone. The internationally recognized photographs of Anne Frank taken in Amsterdam in 1939, 1940 or 1942 (Figs. 2–7) were used by artists to come to terms with the Holocaust in general, and to deal with the fate of the Jewish children in particular. Images of both the Warsaw Ghetto boy and Anne Frank served artists as a source of inspiration, allowing them to express their feelings and ideas about Holocaust events in general, while focusing particularly on the fate of these two children. Artists who used the Warsaw Ghetto boy and Anne Frank’s images were Holocaust survivors, non-survivors, artists born outside of Europe during the Nazi era, second-generation descendants of Holocaust survivors, or others with no personal connection to the Holocaust. Because of the artists’ inability to include all means of expression and ways of dealing with the subject in a single artwork, they created series of works. Ruth Schloss presented fifty paintings 1981, in which Anne Frank’s face is seen simultaneously in Jewish and universal contexts. In 1982, Iris Anne Berger created a series of twenty-eight paintings depicting Anne Frank, inspired by reading Anne Frank’s diary and visiting the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Judith Weinshall Liberman exhibited her series of Holocaust Wall Hangings in 1990, which include Anne Frank’s image in most of them. Samuel Bak started to use the Warsaw Ghetto boy’s image in the mid-1990s. It became central in his paintings and he uses it obsessively in his numerous paintings to this very day. Avner Bar Hama began to use the Warsaw Ghetto boy’s image in the early 2000s, and he too uses the image of the Warsaw boy earnestly in his art to treat a range of topics relating to his Jewish-Israeli identity. Michael Knigin used both the Warsaw Ghetto boy and Anne Frank’s images in many of his artworks between 2000–2011 when dealing with the Holocaust.

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In order to stress their feelings, ideas and messages, many artists added general elements to the Warsaw Ghetto boy and Anne Frank’s images to numerous artworks. For example, Samuel Bak added a wooden cross to support the Warsaw boy’s figure and a target to cover his face (Fig. 11); Avner Bar Hama presented the Angel of Death next to the boy from Warsaw (Fig. 15); the image of the Warsaw boy is reflected in a pile of bars of soap (Fig. 16); or an inedible loaf of bread on the photograph from the Warsaw Ghetto (Fig. 22). Renato Guttuso depicted vicious faces of horses around the faceless Warsaw boy (Fig. 60). Gustav Metzger placed a pile of rubble in front of the enlarged photograph of the boy from Warsaw (Fig. 64). On top of Anne Frank’s dress, in a painting of her by William Rock, Huang Xiang added the calligraphy of his poem about Anne Frank (Fig. 72). Michael Knigin showed two white doves with their wings spread above the boy’s head (Fig. 19) or a common warning sign for radioactivity that he placed on a page from Anne Frank’s diary with her photograph (Fig. 2). Some artists used famous popular cultural figures to lend power to their depictions. Rolanda Teicher-Yekutiel used the character of Pinocchio as a “mediator” on her behalf to prevent a Nazi soldier from shooting the Warsaw boy (Fig. 20). Linda Stein interspersed Anne Frank’s photographs with images of popular animated female warriors, Pop icon Princess Mononoke and Wonder Woman, to present Anne Frank as a universal hero and a female “warrior” who stood against the Nazis (Figs. 75–76). To mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Alexsandro Palombo created images using characters from the long-running American animated television series, The Simpsons. The artist incorporated the figures of the Warsaw boy and Anne Frank into his cartoons, meant to educate new generations and tell them about what happened (Figs. 77–79, 118, 121). The boy from the Warsaw Ghetto and Anne Frank are vivid visual icons of the Holocaust in art today. We must ask ourselves if they will continue to be such icons for future generations or will they fade away? Only time will tell.

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Rapoport, Nathan. “Memoir of the Warsaw Ghetto Monument.” In The Art of Memory, Holocaust Memorials in History, edited by James E. Young, 103–197. New York: The Jewish Museum and Prestel, 1994. Raskin, Richard. A Child at Gunpoint: A Case Study in the Life of a Photo. Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2004. Rees, Linda. Nezhnie: Weaver and Innovative Artist. St. Louis, MO: Image Line Publication, 2004. Rosenfeld, A. H. “Popularization and Memory: The Case of Anne Frank.” In Lessons and Legacies, the Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World, edited by P. Hayes, 243–278 Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991. Rosenthal, Norman. “Survival.” In Peyton-Jones, Julia, and Ulrich Obrist, Hans, eds. Gustav Metzger, Decades: 1959–2009. London: Koenig Books, 2009. Roskis, David. Facing Evil: Responses to Calamities in Contemporary Jewish Culture. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1993 (Hebrew). Shalit, David. “The Artist’s Dialogue with Jewish Themes,” Etrog: Periodical for Education, Judaism, and Society 35, (2007): 40–45 (Hebrew). Shamosh, Amnon. “Anna and I.” In Amnon Shamosh, Upon the Harp with a Solemn Sound. Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1984 (Hebrew). Shamosh, Amnon. Past Revisited Memoirs. Tel Aviv: Aviv, 2007 (Hebrew). Shamosh, Amnon. Anna Frank and I, A Poem in 3 Versions and 18 Translations. Ra’anana: Even Hoshen, 2010 (Hebrew with translation into 18 languages). Shner-Neshamit, Sarah. Gam la-metim lo heniḥu: yizur sabbon mi-shuman adam biṾez’eshats’parvar Gdansḳ (No Peace Even for the Dead: The Manufacture of Soap from Human Fat). Lohamei Hagetaot: Beit Lohamei Hagetaot, 1998 (Hebrew). Shraiber, Dvir. “The Man with the Suitcase,” an interview with Avner Bar Hama, Dimui, 17, 1999, 77–80. (Hebrew). Sion, Brigitte. “Anne Frank as Icon, from Human Rights to Holocaust Denial,” In Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory, edited by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler, 178–192. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012. Sontag, Susan. On Photography, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. Stone, Amy. “Linda Stein, the making of an artist-activist, feminist Jew.” Na’amat Woman, Spring, 2015: 18–23. Stroop, Jürgen. The Stroop Report: The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More! Translated from German and annotated by Sybil Milton, Introduction by Andrzej Wirth. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979. Struk, Janina. Photographing the Holocaust, Interpretation of the Evidence. London-New York: I. B. Tauris, 2004. Tartakover, David. Ha’Hachraza al Hakamat Ha’Medina (Proclamation of Independence). Tel Aviv: Modan, 1988 (Hebrew). Teeuwisse, Jan, Taco Slagter, and Mirjam Beerman. Beeldhouwer Pieter d’Hont Leven en Werk 1917–1997. Utrecht: Het Spectrum, [1997] 1999 (Dutch). Tydor Baumel, Judith. Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust. London and Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 1998. Van Galen Last, Dick, and Wolfswinkel Rolf. Dutch Holocaust Literature in Historical Perspective. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996. Weinshall Liberman, Judith, ed. Holocaust Wall Hangings. South Deerfield, MA: Schoen Books, 2002. Weinshall Liberman, Judith. Holocaust Wall Hangings. Rockland, Massachusetts: Charles River Lithography, 2002. Weinshall Liberman, Judith. My Life into my Art, an Autobiography. USA: Booklocker, 2007.

206

Bibliography

Young, James E. The Texture of Memory, Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven- London: Yale University Press, 1993. Young, James E. “The Anne Frank House Holland’s Memorial ‘Shrine of the Book,’” In The Art of Memory Holocaust Memorials in History, edited by James E. Young, 131. Munich: PrestelVerlag, 1994. Zelizer, Barbie. Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Catalogs Bak, Samuel. The Landscape of Jewish Experience. Washington, DC: B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum, 1997. Berger, Rachel. “ʽIn Every Generation . . . ’ the Holocaust in the Works of Avner Bar Hama.” In The Walls Stand in Witness – Avner Bar Hama, Rehovot: The Municipal Art Gallery Smilansky Cultural Center, 2007 (Hebrew). Bohm-Duchen, Monica, ed. After Auschwitz, Responses to the Holocaust in Contemporary Art. London: Lund Humphries, 1995. Brutin, Batya. Anne Frank in the Artists Eyes. Budapest: Peter Wilhelm Art Center, 2009. Brutin, Batya. Israel Bernbaum Painting His Story, In Commemoration of the 70th year Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Montclair, NJ: Montclair State University, 2013. Carrion-Murayari, Gary, and Massimiliano, Giono. eds. Gustav Metzger. New York: New Museum, 2011. Chicago, Judy. Holocaust Project: from Darkness into Light, with photography by Donald Woodman. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. Feinstein, Stephen C. ed. Witness and Legacy: Contemporary Art about the Holocaust. Minneapolis, MN: Lerner Publications Company, 1995. Feinstein, Stephen C., ed. Absent / Presence, The Artistic Memory of the Holocaust and Genocide. Minneapolis, MN: Katherine E. Gallery and University of Minnesota, 1999. Feinstein, Stephen C. “Conceptualizing the Scale of Destruction, Judith Weinshall Liberman’s Wall Hangings about the Holocaust.” In Holocaust Wall Hangings, edited by Judith Weinshall Liberman, 5–10. South Deerfield, MA: Schoen Books, 2002. Fewell, Danna Nolan, and Gary A. Phillips. Icon of loss: Recent Paintings by Samuel Bak. Boston: Pucker Gallery, 2008. Luski, Aïm. Painting, Above & Beyond. Ramat Gan: The Museum of Israeli Art, 1994 (Hebrew). O’Brien, Sophie. “Transformation and Transcendence.” In Gustav Metzger, Decades: 1959–2009, edited by Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist, 32–37, London: Koenig Books, 2009. Salhoov, Shva. “My Child,” in Adel Abdessemed Mon Enfant. Tel Aviv: Dvir Gallery, 2014 (Hebrew and English). Schloss, Ruth. Anne Frank in Perspective. 1981 (Hebrew and English). Shendar, Yehudit, ed. An Arduous Road: Samuel Bak, 60 Years of Creativity. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2006. Shir, Hana, and Honi Hameagel. To Feel Again. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1983 (Hebrew). Sperber, David. Bein Yisra’el La’amim (Between Israel and the other nations) Rama Gan: Bar-Ilan University, The Faculty of Jewish Studies, The Leiber Center for Jewish Art Exhibitions, 2007 (Hebrew). Stein, Linda, ed. Holocaust Heroes: Fierce Females, Tapestries and Sculpture by Linda Stein. Philadelphia, PA: Old City Publishing(2016).

The Author’s Interviews and Correspondence with the Artists

207

Stein, Linda. “The Protector and Exemplar.” In Holocaust Heroes: Fierce Females, Tapestries and Sculpture by Linda Stein, edited by Stein, Linda, 14–18. Philadelphia, PA: Old City Publishing, 2016. Steinem, Gloria. “Thoughts on Viewing Holocaust Heroes,” In Holocaust Heroes: Fierce Females, Tapestries and Sculpture by Linda Stein, edited by Stein, Linda, 7–8, Philadelphia, PA: Old City Publishing, 2016. Stojka, Kart. Ein Kind in Birkenau, Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial, 1992(German). The Art of Samuel Bak: Memory and Metaphor. Durham, New Hampshire: University of New Hampshire Art Gallery, 2006. The Struggle is Eternal, Jerusalem: Artists House. April, 1988 (Hebrew). Twentieth International Salon of Cartoons 1983, Man and his world. Montreal, Canada, 1983. Weinshall Liberman, Judith. The Holocaust Wall Hangings. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1992 (Hebrew and English).

Archive Yad Vashem Archive AM4/1207.

Papers Presented at Conferences Bak, Samuel. “Speaking about the Unspeakable.” Paper presented at the Council of Europe, International Colloquy: Teaching about the Holocaust and Artistic Creation, Strasburg, France, October, 2002. Bak, Samuel. “Icons of Loss – The Image of the Warsaw Boy in the Art of Samuel Bak.” Paper presented at the 6th International Conference on Teaching the Shoah: Fighting Racism and Prejudice, at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, July 10, 2008.

Video Weinshall Liberman, Judith, and Lewis Bob, The Holocaust Wall Hangings, 1996.

Television Conversation between Yael Paz and Avner Bar Hama prior to recording the program “100 Years of Israeli Art” broadcast on Israeli television Channel 2 in January 2006.

The Author’s Interviews and Correspondence with the Artists Abdessemed, Adel (with Rémi Amiot-Yana, assistant to the artist) – December 2018. Allan, June – Summer 2007.

208

Bibliography

Ament, Daniela – February 2015, December 2018; February 2019. Ardaen, Marie Helene – July 2015, January, March 2018. Bak, Samuel – Strasbourg, October 2002 and Jerusalem, July 2008, January 2012. Bar Hama, Avner – July 2008, March 2010, November 2011, and January 2012. Berger, Iris Anne – October 2007. Chicago, Judy – November 2011. Coppens, Josephus (Joep) G. M. – November 2018. Djimbinov, Oleg – July 2007. Fensh, Binyamin – October 2018. Fink, Bill – September 2008. Fink, Uri – October 2018. Gildor, Jacob – Holon, Israel, January 2009. Goldberg, Hal – December 2008. Gottschalk, Jennifer – January 2009. Graetz-Ran, Haya – March 2003. Hanuka, Asaf – November 2018. Haskins, Elizondo Ralph – March 2015. Hod, Nir – January 2017. Holofcener, Lawrence – Summer 2007. Horvath, Werner – December 2008, April 2009. Huang, Xiang – February 2009. Kaufman, S. Brett – December 2009. Keeter, Susan – Syracuse NY, September 2007. Kern, Doreen – July, October 2007. Kichka, Michel – September 2012, September 2018. Knigin, Michael – September-November 2009. Korwin, Yala – August-September 2008, December 2011. Lahav, Noam – Jerusalem, Israel, February-March 2009. Latuff, Carlos – September-October 2018. Lin, Moshik – January 2015, October 2018. Masad, Anat – Kibbutz Kfar Masaryk, Israel, November-December 2008. Masser, Zehava – Ashkelon, Israel, August 2008. Messer, Tamar – December 2018. Morad, Guy – February 2012. Morag, Dvora – Tel Aviv, Israel, July 2008. Morgan, Aaron – August-September 2008, February 2012. Ono, Setsuko – September 2018. Palombo, Alexsandro (with Vanessa Esteban, assistant to the artist) – April 2016. Philipe, Sam – November-December 2018. Rapaport, Julian (Yonatan) – Jerusalem, August-September 2018. Rock, William – February 2009. Rothman, Marjolein – August 2007. Rotman, Ben – October-November 2009. Rozanov, Michael (“Mysh”) – September 2016. Schechner, Alan – Netanya, Israel, Summer 2010, December 2011. Schepp, Jet – October 2007, December 2008. Schloss, Ruth – Kfar Shmaryahu, Israel, February 2006. Shachar, Yossi – October 2018. Shamosh, Amnon – September 2008.

The Author’s Interviews and Correspondence with the Artists

Starn, Mike and Doug – March 2007. Stein, Linda – New York, NY, April 2016. Stojka, Karl – (with Bianca Stojka-Davis the artist’s granddaughter) – October 2019. Teicher-Yekutiel, Rolanda – Tel Aviv, May 1998, December 2011. Toomy, Michael James – September and December 2015. Trachtenberg, Mitzi – January 2016. Trachtman, Arnold – October 2008, November 2011. Weinshall Liberman, Judith – Boston, MA, September 2007. Weitzman, Drora – Netanya, Israel 2009. Yarhi, Jacky – October 2018.

209

Index Abdessemed, Adel 86–88, 117, 195 Amsterdam, The Netherlands 7, 11, 34, 35, 40, 42–44, 50, 54, 64, 74, 75, 79, 95, 99–100, 116, 122, 130, 156–159, 160–161, 162, 164, 165, 167, 172, 186, 193, 197, 199–201 Anielewicz, Mordechai 125 Anne Frank’ diary 2, 3, 7–8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 33, 35–39, 40, 42–46, 48, 49, 50, 54, 64–66, 74, 94–96, 98–100, 102, 110, 111, 113, 116, 118, 129–131, 153, 165, 167, 169, 171, 172–173, 178, 192, 194, 199, 201, 202 Anne Frank House 3, 10, 40, 50, 64, 162, 167, 201 Annex 7, 11, 13, 38, 41, 44, 54, 99, 153–154, 157, 159, 171, 193, 199 Ardaen, Marie Helene 48, 54, 193 Ardeatine massacre 82, 117, 194 Auschwitz 8, 17, 34, 47, 48, 54, 73, 84, 103, 104 , 113, 126, 141, 183, 184, 190, 193, 201–202 Baigell, Matthew 11 Bak, Samuel 19–21, 53, 56–63, 80, 105–118, 175–177, 179, 186, 187, 190, 191, 193, 196, 200–202 Bar Hama, Avner 23, 24, 30, 53, 71, 72, 80, 107, 108, 119, 121, 122, 126, 129, 130, 135, 138–141, 146, 170, 180, 182, 184, 190, 191, 192, 194, 196–198, 200–202 Basel, Switzerland 120 Ben-Gurion, David 122 Bergen Belsen 8, 34, 54, 100, 104, 161, 182 Berger, Iris Anne 39–41, 47, 51, 52, 54, 55, 154, 171, 192, 193, 199, 201 Bergman, Ingmar 4 Bernbaum, Israel 112, 118, 196 Bible 108, 119, 196 Bohm-Duchen, Monica 6, 10 Boise, Idaho 98, 100, 161, 164, 172, 200 British Mandate 120 Chagall, Marc 115, 119, 196 Chicago, Judy 85, 86, 115, 117, 119, 195, 196 Dawidowicz, Lucy 2, 19 d’Hont, Pieter 165, 172, 200

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110656916-010

Djimbinov, Oleg 50, 54, 55, 193 Drake, Leslie 98 Eichmann, Adolf 16, 124, 125 Epstein, Samek 59 Fink, Bill 46, 47, 54, 193 Fink, Uri 152, 153, 171, 199 First Zionist Congress 120 Fischl, Peter L. 4 Frankfurt, Germany 7, 34, 54, 161 Gandhi, Mahatma 100 Germany 6, 7, 12, 17, 32, 34, 44, 49, 54, 88, 106, 120, 133 Gies, Miep 7, 37, 44, 102 Gildor, Jacob 93, 117, 194, 195 Goldberg, Hal 127, 128, 129, 130, 197 Gottschalk, Jennifer 105, 106, 118, 196 Greenbaum, Masha 31 Guttuso, Renato 82, 93, 117, 194, 202 Hausner, Gideon 16 Helfman, Muriel Nezhnie 21, 22, 53, 191 Herzl, Theodor 120, 121, 130, 197 Hirsch, Marianne 1, 149 Hod, Nir 71, 73, 74, 80, 194 Hollywood 95, 96, 118, 195 Holocaust 1–4, 6, 8, 10–122, 124, 125, 127–130, 132, 134–138, 141, 142, 147–149, 151–155, 157, 159–161, 167, 170, 171, 172, 174, 175, 176–202 Hornstein, Shelley 6 Horvath, Werner 93, 117, 157, 172, 194, 199 Idaho Human Rights Education Center 98, 100, 118, 161, 164, 172, 196, 200 Jacobowitz, Florence 6 Jewish Identity 13, 73, 79, 81, 82, 100, 105, 107, 110, 111, 118, 119, 157, 189, 192, 194, 196, 197, 200 Jimmink, Gert Jan 42 Karst, Kurt 98, 118, 195 Katzenelson, Yitzhak 15

212

Index

Kaufman, Brett S. 44–46, 54, 193 Keeter, Susan 37, 38, 54, 110, 111, 118, 154, 157, 171, 172, 192, 196, 199 Kiddush Hashem 21 King Jr.,Reverend Martin Luther 100 Knigin, Michael 26, 28, 53, 94, 117, 122, 124, 128–130, 157, 172, 192, 194, 195, 197, 199, 201, 202 Kolleck, Teddy 124 Konrad, Franz 3 Korwin, Yala 4, 16–18, 28, 53, 191 Kovno Ghetto 31

Phillips, Gary A. 106, 107, 177, 179 Phillips, Lisa 88 Phúc, Phan Thị Kim 85, 86 Picasso, Pablo 82 Pinocchio 29, 30, 53, 115, 192, 202 Pinsker, Yehuda Leib 120 Ponary 20, 57, 186 Porat, Dan 2, 6 Porat, Dina 10 Princess Mononoke 102, 202

Lahav, Galya 86, 87 Lahav, Noam 183, 184, 190, 201 Land of Israel 120, 121, 124, 130, 157, 172, 199 Lazawert, Henryka 113 Lelyveld, David 48

Rapoport, Nathan 84 Raskin, Richard 2, 6, 61 Resnais, Alain 3 Rock, William 96, 97, 118, 195, 202 Rothenberg, Ellen 10, 11 Rotman, Ben 26, 53, 192

Ma’abarah 85 Mandela, Nelson 100 Maor, Haim 66, 80, 157, 172, 194, 199 Marc, Franz 82 Marston, William Moulton 102 Masad, Anat 74, 75 Masser, Zehava 74, 75, 80, 157, 172, 194, 199 Merwedeplein, Amsterdam 7, 42, 43, 54, 164, 172, 199 Metzger, Gustav 88, 89, 117, 182, 190, 195, 200, 202 Micrography 106 Milton, Sybil 1, 3 Montessori school 74, 75, 79, 122, 157–159, 172 Morag, Dvora 74, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 194 Morgan, Aaron 22, 23, 51, 53, 54, 55, 191, 193 Morocco 23, 71

Salhoov, Shva 87, 88 Schepp, Jet 41, 43, 54, 164, 165, 172, 193, 199, 200 Schier, Otto 83, 84, 117, 195 Schindler, Oscar 45 Schloss, Ruth 10, 49, 50, 54, 55, 94, 95, 118, 193, 195, 201 Schoenberner, Gerhard 4 Shamosh, Amnon 64, 66, 80, 174, 193, 194 Sion, Brigitte 98–100 Sonek, Barbara 22, 53, 191 Sontag, Susan 1, 191 South Africa 100, 105 Spanish Civil War 82 State of Israel 13, 109, 120–130, 138, 181, 197 Steinem, Gloria 102, 103 Stein, Linda 100–102, 118, 196, 202 Stone, Greg 99, 164, 172, 200 Struk, Janina 1, 6 Sylvester, Andriessen Mari 165, 200

Nausicaä 102 Nazi 2–5, 7, 12–18, 20–22, 28–30, 32, 37, 40, 44, 49, 53, 54, 56, 70, 73, 82, 84–89, 91, 94, 100, 103, 104, 115, 117–121, 124, 125, 127, 131, 132–134, 143, 144, 149, 150, 170, 171, 180, 181, 189, 191, 192, 195–199, 201, 202 Nolan Fewell, Danna 106, 107, 177 Nuremberg Trials 21, 22, 191

Qur’an 139

Tarnów 83, 84 Tartakover, David 124, 125, 129, 130, 197 Taylor, Reverend Nancy 98 Teicher-Yekutiel, Rolanda 29, 30, 53, 115, 192, 202 Tiananmen Square 97 Toomy, Michael James 89, 90, 118, 195

Index

Trachtenberg, Mitzi 111, 112, 118, 196 Trachtman, Arnold 16–18, 26, 53, 131–133, 170, 191, 197 Treblinka 113 Tydor Baumel, Judith 10

213

Uhlmann, Lisa 98 United States 9, 35, 97, 98, 100, 111, 112, 117, 124, 129, 175, 197

Westerbork 7, 34, 48, 54 Western Wall 126–128, 130, 197 Wiesel, Elie 5 Wonder Woman 102, 202 Woodman, Donald 85 World Trade Center 101 World War II 6, 17, 33, 39, 82, 84, 91, 93, 100–102, 117, 132, 156, 157, 162, 172, 194, 195, 199

Vilna 19, 20, 57, 60, 61, 179, 186

Xiang, Huang 96–98, 118, 195, 202

Warsaw Ghetto 1–6, 12–14, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 30, 56, 58, 59, 71, 73, 80, 82, 84, 85, 88, 90, 91, 106, 110, 112, 113, 120, 125, 129, 130, 135, 137, 138, 140, 151, 174, 176, 178–180, 182, 183, 186, 188, 190–194, 196, 197, 200–202 Weinshall Liberman, Judith 10, 33–35, 43–45, 54, 66–69, 80, 154, 171, 182, 192–194, 199, 201 Weitzman, Drora 120, 121, 130, 197

Yad Vashem 10, 21, 26, 106, 148, 155, 175 Yellow Star 4, 5, 18, 20, 26, 35, 37, 53, 58, 61, 62, 66, 93, 104–107, 110–113, 118, 119, 125, 128, 133, 143, 147, 150, 151, 157, 162, 179, 192, 196 Zelizer, Barbie 6 Zionism 120, 130, 197 Zionist 71, 120–126, 129, 130, 138, 149, 157, 172, 197, 199