With royal honors to heaven

with royal honors to heaven

Rails

Hair 2+3 2006; 250 x 210 cm. Mix Technique on canvas The doors of the wagon opened, after being closed for 10 days. We were in the “Camp of disinfection” Strasshof in Austria. We were lucky not to be in Auschwitz. We were filthy with excrement and urine, shed over us. We had not washed ourselves during the last month. Suddenly I realized that I was together with hundreds of naked women, part of them pregnant, part of them with blood on their legs. I was only 11 years old and had never seen a naked adult before. Our hair was combed with iron combs, some women had their hair shaven and others had their hair cut off. The hair stuck to our naked bodies. The women tried to cover their shaven heads with one hand and with the other their breasts.

The Devils’s Supper, 1990 About four weeks after our liberation, we started our journey to Palestine. First we went to Buchenwald a men’s concentration camp to join other survivors. My brother-in-law was killed there and later I found out that two more brothers-in-law, Mordechai Fargo and Eliezer Shimoni were imprisoned there. When the men saw that Jewish children had survived in a camp, they could not believe it. They wanted us to eat all the time, even at night. They wanted to adopt us. They took us to the town of Weimar and many other places. They also took us to the crematorium. The ovens had stopped burning in the middle. The heaps of ashes around the crematoria and the parts of bodies near the ovens shocked me. As a child I asked >Why do they want to kill us all the time?< I drew the head of the devil in form of the ovens of a crematorium. On his chin I drew ashes. The result looks like Siegfried of German mythology.

The sound of Silence