Exhibits › Humanity & Inhumanity › Auschwitz

The extermination of the Jewish people was a priority of Hitler and his political and military elite. Their hatred of Jews knew no natural or rational bounds. The collective murder of the Hebrew race was not some sort of collateral civilian damage during a time of war, but rather a central aim of their world war and grand global vision.

Even as the Nazi Third Reich was being savagely crushed by the Russian Army on the Eastern front and by the Allied forces on the Western front, the deportation and killing of Jews continued into the last days of the war.

It is not clear to me why the original scene at the extermination site was documented by a photo. But the place was Auschwitz in the summer of 1944.

This photograph of doomed Jewish faces had stunned me over 35 years ago and stunned me again in May of 2022. I had seen the image long before the advent of the Internet, so it must have been in a book or magazine.

It was just a chance event that I stumbled across the photo while scrolling through Yad Vashem's website while recently researching another topic.

For reasons that elude me, I got out my iPhone and took a photo of the pixilated picture from my laptop computer's screen. I had no idea why. It was just something that seemed right at the time.

A few weeks later, I had the digital files printed out as hardcopy and I started making photo collages. The art came quickly. It was more a creative flow or light trance than conscious acts of creation. The imagery was something that seemed to come through me rather than by me.

Whether my creative process was some sort of Freudian catharsis, Jungian race consciousness, or psychological "exorcism" of demons, I know not.

And, at the age of 72, care not.

For me, these images form a visual Kaddish. Although the Kaddish is popularly known as a mourner's prayer for the dead, it never mentions death or dying. It is the sanctification of God's name and concludes with the hope for universal peace.

The Jewish people have a 4,000-year-old history. We have lasted much longer than all of the world's empires. We are a community of shared memory. This demands that we remember our dead and affirm the value of their lives and traditions.

But, on a gut level, that Jewish boy and the other doomed children, and the old Jewish women I focused on in the art, could have been me, my siblings, and my mother or grandmother.

We share much of the same DNA as those who perished. And we would have shared the same fate had we lived at that same time and place as those Jews.

In a world of accelerating nuclear proliferation and relentless ethnic conflict, that unspeakable fate could now be everyone's story on this amazing and precarious planet.

In a sense—everyone is now Jewish.