....Still Thinking About It

Last week I met a friend and we went to an exhibit at The Jewish Museum in Milwaukee. The Museum's Curator visited my quilt guild a few months back to let us know about the works that would be featured and I finally found a day when the two of us both had time to go. My friend is a photographer, artist and quilter......I am a quilter......so I thought this would be a nice thing to do together.

It was more than nice.....it was an exhibit that took my breath away and made an impact that will stay with me forever.  "Fabric of Survival - The Art of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz". To quote the information printed on the back of the Museum's brochure, "Esther Nisenthal Krinitz was 15 when she defied Nazi orders, separating from her family as they and the other Jews of their Polish village reported to a nearby train station. Making their way to a village where they were unknown, Esther and her younger sister survived the war by posing as Polish farm girls. They never saw their family again.

Fifty years later, determined to show her daughters the family she had lost, Esther turned to needle and thread to create a series of 36 hauntingly beautiful, exquisitely detailed works of fabric collage and embroidery - a legacy born of love, loss and the sheer force of memory."

There are so many parts of this story that are remarkable.....that she and her sister would survive on their own, that she would fall in love, marry and move to Brooklyn. That she would be a successful business woman and raise a family and later move to Maryland. That her sister would also find love and live to tell her story.

But to me, as a quilter, I also find it remarkable that at age 50 she began to create panels to show her family her early years on a lovely farm, the community surrounding her, the Jewish traditions they celebrated and cherished.....and then, step by step, how her life changed as the Nazi's took over. Her self-developed artistic ability changed and matured from panel to panel. You could see just how she learned to show perspective, detail, shadowing.....and how the first few panels are so much simpler than the later scenes.

Each panel has comments embroidered along the bottom (and repeated on labels accompanying each piece) that tell what Esther is showing in the scene. Her lovely farm home with her family, the day the Nazi's came and cut off her grandfather's long beard, the day she was working in a field and saw her older cousin behind barbed wire, the day she and her sister fled into the forest, panels showing her working as a field hand in order to hide in plain sight.

Each panel had an impact. Each panel made you stop, look, think, examine, appreciate. Esther created these for her family so that they would know her story, she had no photographs to work with....just her memories. Very clear memories. She never expected that these panels would ever be shown to a larger audience.

There are books about World War Two, there are books and films about that war and the holocaust. There are other museums dedicated to remembrance. But these individual, beautiful, creative, one-of-a-kind fabric panels present the story in a completely unique way.

I've been thinking about it ever since......and wondering why one specific panel hit me the hardest. So many of them were difficult to look at after reading the labels and realizing what the scene portrayed. But when we came to the one large panel showing how the Germans tried to destroy the concentration camps so there would be no proof, burned down the barracks, dismantled the ovens, tore down the barbed wire as best they could there was a section that immediately made me cry. Reading the label I realized that at the top of the panel, at the edge of what had been the camp, was a garden......filled with huge cabbages. Much bigger than a normal garden cabbage......why? Because they were planted on the top of a mass grave. That thought.....that fabric image....that horror.

Cabbages.....