Northwest Ethnic News
Published by the Ethnic Heritage Council, Seattle
Volume IX
May 6, 1992.
Page 4
Warsaw Uprising Anniversary Martyrs take wing under artist’s hand
By Ramona Gault
When Seattle artist Ken Akiva Segan visited Poland in the mid-1980’s, he went to the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, and to Auschwitz and Birkenau. The memories still haunt him.
“Auschwitz is set up as a totally intact museum…maintained so well it’s as if you could start using it again.” And at Birkenau, where trains arrived with their passengers bound for the death camp, “nothing can describe the bleakness and the harrowing feeling that came into me,” Segan said.
As testimony to the transformative power of art and to the persistence of memory, Segan is working on a series of 50 drawings inspired by these scenes, a series he is calling “Under the Wings of G-d,” [“G-d” is a Hebrew manner of writing the name of God to indicate its sacredness.] With a sense of mission, he has been digging into archival material on the Warsaw ghetto, scrutinizing old photographs, trying to invoke the faces, the details of clothing of those “who died innocently.”
1993 marks the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, when the Jewish citizens of that Polish city tried valiantly, and unsuccessfully, to throw off their Nazi occupiers. Segan plans utilizing the drawings next year in educational activities about the uprising.
“In light of the debate brought on in this country by [Holocaust] revisionists focusing on individual people in the drawing series gives me a way to illuminate the anonymity that we encounter when we hear about 6 million Jews [being put to eath by the Nazis], says Segan. “We can see that these are people just like you and I.”
Though the people in Segan’s drawings may look like everyday people, under the artist’s hand they achieve a mythical quality, enhanced by the addition of realistically detailed wings. The wings, which Segan produced after studying the bird and wing collection of the Burke Museum at the University of Washington, are “metaphorically giving them flight. I’m giving them the flight they didn’t have. I’m angelizing them. They were martyred for their faith, background, birth; as martyrs they were made into angels.”
“I want to keep memory alive,” says Segan, “and I want to think about how easy it is to criticize your neighbor, who may look different or sound different. Looking critically at people can lead to discrimination and that can lead to violence.”
A native New Yorker with a non-religious upbringing, Segan is nonetheless acutely tuned to the dangers of a society allowing itself to set one group against another. He thinks about Holocaust survivors “who saw relatives taken away, and spent their whole lives wondering why this happened” who are now faced with the claims of so-called Holocaust revisionists.
“I can’t imagine the pain that the Holocaust survivors are going through. It’s like their worst nightmare.”
He cites two books he recently read: famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal’s last book, Justice Not Vengeance, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel’s essay collection From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences. Both of these men, who lost all their families [in the Holocaust] , state that they do not believe in collective guilt, and that they don’t believe that the younger generation in Germany or Austria has to be blamed or is responsible for the crimes their parents’ generation committed. Wiesel states that he doesn’t believe that the Jewish response to the Holocaust should be hate.”
People cannot allow themselves to hate, but they should not forget either. Observances like the commemoration of the Warsaw uprising will help people to remember and to raise the questions anew.
“I want to keep memory alive,” says Segan, “and I want to think about how easy it is to criticize your neighbor, who may look different or sound different. Looking critically at people can lead to discrimination and that can lead to violence.”
Segan, whose artwork appears in museum and corporate collections and who has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, hopes to take his “Under the Wings of G-d” works to synagogues, churches and schools next year in conjunction with observances of the Warsaw uprising anniversary.
In contrast to the current art mainstream, he wants to use his medium for a message. “I believe that art ought to have some sort of statement or message,” he says. “I feel more in solidarity with Jacob Lawrence [the celebrated African-American artist] than with some purely abstract painter, however beautifully or decoratively pleasing the works might be. Lawrence’s art can speak to both the art-educated and to someone who has never looked at paintings before.”
Segan’s group studio will be included in a tour of artist studios sponsored by the Seattle Art Museum on May 17. The address is Westworks Studios….
To learn more about the Holocaust, Segan recommends the Seattle Public Library as an excellent resource for videos and books. Among the best films are The Partisans of Vilna; Night and Fog, an award-winning documentary on the concentration camps; Kitty: Return to Auschwitz; Shoah, a contemporary film of interviews with camp survivors, Polish citizens and former Third Reich officials; and Witness to the Holocaust, the 1960 war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann. Among Hollywood produced films are Judgment at Nuremberg, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Boat is Full, Julia and QBVII.
Also, the Holocaust Education Resource Center, 2031 Third Ave., has filmstrips, videos and books for classroom use.