The Jewish Transcript, Seattle, Washington. April 28, 2000
Seattle Report from Vienna, Jerusalem and England
By Akiva Segan
Special to the Transcript
Seattle artist Akiva Segan spent three weeks in Vienna, Israel and England last fall on his way to and from a conference at Yad Vashem, where he was invited to speak about his work in Holocaust education. This week, the Holocaust museum and research institute in Jerusalem announced it would accept a donation of some Segan artwork. Museum directors said in a letter to the Seattle artist,” We are delighted to inform you that the Yad Vashem Art Committee has reviewed your work, and has decided to accept your work in our collection. Your work will be an important addition to our museum and will highlight our effort to establish an all-encompassing collection…” Segan said this acquisition is a gift from Alexander Schwarz, formerly of Seattle and now living in Vienna, in memory of his wife Trudi and their son.
Segan’s trip last fall began with a visit to Schwarz in Vienna. He shares his impressions of his journey here.
My whirlwind began with a four-day stay in Vienna to see my 90 year old friend Alexander Schwarz. Alex and his late wife Trudi and I met in 1990 after I began working at the Magnolia Library. Alex moved back to Vienna several years ago after 60 years away. The Schwarz’s escaped the Nazis by sheer luck: Trudi went to work as a servant in an English rural estate. Alex had a “winning” lottery number for an American visa, saving him from the death at Auschwitz that took his mother, cousins and other relatives.
Alex lives in the Jewish Old Folks Home and is visited daily by his nephew Georg Brandel and wife Halina. The home has security alert posters urging everyone to be on guard for suspicious packages. The Viennese Jewish Community pays for a 24-hours-a-day armed city police presence outside the building. On my arrival at the airport, Alex tells me “The place is full of Nazis!” My visit coincides with the national election, still making news. Second-place winner Jorg Haider of the far-right Freedom Party has caused a commotion for years with sympathetic remarks about Nazi SS soldiers and veterans of Nazi “labor policies” and has given anti-foreigner speeches using terms evocative of 1930’s Nazi slang.
I visited the central synagogue, the only shul pre-dating the war. To get inside, I had a five-minute interrogation and security screening. The synagogue was saved from burning before the war as its destruction would’ve displaced gentile apartment dwellers and shopkeepers.
The Jewish Old Folks Home has a collection of pre-war paintings by Jewish artists that grace the walls. Most appear to be 19th and early 20th-century works without identification labels. Many are unsigned and undated. I would guess the artist and subjects alike were lost during the Holocaust. Yet their beauty and historical interest are as compelling as any paintings in Europe.
For a celebration, Alex, Georg, Halina and I went to the famed “Grinzig” district, where weadrank, ate and listened to the din of singers pounding their beer glasses on the tables.
On to Israel
My first observation on Israeli soil was of waiting with smoking religious men to clear customs. Since my trip “the evil weed” has been denounced by a number of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox rabbis in New York and Israel. One prominent politically conservative Orthodox rabbi called smoking a “suicidal” behavior “more trayf than eating ham.” Anti-tobacco rabbis have a lot of work to do. Israelis smoke everywhere, even where it’s posted not to.
Jerusalem is unlike anywhere else on earth. I saw people in modern clothing, Arab women completely covered and Jewish women wearing wigs, hats or scarves, teenage soldiers with red berets and rifles, Chasidic men in “Black Hat” garb, and adult men from Chasidic sects wearing 18th-century style buckled-shoes with calf-high stockings, gray pin-striped jackets and hats that made me say “Wow!” Completing a picture for me of a “modern, hip” Israel was the young Israeli fellow I saw one night in Jerusalem with purple spiked hair and Mohawk-style shaved sides. Just like home!
At the Yad Vashem conference, it was great to be with so many people involved with Holocaust research, education and creative artistic pursuits. Among the people I met was Ann Weiss of Philadelphia, founder-director of the Eyes from the Ashes Foundation. Weiss spent 13 years researching the only group of photos that Jewish arrivals had in their possession when they arrived at Auschwitz and Birkenau. The photos saved from destruction by the Nazis show neither corpses nor “skeletal” post-liberation camp inmates. They were the most precious belonging an arriving prisoner had – pre-war, life-affirming photos of loved ones, babies, parents, grandparents, spouses, siblings, children.
Her research took her back and forth to Israel and Europe, and to meet survivors, one of whom I met – Cvi Zuckerman, a wonderful old man who sang a song for me while driving to Hod Hasharon north of Tel Aviv at the end of the conference where I rejoined an old Israeli college pal. Arriving in Palestine in 1947 from Poland, Zuckerman joined the Haganah and fought in the brigade led by Yitzhak Rabin that battled on the road outside Jerusalem. One of Zuckerman’s own family members was located in these photos, and Weiss’s lengthy project has led to the forthcoming publication this spring of Eyes from the Ashes. Elie Wiesel is among the contributors to the text.
Another artist I met who is involved in interpretative Holocaust artwork was Leah Thorn of London, the creator of “Performance Poetry in Holocaust Education.” Thorn has designed a unique and desperately-needed way for youth and adult audiences to process the pain and sadness that accompanies Holocaust education using easy-to-do exercises requiring no knowledge or understanding of poetry.
My last night in Israel I finally met my mother’s first cousin, Genia Dayan, originally from pre-war Vilna, Lithuania. My sabra college friend Yoram Joshua, in Hod Hasharon, joined me at Genia’s modest apartment in a pre-war neighborhood of Tel Aviv. Genia and I hugged, we drank wine, she sang a Russian tune from her childhood, and ate a delicious dinner.
Then a surprise! Carefully pulling out a photo album, she showed me two photos of my murdered great-grandmother, who now had a name, a face and a place of death – nearly knocking my socks off my feet. Her name: Zlata Barshewsky. She was from Tykocin, a town near Bialystock in northeast Poland.
Transcript readers will recall the cover art for Section B this past Rosh Hashonah of a watercolor I created several years ago of a Baroque wall exterior at the Tykocin synagogue. Genia told me great-grandma Zlata died in the Bialystok ghetto in Poland. My collection of photos of my great-grandparents is now closer to completion.
My last stop: England.
I presented my “Holocaust Education Through Art” class at the German-Jewish Studies Dept. and then to 19 student “History-Teachers-in-Training for Secondary Schotls” at the University of Sussex.
Even though they spoke “The Queen’s English” and I the delightful “Queens English,” learning prevailed. They sent me on my way home with London bagels for the long flight home. “Tally ho!,” I said, “and next year in Jerusalem, too!”