The Mast
october 11, 2002 issue. Pacific Lutheran University Volume LXXX, No. 5
(the article published on the front page, lower left)
Artist Remembers The holocaust victims
by Jennifer Newman, mast news intern
Photo by Minerva Rios
caption: Junior Kathy Simpson examines a piece from the Holocaust art exhibit
Students walking through the right hall of the administration building might notice a drawing a violin played upside-down, a swastika, and a rooster.
This painting, entitled “Hitler’s yo-yo,” is part of Seattle artist Akiva K. Segan’s Holocaust art exhibit on display in the Mortvedt Library and upper level of the administration building. The paintings have been on display for two weeks.
As director of the Holocaust Education Through Art program, Segan said on his website that he designed his 50-work series to “restore dignity to the memory of those murdered by the Nazis , their Fascist collaborators, and the silence of millions.”
The collection of mainly drawings is inspired by the photographs and life stories of victims of the Holocaust.
The exhibit, sponsored by PLU’s Wang Center for International Programs and the German program will be on display through Oct. 27.
Janet Holmgren, PLU German professor, is a friend of Segan’s and invited him to campus. She coordinated the exhibit dates so guests attending last week’s Holocaust conference could view them.
PLU is showing six pieces of the series, though the university hopes to be the first location to display all 50 pieces within the next few years.
Pieces from the exhibit are also being displayed at the Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle and some have been shown at local churches.
Segan began work on the series, entitled “Under the Wings of G-d,” in 1991 with a special focus on children’s education. Art is a “universally understood teaching tool,” Segan said, and though appropriate for all ages, he hopes his works will especially inspire children’s enquiry.
In the future, Segan plans to supplement his exhibit with CD-ROM programs and books for both children and adults, as well as increase the exhibit’s exposure.
Since the start of the program, Segan has also lectured at universities, churches, synagogues and prisons, a swell as aided in developing Holocaust memorials.
The drawings range from life-size portraits to multiple-piece works, but each piece includes a depiction of wings. Segan believes wings are a metaphor easily understood by all ages, as a universal symbol of freedom. Furthermore, in the Jewish Torah, wings represent shelter and redemption.
Each work is completed in two parts. He begins by drawing the figure, most often modeled after black and white photography from the Holocaust.
To add the wings, he enlists the aid of the ornithology (study of birds) department at the University of Washington’s Burke Museum. There Segan and the staff experiment to find the appropriate wings for his subject.
Most of Segan’s works have titles descriptive of the drawing’s subject. For example, his first work of the series was entitled “The Muranow Street Trolley Car in the Warsaw Ghetto.” As the title suggests, the drawing depicts a trolley car, inspired by a photograph taken by a Nazi soldier.
Many works are left untitled, as a representation of more than one million anonymous victims. Out of more than 6* million killed in the Holocaust, Segan’s collection represents roughly one hundred victims.
Segan chose to title his exhibit with a hyphenated “G-D,” out of respect for Orthodox and Chassidic Jews. Because the name of God is so sacred to these worshipers, the names “Ha-shem” or “Adonai” are usually spoken instead.
Segan was intent on creating an exhibit to reach everyone, as he believes all victims can learn from the victims of the Holocaust.
Originally from New York, Segan studied printmaking and drawing before continuing to Europe to study Polish-Jewish relations. Besides it qualities of education and reverence, Segan seeks to use his art to personally understand the events of the Holocaust.
Segan’s maternal grandmother** was gassed in a Polish*** concentration camp, and he said strongly, “The Holocaust did not have to happen.”
Segan hopes his works will be a catalyst for questions and discussion, from which the solutions can be found to modern-day problems of stereotyping, prejudice and hate.
For more information, check out [the text listed the url of Segan’s then website. His new website, 2020, is www.humanrights-holocaust-art.org]
Three correction notes by Segan, August 31, 2020, while typing the text of Ms. Newman’s article from the hardcopy Oct. 11, 2003 issue:
* the hardcopy newspaper text mistakenly printed “out of more than 600 million killed in the Holocaust…”.
The number of Holocaust victims is estimated at ten million, including six million Jewish Europeans; several hundred thousand Romany and Sinti; several hundred thousand physically and or mentally disabled Austrians and Germans murdered in the Nazi’s Aktion T-4 genocide of the disabled; over one million Polish Catholics and one million Russian (Soviet) soldier POW’s. Others who were murdered common criminals; gays; a small number of Jehovah’s Witnesses; and American and other allied prisoners of war.
I myself never use the word “killed” in referencing the Holocaust and other genocides and crimes against humanity. People are killed in accidents, and in storms. When people are deliberately put to death they are murder victims.
** The victim referred to in the article was a great-grandmother of the artist. She was the mother of the artist’s maternal granddad. She has been depicted in 2 artworks in the Under the Wings series: UTW 42: Shoah Dreams; and UTW 62: Zlata Barshewsky of Bialystok. She has also been portrayed in a major drawing, “Zlata the Righteous of Bialystok and her son Liebl who lived in Berlin,” viewable in a photo in the Other Holocaust Art – Shoah Trilogy art gallery in the artist’s website.
***
She meant to write “gassed in a Nazi death camp,” (and not a Polish concentration camp). During the Nazi’s military and civil occupation occupation of Poland, the Nazis built a number of mass murder-death-extermination camps. Those Nazi mass murder camps were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, and Belzec. They were not Polish concentration-death camps or extermination camps; they were Nazi built and Nazi -run camps in Nazi occupied Poland.
I don’t know if my great-grandmother, Zlata, was murdered in one of the Nazi’s death camps or if she died elsewhere (at the hands of the Nazis). She might have died of forced starvation in the Nazi’s ghetto (sealed-in concentration-death camp district) in Bialystok. It’s possible she was shot by the Nazis. She had corresponded with one of her sons, my mom’s dad, from the time he left Poland around 1903 until sometime after the Nazi occupation of Poland in 1939 after which correspondence ceased.
Those corrections aside, this was a terrific article, for which I extend my thanks to Ms. Newman and to the 2002-2003 editors of The Mast.