MIZZOU magazine
published by the Alumni Association, University of Missouri, Columbia campus
University of Missouri at Columbia, Winter 1998, Volume 86, Number 2, page 50
FALLEN ANGELS, by John Beahler.
(The issue included a black & white photo of Segan seated in front of UTW 27: Mordecai Anielewicz)
FROM HIS DAYS AS AN ART STUDENT in Poland during the mid-1980’s, Ken Akiva Segan still remembers how the horror of the Holocaust was brought home to him. On his first visit to the Birkenau death camp, Segan climbed to the top of a guard tower for a bird’s-eye view of the place where Nazis murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews during World War II.
Most of the camp’s barracks had been torn down, leaving rows of chimneys standing as a testimony to genocide. Wind whistled through missing boards on the few remaining buildings. “It was a huge expanse- a city, a whole city – built to kill people,” Segan, MFA ’80, recalls. “That image I just can’t keep out of my mind. I really felt the presence of the dead.”
He doesn’t want others to forget, either. Since 1991, the Seattle-based artist has created a series of drawings that quietly commemorates Holocaust victims. His goal is to use art to promote tolerance of others as well as to educate people about the Holocaust. The project is called “Under the Wings of G-d.” In deference to Jewish tradition the “o” is dropped, because to spell it out would profane God’s name. Segan uses archival photos from the Warsaw Ghetto during the early 1940’s. Looking at those photos is a moving experience, he says, because almost all these individuals likely died in the death camps or the ghetto. “In so many of the photos, the innocents, as I call them, look right into the camera’s lens. Their eyes say so much, especially the children’s,” he says. “These are people like you and me.”
He breaks down the anonymity of these genocide victims by adding wings to the portraits. Segan says that winged angels are not solely an image from Christian tradition. Both the Bible and Jewish folktales are filled with angels, he says. Wings are a metaphor for freedom, and in the Torah they are symbols of shelter and redemption.
The New York native rediscovered his Jewish roots after moving to the Midwest in the mid-1970’s to attend college, first in Illinois and then at Mizzou. He settled in Seattle after graduation. A few years later Segan spent two summers studying in Poland, which he calls a vast Jewish cemetery. “I saw vestiges of a once vibrant and flourishing Jewish life in Poland everywhere I traveled.”
His experiences in Poland sparked the “Wings of G-d” project. More than 30 of the projected 50 drawings are completed, and Segan has established a foundation to continue Holocaust education. Fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors remain alive to tell their stories, Segan says, and “Holocaust revisionists” are stepping up their campaigns of hate and disinformation. Segan sees American politicians manipulating distrust of minorities and immigrants for political gain.
“It scares me when political leaders of both parties don’t denounce platforms built on hate.” Are we then, when all is said and done, our brother’s keeper? Segan quotes an old friend and Holocaust survivor: “We want to be.”