Mira Hamermesh
ALTHOUGH SHE did not directly experience the Holocaust, it had a seminal influence on the life and career of Mira Hamermesh, the accomplished artist and film-maker. Its impact lay behind the making of Loving the Dead, the BBC 1991 documentary which won the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco Film Festival the following year, and which Steven Spielberg has acknowledged as having inspired Schindler’s List.
In the film Hamermesh returns to Poland to find out how Poles today live in the shadow of the slaughter of millions of Jews in their country during the Second World War. She lost both her parents in the Shoah; her mother in the Lodz ghetto and her father in Auschwitz. She owes her escape to the resourcefulness of her business-man father who urged her and her elder brother to join their sister, an early Zionist immigrant, in then Palestine, in the wake of the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939.
The arduous two year journey, starting with a trek across crumbling Central Europe, the Soviet Union and turbulent river San, dividing Poland and the Ukraine, is recorded in her mem- oir, The River of Angry Dogs, published in 2004. En route, she was separated from her brother who was captured in Russia and sent to Siberia. They were reunited in Palestine in 1943 after his release from detention camp.
In 1942 she studied at Jerusalem’s Bezalel Art School and the following year held a solo exhibition of her paintings at the Cabinet of Arts gallery in the city. Another exhibition three years later at the British Council led to a British Council scholarship to study at the Slade School of Fine Arts. There she trained under Expressionist artist Josef Herman, becoming a reputed figurative painter in 1950s London.
She returned to Israel briefly in 1949, accompanying young European Jewish refugees to the newly-established state and, back in London in 1951, she married Richard Coopman, a chartered surveyor and property developer. Their son Jeremy was born in 1953.
A pilgrimage to her mother’s grave in Lodz changed her artistic perspective. She opted to study at the reputed Polish National Film School, realising that film would better convey her preoccupation with war, injustice and women. But few Western students were accepted at that time. Fortuitously the School’s director was in London in 1960 and viewed her successful art exhibition of women at the Brook Street Gallery. The show was praised by Edward Lucie Smith among others, and won her a scholarship to the Polish film School. She studied there from 1961 to 1964, creating some short animated films and a half-hour feature. Her first film on her return to London was End of Term, for Granada TV in 1964. She spent a year in Israel in 1968 helping to set up the newly formed Israel Television. By then she and her husband had divorced. In Israel her films included Fighters of the Ghettos and One Year After, about the recovery of soldiers wounded in the Six Day War.
Her first full length documentary, shown on Thames TV in 1976, was Two Women, contrasting women’s status in capitalist and communist societies. In 1981 she was a guest lecturer at the Australian National Film School in Sydney. Maids and Madams, in 1985, was the first of her award-winning triptych of films for Channel 4. Focusing on the tragedy of apartheid, it won four awards, including Channel 4’s first Prix Italia. It was followed in 1987 by Talking to the Enemy – Voices of Sorrow and Rage, about the Israel/palestinian conflict, and in 1990 by Caste at Birth, about the Untouchables in modern day India, which won two awards. Her last film in 1993, also for Channel 4, was Holy Madness, about Jerusalem’s power to turn some people crazy.
In 2005, Hamermesh was honoured by Israel Cinematheque with a retrospective of her films, many made for Israel Television. Three were screened at the Polish Arts Festival last year.
She remained lively and active till the end, despite ill-health, and was half-way through writing a book entitled Sex and War, linking the threads of her documentaries.
She is survived by her son Jeremy, and two grandchildren Benjamin and Anna.