Beyond words
Blackstone Valley Visitor Center photo exhibit on Holocaust survivors is nothing short of powerful
“You stand up against these long portraits and you read their own words in their own handwriting... it’s overwhelming.”
B lack-and-white portraits, each four or five feet tall and printed on transparency film, hang in the art gallery at the Blackstone Valley Visitor Center. The large scale allows the viewer to see every pore, every wrinkle, every eyebrow hair.
Between the photographs hang blown-up copies of the handwritten memories of those photographed, and the nine people with whom Jonathan Sharlin spoke have one very important thing in common: They’re all Holocaust survivors.
His exhibit is an effort of Arts Emanu-El at Temple Emanu-El in Providence, and it was made possible through a Bliss, Gross, Horowitz Fund grant from the Rhode Island Foundation.
“When you walk through this exhibit and you stand up against these long portraits and you read their own words in their own handwriting... it’s overwhelming,” said Linda Shamoon, a member of the Arts Emanu-El committee.
Sharlin is a Providence-based artist who began photographing Rhode Island Holocaust survivors in 1992 and held his “Portrait Narratives” exhibit for the first time in 1994. He held an artist’s talk on Sunday afternoon at the Blackstone Valley Visitor Center in Pawtucket, where his work will be on display through April.
The nine Holocaust survivors featured are E.O. Adler, Leah Eliash, Raymond Eichenbaum, Alice Händel-Eichenbaum, Marty Weissman, Morris Gastfreund, Lenka Rose, Heinz Sandelowski and Ellen Zitkin.
Eichenbaum was the first Holocaust survivor Sharlin met. He gave the photographer a four-page remembrance of his brother, who died in the Holocaust, that he had written for a class at the University of Rhode Island.
Sharlin also photographed Eichenbaum’s wife, who said that, even though she had to wear the yellow star, and even though she couldn’t go to school, and even though her father’s photography business was confiscated, life was still pleasant.
Händel- Eichenbaum wrote of her time in Sofia, Bulgaria, “Being protected by my parents – and my parents being helped out by the Bulgarian people – I did not suffer.”
Sharlin worked with Mike Fink – of The Jewish Voice – to meet other Holocaust survivors.
One was Marty Weissman, a butcher working in Cranston. For a little while, Sharlin would go into the shop hoping to get a written memory but leaving with only free meat.
Weissman eventually wrote a short account of how the first day in his city, Germans killed 13 people, taking some out of their houses to shoot them and leaving others inside as the buildings burned.
Morris Gastfreund wrote about Jan. 6, 1943, when he saw corpses lying in the snow in Radomsk, Poland, after the Gestapo ordered inhabitants out of their houses by 11 a.m. – to walk to the railroad station – or they would be shot.
Lenka Rose wrote about the last words of her mother, who was shot at age 44.
Heinz Sandelowski chose a happier memory: meeting his wife for the first time, and bringing her flowers on their first date, a beautiful spring day. They were separated and didn’t know if they would see each other again, but they eventually got married, in the first Jewish wedding in Berlin after the war.
While Sharlin is Jewish, he didn’t have a very religious upbringing. He didn’t have a bar mitzvah.
But then his sister married a German artist, and they moved from Providence to Frankfurt, the native city of Sharlin’s brother-in-law. Sharlin visited them occasionally.
“Here I am in Germany and only 50 years before Jews were being persecuted and killed,” he said. “I kind of felt like an outsider, and even though life had changed, the echoes of the past were present to me, so I photographed from that perspective.”
That led to a series titled “Jew in Germany.”
Another series was inspired by his visit to the BergenBelsen concentration camp, where he saw trees that he felt resembled people in their stature. Sharlin figured that the best way to complement these anthropomorphic trees was to photograph Rhode Island Holocaust survivors.
So for “Survivors Trees of Bergen-Belsen,” he photographed survivors with their children and grandchildren.
It wasn’t until later that he got written stories from some of the survivors he had photographed.
As they aged, Sharlin said, there was a sense of urgency in getting their narratives sooner rather than later. To his knowledge, Eichenbaum is the only survivor he photographed who is still alive today.
Sharlin printed his portraits on large pieces of transparency film in a dark room he shared with his wife, and he joked that such sharing has its positives as well as its negatives. The transparency film panels serve as both a printing material and a mirror, reflecting back the viewers walking by.
One effect of creating this series was that it led Sharlin to visit Jerusalem for the first time. This led to a project called “Letters from the Middle East,” which incorporated portraits and stories of both Israelis and Palestinians.
Along with Sharlin’s “Portrait Narratives,” Arts Emanu-El is exhibiting Alexandra Broches’ “Letters and Pictures from a Box” from March 14 to April 2, at Temple Emanu-El. There will be an artist’s talk and reception at the temple on March 23 at 6:30 p.m.
Arts Emanu-El was founded six or seven years ago to bring Jewish arts – including fine art, films and concerts – to the temple and to the community on the whole.
The group worked with Sharlin as he applied for a grant. The Bliss, Gross, Horowitz Fund grant the photographer received “was established at the Rhode Island Foundation to support Jewish community charitable organizations located in and serving the greater Providence area.”