Alice Lok Cahana exhibit brings home Holocaust’s horror
The concentration camp survivor, who settled in Houston after liberation, created emotional works of art that turned her into a global figure
Artist, poet and Holocaust survivor Alice Lok Cahana was such a towering figure that it is literally impossible to fit a full view of her life in a single exhibition, but Holocaust Museum Houston is giving it as best a shot as they can in “The Life and Art of Alice Lok Cahana.” “There are so many stories here that could be exhibitions in their own right,” says chief curator Carol Manley.
Cahana, who settled in Houston in 1959 and lived in the city for decades creating art, survived the Nazi Auschwitz-Birkenau, Guben and BergenBelsen camps. Born in Sárvár, Hungary, her family was captured late in the Final Solution, the Nazi program for killing all Jews in German-controlled lands, as the Hungarian government sided with Hitler, protecting most Hungarian Jews from extermination for the first several years of World War II. Cahana’s entire family died, except for her father. The vast majority of art created by Cahana, who died in 2017, centers on the Holocaust. Her mixed-media pieces are enormous. As visitors enter the Josef and Edith Mincberg Gallery, they see her massive work “The Wannsee Conference.” Done in colors of rust, blood and mud, and shot through with fragmented greens and blues, it is a grim mockery of the idyllic lakeside setting where top Nazis gathered to plan the extermination of European Jewry. Cahana peppers the stark, bars-like squares of the piece with photos of her own family enjoying holidays and a list of Jewish populations specifically targeted by Hitler’s government.
In a strange way, “The Life and Art of Alice Lok Cahana” is its own archeology project and a commentary on how the stories of the Holocaust are to be preserved, as it fades rapidly from living memory. A showing of Cahana’s work was the first exhibition displayed by the Holocaust Museum when it opened in 1996. Manley spent weeks digging through paper files filled with striking photos that lacked context. Catalogs of Cahana’s work were long out of print, and much of her collection was scattered among her still-living friends in Houston. “The records had never been digitized,” said Manley. “I had to do a lot of detective work.”
The exhibit covers many of the major points of Cahana’s remarkable life in brief. Pictures of her sister, Edit, feature prominently, both in family photos and staring out of her 1988 piece “Have You Seen My Sister?” Edit technically survived the camps but died shortly after liberation. Cahana had a particular focus on children and the lives the Nazis stole from them. There is even a striking work, based on the collection of poems “I Never Saw Another Butterfly,” that pays tribute to the youngest victims of Hitler’s machine. It’s impossible to escape the gaze and words of children wandering through the exhibit.
“This is just a regular class photo, no different than you or I have taken,” says Manley, gesturing to a black-and-white image of smiling grade schoolers. “The difference is that all these children died in the camps.” The rest of the exhibit is a whirlwind of experiences. A mournful rendition of Gershwin’s “Summertime” whispers to visitors, who eventually find out from a placard near the exit that the song became Cahana’s favorite after it was played in the camps. She traded two days of rations to another prisoner to teach it to her. Nearby, there is a recreation of her piece “No Names,” which is the only work by a Jewish artist shown in the Vatican. A picture of Cahana with Pope Benedict XVI is hung beside it. It’s the sort of thing that would dominate any other artist’s résumé, but here, it’s just one more stop that includes being in a documentary by Steven Spielberg; participating in the Camp David Accords with President Jimmy Carter; being part of Raoul Wallenberg’s famous rescue of Hungarian Jews; and sailing to safety on the Exodus. Impressive and moving as the new exhibition is, it just shows how the magnitude of the Holocaust extends to the people who survived it. The scale, like Cahana’s works themselves, is gargantuan. “Hers was a very robust Holocaust story,” says Manley. “Everything that could have happened, happened to her.”