Dr. Lea Mazor, The Hebrew University
About the Exhibition
The Holocaust memorial exhibition by Dr. Sarah Melzer (painter, artist, and educator), 'Counterpoint – In Dual-Faced Reality', was displayed in Paris (2015), in her birthplace Nowy Sącz (2022), at the Galicia Museum in Krakow (2023), and in the city of Gorlice, Poland. The exhibition addresses the dynamics of an existential reality oscillating between the power of life's continuity in a living, breathing world and the duty to remember worlds that were obliterated in the Holocaust without a trace.
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| The exhibition in Krakow. Photographer: Ezer Melzer |
Melzer seeks to bring from the darkness of oblivion those who perished from her family, while wishing to transcend her personal story toward the broader issue of the duty to remember the Holocaust. The exhibition's opening was set for the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, 2014, and was displayed at Tel Aviv University, in the lobby of the Sourasky Central Library. Curator: Arieh Berkowitz. Six works from the exhibition were selected for the Yad Vashem collection, and the University of Haifa requested to display the exhibition again on Holocaust Remembrance Day in April 2015.
Two Worlds in the Exhibition
The exhibition presents two contrasting worlds:
A World That Has Sunk Beneath a Sealed Sky – Relief portraits devoid of human form, made from pulped newspaper shreds baked until charred.
A World That Stands and Exists – Intensely colored portrait paintings on cardboard packaging boxes.
The exhibition raises weighty questions:
- How did human beings come to carry out industrial annihilation of people?
- What is the moral dimension of the duty to remember?
- How does one remember emotions, as distinct from information?
- What is the relationship between remembering and forgiving?
- What is a community of memory?
- Does memory aid forgiveness or stand in its way?
The Starting Point: Discovery of the Estate
The exhibition's origins lie in the discovery of an estate containing dozens of letters and postcards sent from Poland to Melzer's aunt, Tema Teitelbaum (who later lived in Nesher near Haifa), between 1925 and 1947.
Twenty years after the aunt's passing, her son gave the rare collection to Mrs. Shoshana Weinfeld, wife of Professor Moshe Weinfeld (Dr. Sarah Melzer's brother). In 2008, Shoshana Weinfeld transferred the collection to Sarah Melzer.
The Telegram That Shocked
Upon opening the collection, an S.O.S. telegram sent from the city of Lvov in May 1940 was revealed. In the telegram, Sarah's uncle, Mendel Weinfeld, pleaded to obtain entry visas to Palestine for his family to escape deportation to Siberia by the Soviet authorities. Unfortunately, the requested certificate was not obtained, the Nazis occupied the area, and the family perished in 1942 at the Bełżec extermination camp.
The question of her survival in the face of others' annihilation troubled Meltzer for years, without her being able to give it expression. From the day the estate was discovered, for two years, she labored over deciphering the letters and editing them into a memorial book, "The History of the Weinfeld Family," published in 2010. The book contains the collection of letters and photographs discovered in the estate.
The Creative Process
The telegram discovered 60 years after it was sent, along with dozens of postcards and letters, remained as a spiritual remnant of her family members after their annihilation. They awakened in the artist an impulse to seek a creative way to embody the tragedy of annihilation in visual-plastic form. The search led to the development of a unique technique of relief portraits devoid of human form made from newspaper, baked until charred.
The Artistic Technique
Tearing newspaper shreds by hand – Like a religious 'tearing' ritual of mourners.
Transforming the shreds into paper pulp – From which dozens of portraits devoid of human form were created.
Baking in a home oven – Until they produced smoke and charred.
The works connect together into a human family, as if emerging from the furnace and trying to return to life and declare: "We have not disappeared, we are here in consciousness and memory." The artistic technique is presented in the exhibition through the video film "The Painter's Debt."
The Contrasts in the Exhibition
Opposite the monochromatic reliefs of the charred portraits hanging on the white wall, dozens of colorful cardboard boxes are scattered throughout the space, upon which expressively vibrant portraits are painted.
The box, once new and full, has been emptied and transformed into an empty container of memory, folding within it the past like a refugee wandering from place to place. The portraits are both spiritual and internal. The memory of the present-absent lives among many of us, and with them we conduct constant dialogue.
Referring to Walter Benjamin's terms, one can see in these figures characters walking and wandering not only in visible space but also within the inner soul, as they return to the forgotten and repressed past. This past rises from hidden places to the existential plane, in a dual-faced reality oscillating between a dynamic living world and the world of figures represented in the burnt paper pulp reliefs, sinking like an open wound into the darkness of oblivion.
The contrast between the two types of portraits – between ghosts on one hand and those representing life's power and continuity on the other – creates the tension characterizing the entire exhibition.
Additional Components of the Exhibition
The exhibition displays the book "The History of the Weinfeld Family" and screens the video film "The Letters," prepared in the spirit of Melzer's works and based on letters from the family estate.
The film is structured on a temporal sequence: before, during, and at the end of World War II. Among what is shown in the film:
- The panicked telegram from Lvov, May 1940
- Letters from May-June 1941 from Lvov
- A letter from June 1942 from Sarah Melzer's aunt, smuggled from a train car on its way to the Bełżec extermination camp
- Letters and telegrams from Siberia between 1940–1946 (from Sarah's family who survived thanks to deportation to Siberia)
- Letters between 1946–1948 from displaced persons camps in Germany, before Melzer's immigration to Israel.
A Personal Survival Story
Melzer and her brothers were deported to Siberia. One of them, Moshe (later a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Israel Prize laureate in Bible studies), was 17 years old when he was sentenced to forced labor in exchange for a bread ration. He worked hauling earth carts in underground gold mines and washing gold ore.
This was the coldest region in the Siberian taiga, 1,000 km north of Lake Baikal, where the average temperature ranged between minus 50 and minus 60 degrees Celsius.
The Exhibition's Significance
In establishing this exhibition with its various components – the portraits, the book, and the film "The Letters" – the artist saw the payment of a debt and an expression of her desire to establish a "memorial and name" in memory of her family members, most of whom were annihilated without a trace at the Bełżec extermination camp.
The exhibition has been displayed in various locations in Israel and abroad.
Historical Note
The Bełżec extermination camp was the first extermination camp established by the Nazis as part of Operation Reinhard in Poland. About half a million Jews met their deaths there. The fact that almost no survivors remained from the camp is one of the reasons it is not as famous and well-known as Sobibor and Treblinka, which were also established as part of Operation Reinhard.
From Professor Moshe Zuckermann's Words
From the opening speech at the exhibition on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, 2014:
Sarah mentioned in her remarks Adorno, who after Paul Celan's poetry admitted he had erred and retracted, at least partially, his earlier statement, declaring: "Human suffering is entitled to artistic representation, just as a person under torture is entitled to scream!"
I see in this part of the exhibition – the burnt reliefs made from paper pulp, devoid of human form – a voiced expression of human agony. Not an act of remembrance here, but a memory of human suffering. Voicing of agony and suffering in burnt flesh.
In this sense, this exhibition is uniquely important. There are not many such exhibitions in the country. I would compare it to Gershuni who expresses in the abstract, and here – in the implicit figuration.
Adorno asks himself, in his book "Negative Dialectics," what remains of morality after the Holocaust? If you haven't read it, you should know, Sarah, that you have realized it in your exhibition – not in concepts, not in description, but in burnt flesh!
I read your description of developing the papier-mâché technique. Not to describe, but to say: "There was a great fire there, there was burnt flesh!"
Your exhibition is not only a duty to family – but to humanity!
Thank you so much for this exhibition, Sarah.
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