Le devoir de mémoire / a duty to remember
Schwarzheide, Luc Tuymans, 1986
We have entered an era in which fiction writers are derided for not being factual enough and where politicians have license to make up fiction as facts.
This stark painting by Luc Tuymans depicts the pine trees planted in order to hide a concentration camp near Dresden and is based on a found drawing made by one of the camp’s inmates, who survived.
Tuymans, who often engages with historically charged and morally weighted images said ‘a good painting is diverse in the sense that it’s multilayered. If it’s not, you’re either making propaganda or you’re making an illustration.”
It’s been on my mind for the past two weeks. At a recent congressional hearing a Republican congressman felt he could quote Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, while discussing the role of state in the public debate. My hair stood on end on my arms.
That afternoon as I was working on a new painting in the studio, I was listening to the radio. There was a show about a letter found at Auschwitz which had been buried in a glass bottle and hidden in the ground. It had been written by a man who signed it ‘Hermann’. This is important as for years it was misattributed and only recently was an archivist able to trace who its author really was. The letter is full of love from a man to his wife and daughter, urging the daughter to marry and live on a fulfilled life. It is also a factual letter. The author was a member of the Sonderkommandos, a direct witness to the atrocities perpetrated by Nazis in the camps. He knew he would not make it out alive of the camp.
This last letter reminded me of Vassili Grossman’s epic novel Life and Fate in which the protagonist, a Jewish nuclear physicist, receives a letter from his mother detained in a ghetto and writing to him one final time with the knowledge that she will not survive. Life and Fate is an extraordinary novel that weaves so many characters in Stalinist Russia, but the letter is in my opinion its most eloquent and unforgettable passage.
I grew up looking at the last letter sent from a relative of my grandmother as he had been taken to Drancy. We had it framed and hung in the dining room. ‘Take care of the children’ it read.
As a friend reminded me this morning, for Passover this week let’s honor those ‘who let go of everything but freedom’, in the words of Marge Pierce in her poem ‘Maggid’:
We Jews are all born of wanderers, with shoes
under our pillows and a memory of blood that is ours
raining down. We honor only those Jews who changed
tonight, those who chose the desert over bondage,
who walked into the strange and became strangers
and gave birth to children who could look down
on them standing on their shoulders for having
been slaves. We honor those who let go of every-
thing but freedom, who ran, who revolted, who fought,
who became other by saving themselves.
READ
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
Maggid by Marge Piercy
LISTEN
https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/avec-philosophie/l-extraordinaire-histoire-d-une-lettre-retrouvee-a-auschwitz-1943743