Kind: captions
Language: en
I felt that I had a story to tell
and I wanted to touch others people and
I wanted to tell them something and they
could not say it directly because people
are kind of reluctantly accepting
graphical images or I wanted to tell
them something
what did I want to tell them I wanted to
tell them that the once was a world and
the world was destroyed and I wanted to
speak also about the survivors and I
wanted to say that the survivors are
people who try to rebuild something that
is similar to the reality that existed
once but cannot be totally reconstructed
I remember alive that was maybe the life
that my parents tried to create for me a
kind of an artificial paradise which
later I understood was kind of maybe
fabricated for me because this way that
mid thirties and Poland was already on
the verge of being invaded by a mounting
Germany one day walking in the street
from the kindergarten with my mother a
big kind of very bullish boy came over
to me slapped me in my face
spit in my face and called me
which means and then the next day
my mother took me out from this polish
speaking kindergarten and put me into
hideous speaking little garden one day
the little alien police came and said
you just take with you what you can
carry and to go out into the street and
it was a rainy day and we went down to
the court here and
we were brought down and my mother
although she prepared a little suitcase
already hearing that one maybe at a
certain moment obliged to leave she told
me take a pillow she gave me a big big
pillow to carry music this is where
you're going to put your head to sleep
and we walked in the street we were not
allowed to choose were not allowed
anymore to walk on the sidewalk and we
arrived to the ghetto it was quite
normal with people try to escape when
they came back from their work and in
the terrible reality they tried to
escape from it by burning themselves in
stories though obviously
there was no television or such things
you know that the entertainment where
were the books in the ghetto that was a
theater and this in the theater they
created a space for an exhibition of
paintings of the painters who survived
in the ghetto and I had an exhibition of
my by my drawings when I was 9 years old
when I walked with my father and my
mother to this opening of the exhibition
were exhibited for the first time I mean
it was kind of strange because I don't
think that when at age 9 I knew what an
exhibition means and all but we had to
go through that courtyard packed with
people that looked like kind of dirty
rugs dirty rugs it was there is a masses
of stuff and there was crying of babies
and and some of them in very mobile and
some of them were moving that I remember
there was a woman next to the door there
that was trying to give her breast to a
baby
and so these were hundreds and hundreds
of people that two or three days later
would be taken away to Panera and shot
[Music]
to me what remains is this terrible
image this kind of enormous difficulty
to connect all these things and walking
through these people they are like me
and I walk in there and I have my
drawings put on the wall and people come
to look at them and how do all these
things work together it was clear that
the people that were chosen to be
transported to Pune are we're the ones
who were less useful for the Germans I
was very very lucky that my father who
then became a welder was in this was
among these group of Jews that were
brought to the Hakata camp in Subic the
next morning there was this yelling that
came from the Germans in the courtyard
and we were in these buildings that had
three or four floors and the little
cells with with a kind of not very large
staircase my father hid me under blanket
something brought me and put me into a
kind of a little closet where I was like
when my father took me out from this
thing he put me in our room rolled into
the madness of his bunk so I was alone
and in order to prove to everyone that
this room was empty the door was left a
little open so I knew that I am under
the bath covered by blankets I should
not move all of my vision was just the
wall
then at a certain point my father came
and put me into a sack came with a sexy
get into it and put me on his soldier
and then he went out from that room with
me in the sack and joined a line of men
that were working bringing sex from the
place where they were cutting trees into
little blocks of wood to the gate to
that room my last memory of my father is
is the feeling to be on his on his on
his shoulder is a kind of a physical
feeling of his his presence I don't even
know if the voice of somebody shouting
run run run when they liberated me from
the from the sack I don't even know if
it is his voice or somebody else's voice
my father was was was executed there
with the last Jews that were in the camp
he was gunned down but there were about
I think about many people who managed
somehow to escape
the symbolism of something that exists
at once and it was reconstructed because
people will always try to repair somehow
it is out of the big bits and pieces of
the horrors of the past that we can
reconstruct the sense of our being here
and not only that but we can also learn
how to prevent such horrors to happen
again I'm not only painting paintings
but I'm also touching some people with
what I am doing and so this is important
to me
[Music]