'Darkness And Eternity
- In Remembrance Elie Wiesel And His Comrades'
Acrylic on canvas 110 x 190
Some words by Tamara Hasselblatt about this painting here, Details below
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Tamara Hasselblatt:
I worked on the painting Darkness And Eternity - In Remembrance Elie Wiesel And His Comrades, for more than three months.
It was inspired by the speech which Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel gave at the Buchenwald memorial site in June this year, in the company of President Barack Obama, as well as by his memoir Night.
When Elie Wiesel said, “I came here … to visit my father’s grave – but he had no grave ...” I was deeply moved.
A need then arose in me to paint a grave for his father, Chlomo Wiesel. As he was unable to have one on earth – as a result of all that inconceivable injustice – I painted a grave for him, his wife and Elie Wiesel’s little sister Tzipora in heaven.
Not only for him, but for all those who had to die due to the Nazi terror and were not given a grave: Jews, Christians, Sinti and Roma, Communists, Socialists...
I have painted a whole graveyard in heaven.
Elie Wiesel’s recollections of Auschwitz and Buchenwald in Night, an oppressive, but non-accusatory book, added depth to the image of the painting which I had directly after his speech and which became more concrete through my further research.
In the painting (a.1x1.9 m) I engage with the fate of those imprisoned in Buchenwald and through them, the fate of all concentration camp victims.
It is a huge, arduous theme. For weeks, I was surrounded in my studio by photographs which the Americans took of the survivors in their bunks after the liberation of Buchenwald.
In abstract form, I have given all those concentration camp victims a place in my painting and a grave in heaven.
Against forgetting.
For vigilance and forthrightness.
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