oha 1999

Alex Schwarz of Vienna and Seattle having a gut eingeschlufen in his favorite reading & tv chair at the Jewish Old Folks Home, Vienna, Austria, 1999

Art: 1999
Media: Ink, with collaged on travel momentos from Vienna, Israel and London
Framed: 24 ¼ in. H x 19 ¼ W

Included are an old US Special Delivery postage stamp; a Masada cable car ride ticket; a London underground tube ticket;
two Austrian postage stamps; a Viennese club flyer stating Nov. 1999; a Do Not Disturb hotel guest room - paper sign printed in Hebrew, English, French, German; an Israeli bus or train ticket; and the picture image side of an Israeli business card, probably from a hotel.

Schwarz escaped Vienna and Nazi Austria by sheer luck: A lottery visa from the American Embassy. His wife Gertrude, also from Vienna, escaped in a kinder-transport to England. She was unhappy there, speaking no English on arrival, and working in a country estate, but she was alive, a great life-saving happenstance for an Austrian Jew during the years of the Third Reich. They met in New York in the late 1940’s or early 1950’s and moved to Seattle.
~
I met them in the early 1990’s. In Oct. 1999 Segan flew to Vienna where he visited Alex; then to Zurich on the way to Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and eventually London. During the visit he also did a small pencil drawing which was the inspiration  for a very small linocut print made in 2000.

See OHA 1999 Alex Schwarz pencil; OHA 2000 Alex Schwarz lino

Gut eingeschlufen is transliterated from Yiddish. It’s used as a humorous term. When one says someone is having a “gut eingeschlufen” it means they’re departed, as in the skies above - for eternity. Each morning during my stay in Vienna Alex and a relative of his would come to where I was staying and greetme. On his arrival I’d ask Alex, “Did you have a gut eingeschlufen last night?” and he would laugh heartily.

~

In 1999 Schwarz donated an artwork by Segan, "Baroque prayer wall, Tykocin synagogue, Poland" (1994-5) to the Yad Vashem Art Museum. It can be seen by visitors by prior arrangement.

[see OHA 1995 Tykocin synagogue]

Schwarz donated that artwork in memory of his mother, who was murdered at Auschwitz; his son Ronni, who had died of MS in Seattle prior to when Segan met them couple; and in memory of his wife, who preceded him in death.

I wrote of my visit to see Alex in Vienna in an article I penned, printed in the late Jewish Transcript newspaper of Seattle (pub. by the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle): “Report from Vienna, Jerusalem, England,” April 28, 2000.

A photo of Alex, seen chatting with another friend of the artist, (now retired campus Christian pastor) Rev. Brooke Rolston, was published in The Magnolia News, a community weekly newspaper in Seattle, Oct. 5, 1994 issue. The photo was taken at the reception of the exhibit of photos by Nazi sergeant Heinz Jost and 7 of Segan’s Under the Wings series drawings at Seattle’s Museum of History & Industry.

In 2002 Segan completed a large artwork portraying a first cousin of Alex's, Kamil Hahn of Czechoslovakia, who had been murdered by the Nazis. See UTW 44.

Art, video © A K Segan