OHA 2013

Zlata the Righteous of Bialystok & her son Liebl who lived in Berlin ©

Art: 2013.
Media: Ink, gouache, colored pencil, woodcut prints, linocut prints and a collaged on piece of fabric- cloth from the foot of a stuffed-animal (toy) parrot.
Framed, 40 inches H x 34 wide.

Zlata Barshewsky was an elderly resident of the Jewish Home for the Aged, Bialystok, Poland. She was a great-grandmother of the artist. She was likely born around 1860. One of her sons, born Herschl, was the maternal grandfather of the artist. He left Poland around 1903, first living in London; then to the US around 1905. He died in New Jersey, 1968.

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Zlata Barshewksy corresponded with her son Harry in America until sometime around or after the Nazi occupation of Poland, 1939. The artist does not know if she was murdered in the ghetto, or at the Treblinka death camp, where most of Bialystok’s Jews were murdered.

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Depicted at upper right: Zlata's son Liebl. His wife was named Hindl, a Jewish woman from Lithuania. They lived in Berlin. They had two children, a boy and a girl, born in 1923 and the late 1920's. All vanished into the abyss of the Nazi genocide and theft.

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Another of Zlata’s sons served as a soldier in the Red Army and emigrated to Israel after the war; that son’s son also served in the Red Army and survived.

Segan met him near Tel Aviv in 2002; he is now deceased.

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The wife and daughter (the daughter also a cousin of Segan’s mother) of the great uncle of Segan (the son of Zlata who was in the Red Army) both survived, having fled far enough east into the Soviet Union that they were not in the areas of western Russia where Jews were murdered en masse by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen soldiers. The Einsatzgruppen units murdered over one million Jews there.

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Other imagery includes scenes inspired by synagogue wall frescoes, seen in black & white photos in the book Wooden Synagogues, published in Warsaw in 1959.

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Sketches of birds were drawn by the artist in Seattle's Greenlake Park; a chicken in the Olympic Peninsula (Washington state); and storks in W. Palm Beach, Florida.

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A sketch of a worshiper during a High Holiday service at Seattle's Congregation Eitz Or (a Renewal denomination synagogue) is seen at center right, above the red & black tree branches and below the portrait of Liebl.

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The words Augen Auf! and the pictorial imagery of eyes were inspired by a security flyer in a Jewish home for the aged that Segan visited in central Europe in 1999.

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This is the third artwork a trio- triptych: The Shoah Trilogy.

Shoah is the Hebrew word referring to the Holocaust.