UTW 29

Girl in rags in the Warsaw ghetto

Art: 1994
Media: Ink
Framed, 78 inches H x 40 W [198.1 x 101.6 cm]

The framing was a gift of Maura T. Callahan of Seattle in memory of her mother; Seattle First Baptist Church; and congregation members of Mercer Island United Methodist* Church, Washington, 1995.

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Drawn from a Warsaw ghetto photo which mesmerized me for over a year, during which time I planned to do a life-sized drawing.  It is seen in The Warsaw Ghetto - 45th Anniversary of the Uprising, pub, by Interpress, Warsaw. It is in the chapter “Dzeici (Children).”  

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The girl was perhaps in her early teens, and probably near death from starvation, illness, exposure (to the elements), or any combination thereof. Food rations in the Warsaw Ghetto were less than 600 calories a day per person, not enough to keep a human being alive.  

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In the photo, her clothes are in a wealth of pieces unraveling and unstitched. Her stance - how she holds herself - is frightening, as is the look on her face.

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This was my first life-sized drawing in the series. In 1996, I drew Bar Mitzvah Age Boy in the Warsaw Ghetto (UTW 31) as a companion piece.

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*The Mercer Island United Methodist Church’s pastor in 1995 was Rev. Jack Olive, of blessed memory. He was very active in interfaith dialogue and communication for many years. During one of two visits I made to see him, years later, when he was terminally ill, he mentioned  up his great disappointment that after he left the MIUMC church (from there he became pastor at University Temple Methodist Church, Seattle; and his last job before becoming seriously ill was Assistant Dean, School of Theology & Religion, Seattle University) the MIUMC pastor who replaced him welcomed a Jews-for-Jesus group into the church.

Jews for Jesus is a California based anti-Semitic hate organization, funded by Christian supremacist churches. The Jews for Jesus organization target Jewish people for conversion, especially children, youth and young adults. Were they to succeed, they would achieve what the Nazis sought, which was to make the whole world “Judenrein” (without Jews).

 In the aftermath the mass murder of six million Jewish Europeans (and four million other victims of the Nazis and Fascists duing the 1930’s and on through 1945), contemporary conversion campaigns  led by evangelical Christians are racist, immoral, unethical and imperialist.]