UTW1

Muranow Street Trolley in Warsaw Ghetto

Art: 1991
Media: Ink
Framed, 35 inches H x 32 W [88.9 cm. H x 81.2 W]

The trolley was drawn from a photo in the book The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising - 45th Anniversary (Interpress, Warsaw, 1988) this drawing became the first drawing of the Under the Wings Holocaust art series. The photo is seen in the chapter titled Life in the Ghetto.

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I was struck by the three figures: the conductor and two men on either side of the of the front of the trolley, all of whom, I contemplated, probably went up in smoke in the gas chambers or died in the ghetto, itself a concentration-death camp where over one-hundred thousand people died in 1941.

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The trolley itself would have been eventually removed by the Nazi's for its valuable metal.

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After the total destruction of the ghetto, spring 1943, a group of Greek Jewish slave laborers were moved from the Auschwitz death camp complex to Warsaw, where they spent many months retrieving usable metal from the ghetto for shipment to Nazi Austria and Germany.
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Ulica (Polish for street) Muranowska was a well-known street in the old Jewish quarter of Warsaw. After drawing the trolley, I was transfixed by its innocence - surrounded by the white space of the drawing paper, and I decided to add wings.
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The two wings were drawn on subsequent visits to the ornithology lab, Burke Museum of Natural History, University of Washington in Seattle.
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A 5 min., 20 sec. video of the artist talking about the artwork at an exhibit of his Holocaust and human rights art,  Hillel Center, Univ. of Washington, Seattle, 2013
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Exhibits, selected

• Hillel Center, Univ. of Washington, Seattle (199)

• Burke Museum, program display at opening reception, National Holocaust Scholars

• Conference and the Lutheran Church Struggle (1992)

• HUB Student Union, Univ. of Washington, program display, National Holocaust Scholars Conference (1992)

• B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum Washington, DC (1994)

• Broadway Market, Capitol Hill district, Seattle (1994)

• Temple Beth Am, Seattle (1997)

• Fairwood Library branch, King County Library System, Washington (1998)

• Seattle Central Community College, Art Gallery (1998)

• Western Illinois University, Art gallery, Macomb (2004)

• Washington State University, Tri-Cities (2007)

• Hillel Center, Univ. of Washington, Seattle (2013