COMMEMORATIVE TO ARTIST OF THE HOLOCAUST - December 15, 1986

“This is a picture of denial. When I was asked for a drawing about the Holocaust, I didn’t have one. Why not? The answer had to be that I had always denied that it ever happened. Here I sat, years on end, drawing flowers and smiling faces. So I decided to draw a picture of denial. I drew these flowers and smiling faces ad infinitum. Next day a young father was visiting us, just home from Amsterdam. He told of the high building where Anne Frank hid from the Nazis with her family. He described the steep steps up to the bare attic room, the one tiny window where they could look out on a dark night, down onto the flower garden in the back yard. My steps and garden were already drawn, so I drew in a sad face in this little window. It was crazy times, and Hitler was a madman, so the cuckoo clock. This is a Commemorative for Artists of the Holocaust. The Children’s Art. It must go on. No two alike, all heart-breaking, all scorched and burned, along with vast acres of bodies, a Star of David, gypsy beads, pink triangles of the homosexuals, old, debilitated children. The bones stand for the many other group victims of the porgrom, and pogroms in other lands. Artist David Olere, a concentration camp prisoner, drew “To Burn Their Sisters and Brother.” In the summer of 1985 two young women stopped to visit our home, one a young German girl who had been in our country a year. When she reached her home she sent this Peace movement button from her hometown. When my daughter saw the woman’s black velvet dress, she exclaimed: “Oh, the black Nazi armband.” Last my note. ‘Dear Anne Frank, Brothers and Sisters, Too late we answer. Forgive us. We, of the unseeing eyes and deaf ears, salute you.