Holocaust survivor's artwork exhibited
By Chris
Bergeron / Daily News Staff
February 28, 2005
Like
many other young children, 12-year-old Helga Weissova drew
pictures of her nightmares.
Starving neighbors
picked through garbage for something to eat. A tired woman
boiled sheets to keep typhus from spreading. People waited
for the dark truck that would carry them to the
crematorium.
Helga didn't dream up
her demons.
Growing up in the
Nazi-controlled ghetto of Terezin in Czechoslovakia, she
witnessed the Holocaust through a child's clear eyes as it
consumed her world.
With crayons and
paintbrushes, she recorded institutionalized barbarities and
everyday decencies in images that still sear the
soul.
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One
of the drawings by Helga Weissova-Hoskova shows two
violinists performing an impromptu concert in
primitive barracks. (Contributed Photo)
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Her paintings and drawings are on display at College of the
Holy Cross in Worcester in an exhibit of extraordinary
power.
The 36 images in "A
Child Artist in Terezin: Witness to the Holocaust" can be
seen in Smith Hall in the fourth floor lobby above the Rehm
Library through March 18.
Built northwest of
Prague in 1780, the city of Terezin (known in German as
Thereisenstadt) was transformed by Nazi occupiers into a
ghetto where Czech Jews were kept as workers before being
sent to extermination camps.
After three years at
Terezin, Helga Weissova was one of the lucky
ones.
She lived - as just
one of an estimated 150 to 1,500 children who survived from
among the 15,000 who spent time in the stone-walled
fortress.
Helga was sent to
Auschwitz with her mother Oct. 14, 1944, and on to labor
camps at Freiberg and Mauthausen.
Now 74 and known by
her married name, Helga Weissova-Hoskova, she is one of the
Czech Republic's best known artists.
Friends cherish
artwork
Hana and Edgar Krasa
also survived Terezin to forge new lives in Israel and now
in Newton.
Decades later, they
befriended Weissova-Hoskova at a 1991 Boston exhibit
featuring Terezin artists and regard her drawings an
invaluable testimony of enduring righteousness.
"These drawings are
the truth," said Hana Krasa. "There will be a time when
there are no living witnesses. I hope these drawings help
people understand what really happened."
In 1941 at the age of
21, Edgar Krasa "volunteered" to go to Terezin as a cook as
part of an agreement to protect his parents from deportation
to a Polish labor camp.
Now 84, Krasa is a
sturdy animated man with thick graying hair.
He said the Nazis
forced 60,000 Jews to live in a converted fortress designed
to hold 7,000 people. Due to disease, malnutrition and
mistreatment, 33,000 Jews died at Terezin and 88,000 Jews
were deported from there to Auschwitz and other camps where
they were killed.
"I'm a pretty tough
guy. I'm not very emotional," said Krasa, sipping coffee.
"It was reality. I lived it. Boys became men. Women grew up
fast."
Though both spent
several years in Terezin, the future husband and wife never
met because men and women lived separately. Krasa, however,
knew his wife-to-be's father, a respected leader in
Terezin's Jewish community.
Since immigrating to
the United States in 1962, the Krasas have returned twice to
Terezin and agree that Weissova-Hoskova created art that
honors people who refused to surrender their
humanity.
Thomas Doughton, a
lecturer in the college's Center for Interdisciplinary and
Special Studies, said the exhibit documents the experience
of one young woman at Terezin. "Sixty years later, we wonder
what we have learned. It's an area of contestation," he
said.
The exhibit is
cosponsored by the Holy Cross Center for Religion, Ethics
and Culture, CISS and the Cantor Art Gallery. It is offered
in collaboration with Clark University's Strassler Family
Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies Exhibit "Forging a
New Life: The Jewish in Central and Eastern Europe on the
Cusp of a New Millennium."
Doughton uses the
exhibit in his class on the Holocaust to encourage students
to ask: "How should we live in response to the darkness that
surrounds us."
In class, he urges
students not to view the drawings as a "chronicle of
victims," comprising stereotyped images of Jews,
"perpetrators, liberators and bystanders."
Rather, Doughton hopes
viewers regard the drawings as one artist's humane response
to anti-Semitic genocide.
"It's helpful if
students can see (the drawings) as an expression of one kind
of accommodation to a horrific experience. It's important
students understand people who didn't survive ... live on in
the memories of the families, friends and neighbors," he
said.
Helga Weissova-Hoskova
was 12-years-old when she was deported to Terezin on Dec.
17, 1941, along with her parents who'd hidden paints and
brushes among their belongings.
After the child first
painted an imaginary snowman, her father encouraged her to
"draw what you see."
For the next three
years, she embraced that advice, chronicling the commonplace
indignities of camp life with sharp-eyed detail.
Most pictures are on
single sheets of paper about eight- by 11-inches.
Mothers carry children
and an elderly woman, wearing a Star of David badge to
identify Jews, leans on a cane as newcomers arrive in
Terezin. A violinist performs a makeshift concert for camp
members in a drab barracks. Men carry loaves of bread into
the camp on a wooden cart used to carry away
corpses.
The childhood drawings
combine realistic portrayals of daily life with an abstract
universality that reaches beyond Terezin.
Roger Hankins, curator
of the Cantor Art Gallery, said, "These are drawings by a
child of great skill." He suggested that Weissova-Hoskova's
art could be interpreted as an attempt to understand her
drastically changed circumstances or "give form to her
fears."
Hankins observed the
subject and style of the drawings became "a lot more
dramatic" as time passed.
As conditions
worsened, several of the later drawings featured childlike
fantasies of gaily dressed children carrying platters of
food through fields of flowers. Others showed castles in
clouds.
Perhaps the most
ominous of the later drawings depicts people lining up for
"A departing transport," a truck that carried them to death
camps, including the artist's then 46-year-old
father.
Weissova-Hoskova and
her mother survived and returned to Prague where the artist
lives today.
As the war approached
its end, Edgar and Hana Krasas' lives took separate, violent
turns.
Edgar Krasa was sent
to Auschwitz. He recalled stepping from a train with
hundreds of other Jewish prisoners who were herded into two
lines, to the right for forced labor to the left for the gas
chambers.
"There were miles of
electrified barbed wire. I saw a chimney and asked a Nazi
guard why there was so much smoke. He told me it was the
bakery,"he said.
On a work detail,
Edgar Krasa tried to flee and was shot in his side and left
for dead in a ditch.
Crawling into the
forest, he found other escapees who kept him alive. After
hostilities ended, he returned to Terezin and found both
parents alive.
In early 1945, Hana
Krasa's father was taken from Terezin with 20 other men and
forced to throw thousands of boxes containing the ashes of
Jewish dead in the Ohre River to hide evidence of Nazi war
crimes. Her mother was sent to Auschwitz. She never saw her
parents again.
Asked whether she
still felt embittered by their "death," Hana Krasa paused
and then said firmly, "They didn't die. They were
murdered."
After years of near
starvation, Edgar Krasa returned to his trade as a
restaurant cook, gaining 80 pounds in six weeks to regain
his pre-war weight of 163 pounds.
After the war, Hana
and Edgar Krasa met at a New Year's Eve party in 1946 and
were later married.
He joked, "At one
point, she proposed and wouldn't take 'no' for an
answer."
Amid the post-war
chaos, Russia installed a communist government and the
Krasas fled Czechoslovakia to Israel in 1950. In 1962, they
emigrated to the United States where they raised their two
sons, Daniel and Rafphael, who live in Newton and Natick,
respectively.
Edgar Krasa spent 22
years as an administrator at the Jewish Rehabilitation
Center in Boston working alongside his wife, and in 1985
opened his own restaurant in Brookline.
Now retired, he
remains active in "Facing History and Ourselves," a
Brookline nonprofit dedicated to educating students about
the Holocaust.
Hana Krasa, who
doesn't like to speak before audiences, shared her family's
story with her grandchildren. She was moved when her
11-year-old granddaughter, Rebecca, wrote about Terezin for
a school report using books with Weissova-Hoskova's
drawings.
Hana and Edgar Krasa
pray children like Rebecca will never again have to live the
nightmare portrayed in the artist's drawings.
On their bedroom
bureau, they keep a sprig of edelweiss from the years before
the war and a stone carving of "chai," the Hebrew word for
"life."
"This is what we
always wanted for our children, a better world," said Hana
Krasa. "When I see my children and their children, I know
with certainty the Nazis did not succeed in eliminating our
people. This is our family. This is sacred."
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