Another revelation from one of the worst crimes against humanity in world history
With all that has been written over the years about the Holocaust and its victims, the amount of history to be yet uncovered is no doubt staggering. As I read this piece, I found myself travelling back in time using examples cited trying once again to grasp the magnitude of this horrific time in history.
Impossible is the only word I can find. Unless you lived through this, or had family who did, all the stories and pictures in the world could never leave the same mark. Perhaps that is why reminders of the Holocaust continue to be unearthed to this day. To that end, those of us who have no personal attachment will never forget.
BAD AROLSEN, Germany - Deep in Shari Klages’ memory is an image of herself as a girl in New Jersey, going into her parents’ bedroom, pulling a thick leather-bound album from the top shelf of a closet and sitting down on the bed to leaf through it.
What she saw was page after page of ink-and-watercolor drawings that convey, with simple lines yet telling detail, the brutality of Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp where her father spent the last weeks of World War II.
Arrival, enslavement, torture, death — the 30 pictures expose the worsening nightmare through the artist’s eye for the essential, and add graphic texture to the body of testimony by Holocaust survivors.
“I have a sense of being quite horrified, of feeling my stomach in my throat,” Klages says. Just by looking at the book, she felt she was doing something wrong and was afraid of being caught.
Now, she finally wants to make the album public. Scholars who have seen it call it historically unique and an artistic treasure.
But who drew the pictures? Only Klages’ father could know. It was he who brought the album back from Dachau when he immigrated to America on a ship with more than 60 Holocaust orphans — and he had committed suicide in 1972 in his garage in Parsippany, N.J.
The sole clue was a signature at the bottom of several drawings: Porulski.
This is a fascinating piece in its entirety and once again, even though some of the blanks are filled in as it proceeds, you realize the numerous unanswered questions about those who suffered this unimaginable crime. Questions which undoubtly will never be answered.
Written by Sue
