Author: Inna Rogatchi

Edward and Wallis Simpson meeting Hitler. Germany, 1937.

Missing Part of the Guide for TV Interview Watchers

“Racism drove us out of UK” – a quote from the recently carefully planned and calculated interview by a very fitting each other couple to Oprah. 17 millions Americans watchers, probably more, are in shock and full of sympathy, naturally. 

The Labour MPs in Britain have jumped on the horse and have demanded an official probe into the racism at the Palace. Of course. Racism claims are a hot commodity nowadays.

Perhaps, those sympathisers have to be educated a bit who is the person who has stated the line so somber-like and self-convincingly. That still young man is the person who sixteen years ago was featured all over the UK and in some US media as well, on the front pages. He was going to party, with a Nazi bandage on the sleeve of his white shirt. And it was not an isolated case. There were reports on Heil saluting by the same person, too. So he knows something about racism, it seems. British media covers, 2015. (C) Wiki Commons Image Library.American coverage , New York Post, 2015. (C) Wiki Common Images Library.

To compare the person’s actions and his words in this case and at this time leads to only reaction: it is simply hilarious. Whoever chooses this kind of outfit for a dressing party is declaring who-he-is. Period. And he is somber-like mentoring his family now choosing to shame them world-wide, for the profit, in that utterly hypocritical exercise for dumb and dumbest.

Next to him is a thriving former barmaid, former B-movies participant ( actress is a profession, so it has to be a distinction) who is having a moment of her life and enjoying every millisecond of it. 

The image of the woman on the screen is renewed to the smallest detail: the hair, the dress, every single gesture rehearsed thoroughly. As it happened, it all is a blatant appropriation: the hair, the dress, and gestures too.

Just somebody in a huge Oprah team who was preparing the show, had to read something about the person whose hair, dress and gestures they were appropriated for never-made-it actress on the bench opposite Oprah. Because they have put themselves, their subject, their mighty hostess, and the whole show, actually, in real jeopardy with that choice. Wallis Simpson, 1936. (C) Wiki Common Images Library.

Because – as it was noted in the British press yet before the interview – the copy-catted image was of Wallis Simpson, American socialite who has persuaded Edward VIII to marry her by the price of abdicating. Which was, actually, a blessing for Britain, as it turned out, because having undeterred pro-Nazi sympatizer on the throne at the time of the Second World War would make the job of Winston Churchill much harder. He would prevail anyway, of course. 

It would be highly recommended to consult some historian in order not to put the entire operation in such utter embarrassment for those who were responsible in the Oprah team before reviving the Wallis Simpson image 80 years after many of her notorious public and private statements and her multiplied allying with pro-Nazi figures literally everywhere she went. It would be so obvious to read, to learn, to think, to make this probably seen as unnecessary for them exercises of putting one plus one, before copiously cloning and putting in front of multi-million audience today  a person who produces all these lines and hints on racism being 100% in the appropriated image of disgusting personage of the modern history known as Wallis Simpson. So much meticulous effort of all sorts to revive the image of whom?

Just for Oprah team – and for those among the huge international audience who have no clue about who Wallis Simpson was: she was the person who has publicly stated that ‘France has lost ( to the Germans) because it has been infested inside”; she was the person who did choose as the host for her scandalous wedding with abdicated Edward the Portuguese banker who was known to the MI-6 as devoted Nazi sympatizer, appropriator of looted by Nazi art,  and who was close friend and business partner of dictator Salazar. 

She was the person who with her husband ran in 1937 to Germany to meet Herr Adolf and to lick his rare part enthusiastically, forgive me a small slip off the protocol. The Simpson and Edward visit to Germany and their cheerful and cordial  meetings with Hitler are very well documented. Just one of many existing photos of the tour  voila: 

Edward and Wallis Simpson meeting Adolf Hitler in Germany in 1937. (C) Wiki Commons Image Library.

She was the person who has organised the luxury marine tour for her-beloved-self and her husband on a board of an yacht of Alex Wenner-Gren, their good friend and associate and at the same time close personal friend – and business associate of Herr Göring, Hermann Göring. Furious Churchill managed to avert the public disaster with that would be sun-bathing of still Royal couple on the yacht of a pro-Nazi person who was actually banned by the British and American authorities during the WWII for his pro-Nazi activities and dealings with the Third Reich.

Substantial part of these activities were banking manipulations subsidising Nazis via Wallis Simpson’s one of the best and closest friends Wenner-Gren’s bank domesticated  where? In the Bahamas, indeed. In the Bahamas where Simpson’s third husband Edward was put by the British Crown to be the Bahamas governor during 1940-1945. One might wonder why on earth did he step down from that so convenient position on March 16, 1945 when the the Nazi Germany’s utter defeat was imminent? One might, but none of the British historians do not. 

I am not going further into that man’s personal relations and existed – before masterly retrieved by the able British ( and it happened, Kremlin) agent immediately after the end of WWII  – highly incriminating letters between him and Hitler. But it is well-known that they did exist. 

My point with regard to that stunningly mean exercise on the TV screen aired with such publicity is that the guide for this show for massive TV audience, especially in the States, clearly misses the part in which the audience would be reminded on the episode of the Nazi entertainment costume happily picked up by member of the Royal family who is now making such blatant statements on racism which in his words ‘drove him and his family out of his country’, and about the record of the openly and proudly pro-Nazi American socialite whose image has been picked up for appropriation by another American who is a parody even of a socialite. The audience has its right to know about these historical facts, to make their conclusions.

But of course, this kind of missing part of a guide for TV audiences does not generate such dizzy profit. As we know from history, including the modern one, decency hardly does. That’s why throughout long historical records it is regarded as a luxury. Royals or not. 

Bar-Mitzvah in front of the Auschwitz entrance

And even there, Pat’s works which I presented, were perceived by the people who know every detail of what has happened to the inhabitants of Brehow Ghetto, with deep emotions. Because when someone , 70 years later, re-lives a tragedy on the level of a certain child, a certain mother, a certain boy, with such a passion, asking loudly all those questions which had been answered never, it reverberates in people’s hearts powerfully. 

 Comparison of Pat’s coloured oil works and prints made in 2011-2014 with black-and-white photos from the original album works in a stricken way. Pat’s art is metaphorical – photos are documental. Pat’s works are picking up some one-two-three people from the photos – photos fixes groups as they were. Pat’s works manifesting hyperbolised details, such as a children doll, a girl bow, oversized yellow star on the Rabbi’s coat – photos are not magnifying anything like that, they show us a cold view of a butcher before his methodically applied butchery would start any minute from the stills taken. The contrast is colossal.  It shows the very essence of the Nazi butchery of human beings in uniquely magnifying glass of compassion which becomes conviction. 

Our committee has decided to start to work with good colleagues at Yad Vashem and go on for the publication of a special brochure, publishing all forty Pat’s art works next to their prototypes from the original The Auschwitz Album, with her – and ours – commentaries.

Eight months later, in Nomver 20202, the first brochure in this format has been ready, thanks to focused and devoted work of Dr Shelley R.Neese who took upon herself to implement our ideas, in memory of her great teacher, Pat Mercer Hutchens. In the end of the past, so difficult because of the pandemic year, 2020, 500 catalogues comparing Pat’s artistic interpretation with chilly black-and-white photos from the Auschwitz Album went to the Faculty of Arts at Liberty University for our pilot educational Art & Holocaust course there. We are having plans for expanding the program world-wide. Cover of the Auschwitz Album Re-Visited Catalogue published in November 2020. Credit and permission: Shelley R.Neese, The JerUSAlem Connection.

Forty Personal Stories

I knew Pat well. I felt her as a family member. She was a close friend. She was a fighter, and a straightforward strong American girl from Louisiana, that type of made of steel ( outwardly) Southern American girl with strongest and noble convictions, immense will, and mighty spiritual drive. She was sharp and fair. Inwardly, she was very subtle, finely feeling and subduedly expressing  herself as a gentle soul who knew what a nuance was about in an organic way of implementing it. 

I also knew, being helping her in her last project as its curator, in what hurry she was. The Auschwitz Album has 56 pages with 193 photos on them. Originally there were more, but Lilly Jacobs who found the album in the pocket of the left SS-coat on very chilling day of January 27th, 1945, in one of the Auschwitz barracks, and who kept it in her attic in the US until 1980s , gave some photos to the people who did recognise their family members in that terrifying document of the Shoah. Page from the catalogue with Little Rose of Hungary art work, the artist’s comment, and the corresponding photo from the original Auschwitz Album.

Pat has told me several times how hurried she is. “You see, my dear, there are about 200 photos in the album. I did just a bit of them. I know that I would not be able to do them all, but I am trying to work hard, to do as many as I could”. She was hoping to make seventy of her artistic interpretation  out of 193 in the album. She managed to do 40 of them. Catalogue page with Ben-Aron art work, the artist’s comment and prototype photo from the original Auschwitz Album.

In the recently published art brochure, the catalogue of her last art and humanist project, there is a quote from Pat’s thoughts with regard on that ordeal which she willingly adopted as her last mission in life: “Horrifying as they are, these group photos revealing mass tactics of de-humanisation make it harder to see each person as a suffering individual. My purpose is to zoom in, take two, three or four, and search for a more personal story. It is my prayer that observers will think about each man, woman, and child pictured in the album separately. That was my goal in the heart-wrenching process of painting. Often, I dreamt of trying to bring one of the children back to life. My heart tells me that if I had gone through such an appalling, de-humanising experience, it might bring some small shred of hope to know that perhaps someday, somewhere, someone would know—and let the world know what happened. That is the goal of my life work as an artist; to create monuments of remembrance through art. I am grateful to God for giving me the honour, strength and compassion to paint each precious person”. 

It was written by a mortally-ill over 70-year old woman artist who knew that her days are numbered and who went through an exhausting chemotherapy process at the same time while working on her last project which has been also emotionally powerfully drenching out. Catalogue page with Rabbi Leib Weiss art work, the artist’s comment and photo from the original Auschwitz Album.

Seven years on Pat’s passing, I am thinking of my elder friend ( Pat and Jim are the generation of my parents),  on her selflessness, and her focusing on the tragedy of Jewish children, women, elderly, Rabbis, anyone who has perished in the Shoah. I am thinking of her vision, her approach to see individuals in all those six-plus million victims of the Shoah, with one and a half million children among them. She tried to see and recognise every single person in those 193 photos from the only photographic evidence we have of what was happening inside Auschwitz.

Because only if one would be seeing them individually, they would be recognised and remembered. If we will be looking not on an unidentified child or elderly, but on Little Emma, Ben-Aron, Rabbi Weiss, we would start to comprehend the horror and enormity of that unspeakable crime which has been committed against them and our people. Each of them. Six million and more, individually. With the name. With the place. With the face, if possible. And this is exactly what Pat Mercer Hutchens has done in her last art project which goes far beyond art and gets into the orbit on applied universal humanism, being positioned high there. 

It is very encouraging to me, who was named after my young aunt Minna Chigrinsky who was murdered in the Shoah in October 1941 along with her aunt and uncle being just 18, that many kids in schools in several countries and many students in several American and European Universities would be studying and understanding the Shoah as a personal stories having in front of them the catalogue of the Re-Visiting Auschwitz Album by my dear friend Pat Mercer Hutchens and being able to compare it with the original photos from that horrendous document which is kept at Yad Vashem. I know that this way, people’s understanding of the Shoah will get personal. As it should be. 

* * * * 

The booklet can be ordered here. All funds from it goes to the Holocaust Educational Fund. 

January 2021

The scale of the Shoah prevents us from perceiving it in a whole. Human psyche’s self-defence mechanism is evoked, often blocking us from absorbing it in its enitre shocking volume. We know its methodic plan and idea. We also know the incomprehensible outcome of it. It comes as facts of history. But what connects us with our brethren perished in that unspeakable crime is the way of personal identification with real people from those six – and in all likeness, more – million murdered Jews. That’s why many of us randomly  adopt one Jewish person from the Yad Vashem data-base every January 27th, to identify with that Polish girl, or that Hungarian boy, or that Lithuanian woman. My husband and I are doing it annually, and we treasure that somber but also warm and personal moment when a face and a name appears on our screens and we are able to commemorate the taken lives of more than six million souls while identifying with just two of them, each for one of us. Michael Rogatchi (C). Faces of the Shoah. Indian Ink on cotton paper. 50 x 40 cm. 1992. The Rogatchi Art Collection.

Another day, I saw some photos of a nice American Jewish boy whose family has chosen for his bar-Mitzvah a very moving Yad Vashem program in which Jewish boys can conduct their bar-Mitzvah with adopting a Jewish boy murdered in a  Shoah who had no chance for that. There is one thing when a Jewish boy chooses to put his tefilin for the first time in front of the Auschwitz entrance. It is a symbolic and conscious  gesture. 

It gets disarmingly different when the same boy is doing it in the name of a 2-year old Hungarian Jewish boy with a name and surname, knowing the circumstances of his annihilation. I cannot imagine more formatting experience in upbringing of the kids whose families had the heart and thoughtfulness of choosing this kind of bar-Mitzvah for them.  

When the Shoah gets personal, it gets under our skin for good. 

Presence of Little Emma

A year ago, on previous annual commemoration of the International Holocaust Day in January 2020, I penned the story about such a personal journey into the depths of the Shoah by several people in different generations. The story can be read here. 

I wrote there about dear friend, late American artist Dr Pat Mercer Hutchens who, after learning on contracting cancer at the age of 74, have decided to dedicate the last three years of her life to scrupulous research and the artistic visualisation of the images on terrible photographs from The Auschwitz Album, well-known document. As a matter of fact, the Album which is preserved at Yad Vashem from 1980 onward, is the only existing photographic evidence from inside the largest Nazi factory of death. Inna Rogatchi (C). That Kind of Forest. Watercolour, wax paster, oil pastel, lapice pastel, encre a l’alcool, perle de jaune on authored original archival print on cotton paper. 30 x 40 cm. 2021. Ghetto Waltz series.

I also wrote in that essay a year ago about  several types of interconnections, between the Shoah witnesses and its victims and their families and those passionate souls as Pat’s who were as if translating the emotional trauma of the Shoah for us today; and also about generational interconnections in between the Pat’s students and their children, the way through which the compassion is preserved and alive, thus assuring the memory of the innocent souls murdered,  and also strengthening the personal qualities of all, especially young generations, involved. 

A month after publishing that essay, in early March 2020, I went to the USA in what happened to be my last trip before the pandemic that has grounded us all. Many things during that memorable visit were connected with Pat’s memory, her legacy and how to transfer it to the next generations. We have had a special ceremony of our The Rogatchi Foundation Humanist of the Year 2019 Award in memory of Pat Mercer Hutches for her husband, legendary American hero, Brig. General ( Ret) Jim Hutchens, meetings of the educational committee on Pat’s artistic and historical legacy, collegial encounters at the US National Holocaust Museum and Memorial in Washington D.C., among the other things. 

I was encouraged to see the eyes of young generation, from 10 to 20 year old ones, during the ceremony near Washington D.C. where they were listening to speeches and our re-collections  on how the active, creative, spiritual, passionate memorialising of unknown to her victims of the Shoah has marked the last years of Pat’s life, how she , while battling the cancer, bravery immersed herself into sharing the destinies, actually, the very last hours and minutes of the boys and girls, women and elderly, Rabbis and mothers from the Brehow ghetto in Hungary, which was a collecting point from several towns in the region. How this established American artist, sixty seven years after the collapse of the Hungarian Jewry, decided and carried on re-living the terrible end of their lives with those people. 

It was very quiet in the audience during our ceremony at the speeches part of it when we were recollecting what Pat and Jim did and why. And I would remember the eyes of a few youngsters present there with a hopeful feeling of preservation not only of memory, but the interest towards it. All his life, Elie Wiesel was deeply troubled by the indifference he witnessed first-hand before, during and after the Shoah. Many other survivors would share both publicly and privately the same never answered question and piercing pain on that paralysing, incomprehensible indifference surrounded Shoah and emboldened it in the most desperate way.  

The eyes of those youngsters at our ceremony near Washington D.C. in early March 2020 when we were discussing, remembering and reflecting on the Hutchens family attitude and their life-long efforts to share the tragedy of Jewish victims of the Holocaust in their post-life, were telling to me that these very people would not be indifferent. I do think that it is a vital outcome of the efforts of the people like General Hutchens and his wife artist Pat Mercer Hutchens, their living and growing up legacy. 

Thanks to a generosity and great hearts at the right place of Amy and Bill Zewe who were hosting our ceremony near Washington D.C., it has become a wonderful, warm, meaningful, loving  and memorable event. 

There was one spot in Amy and Bill’s house which was a kind of a magnet to every single person who entered it prior to the ceremony. When I saw it once and again, I decided  to get closer there to find out what makes the place attractive to everyone to stop there, and groups of guests to stay there for a while. When I got close, I was overwhelmed. My favourite artwork of Pat, which is also on our wall as I’ve described it in my previous essay on the topic, Little Emma was there. People were as if being pulled next to that wonderful, and so very special work. Pat Mercer Hutchens (C). Little Emma. Authored original archival print signed by the artist. The Rogatchi Art Collection.

I said: “ It is on mine wall as well”, and was about to continue with “It makes two of us”, meaning Amy and myself, while people staying next to Little Emma started to respond: “ It is on my wall as well” – said Shelley Neese,  historian and writer, President of The JerUSAlem Connection, – “ and on the wall of my in-laws, too”. – “It is on my wall, too” ,  -‘ and mine’ – said both daughters of Pat and Jim Hutchens. – “ It is on my wall, as well”, – said two more guests of the ceremony. ‘So we have a Little Emma club here” – I concluded, being deeply impressed by the choice of all those people, their solidarity, their sentiments which  I would never know about unless we all happened to be at the same time at the same place next to that so special for each of us work of our all dear friend.

I still remember that episode as vividly as it happened right now. And I  remember the eyes of all those smiling women around Pat’s Little Emma, these eyes transmitting deep, non-declarative compassion that little Emma and all of those little Emmas  were devoid of in the awful end of their brutally abrupt lives. 

I also thought of what one artistic work made by a wise heart is capable of, in generations. 

Blue Hills of Virginia

During my last trip before the pandemic, we were travelling through extraordinarily beautiful blue hills of Virginia, a magic place with special people living there, so rich in history from the beginning of the American story 244 years back till today.  We approached a huge campus of Liberty University and were greeted into its giant Faculty of Arts. We have had an important working meeting there, to discuss the further development of the Pat Mercer Hutchens artistic legacy. 

After doing a lot of research and thinking, Pat has decided to donate all 40 originals of her oil on canvas works of her Re-Visiting The Auschwitz Album collection to the Faculty of Arts of Liberty University. She has told me shortly before her passing that it was not her immediate and first decision, neither was it spontaneous one. She realised that those 40 originals are a central part of her legacy, and she wanted to make sure that it will go to the right address, she said. 

With over 70 thousands students attending Liberty University, and many of them taking also different art courses there, with their facilities, and the attention of the Art Faculty’s head,  known sculptor, professor Todd Smith, Pat’s decision seemed to be the right one. 

Pat’s works were presented at the special exhibition at the University Gallery, all forty of them, in a spacious, professionally lit inviting space. While we were there, students and visitors were coming in constantly, chatting and smiling when entering and being completely silent and crying, staying for a long time next to every single of those 40 tragedies on canvas. Pat’s canvases from this collection are not too big, but they are extremely intense, and one needs an extra strength to meet with them, with all those children and women, and elderly, for the first time. Also, there is one thing to see separate prints, and  it is totally different to have that mass of human suffering reflected in deep oil, alive, all around you. Such immersion results in a long-lasting impression, staying with the artist’s message in her dramatic, even desperate canvases, with you for a long time. And yes, nothing can replace a physical seeing the art works, all other experiences are different stories, providing different impressions. Dr Shelley R Neese and prof. Todd Smith at the Auschwitz Re-Visited exhibition of the works by Pat Mercer Hutchens. March 2020. the Art Gallery of Liberty University, Virginia. Photo (C) Inna Rogatchi. The Rogatchi Archive.

During our many-hours meeting at and around Pat’s exhibition, the first one after her passing away in 2014, six years on, we were discussing with Shelley R. Neese and professor Todd Smith how to develop her artistic and historical legacy, how to make it ‘work’ in different ways and forms. 

Since the first moment when I saw the Pat’s works from that heart-rendering collection for the first time back a decade ago, in 2011, I was of an opinion that this kind of art , with the artist’s personal comments, is the one of the best possible ways to teach Holocaust in schools, to bring that element of colours, the accents on humanistic details as adequate and natural for children’s attention. I saw that collection-in-making as the right way to start a conversation on the Shoah with children between 10 and 15, to introduce it  to them in the terms of simple, organic compassion, to make the beginning of the explanation of inexplicable.  I did what I could in that direction, with our Foundation working on several programs and projects of Pat’s The Auschwitz Album Re-Visited in several European countries. 

Now, when our Educational Committee was working on further tasks regarding Pat’s legacy, we thought on the most appropriate way of presenting her works and thoughts to the next level, the university students. I remembered that in many of my lectures on Pat and her re-reading of the Shoah in pictures, I combined her works with corresponding black-and-white originals from the album at Yad Vashem. It always worked, at any audience. I did it in Finland, the UK, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine. Especially poignant was my experience in Budapest,  at my presentation at the Holocaust Remembrance Centre, during the international conference on Raoul Wallenberg. There, a big gallery is dedicated to the tragedy of the Brehow Ghetto, with all material from The Auschwitz Album and more available is presented in graphic and extremely saddening detail. The light in that gallery only makes it harder to see all those faces, their homes, their streets, that open wound stilled in time. 

Modern History Perspectives series

“Jewish tradition commands us to tell the truth to the power” – Elie Wiesel to President Reagan at the public ceremony in the White House, April 19, 1985. 

A Nazi for the Office. Or rather not

Just over a decade ago, which is not that long a time by the standards of political development, I was very busy. In my capacity of a senior foreign affairs adviser for the members of the European Parliament, including the EU-the UK- the US- and Israel public diplomacy, I did initiate the process examining the possibility of expelling from the EP the one of its new members, British open Nazi who, among his other public racist activities, was bragging openly of having two Rottweiler dogs, ‘one named Anne and the other Frank’. During the several months’ process, I was often wondering: why on earth nobody else bothered to try to block that bastard’s membership at the European Parliament? Why on earth it was considered as acceptable to have an open and active Nazi as the member of the highest political pan-European body? Democracy had nothing to do with it. Ineptness had. 

We did everything possible under the legal realities of the European Parliament at the time, including issuing a special inner-EP memorandum protesting the situation and signed by a number of MEPs. That document which although had no decisive legislative power to expel the Nazi from the European Parliament in the XXI century, did raise the question of moral unacceptability of the openly pro-Nazi personalities as the members of the European Parliament as such, with all legally possible points following our claim, including appeal against the owner of two  Rottweilers’ membership in any EP committee. 

As we found out, at the time, during the seventh term of the European Parliament (2009-2014), the EP lacked necessary legal instruments to unseat a member selected by a member-country although everyone at all the levels of the giant pan-European institution had completely agreed with us and with the justification of our demand. As a result, the humanoid in question was not made a member of any important committee, and contrary to all his steroid-energetic efforts, was listed as a member of just one the EU delegation to the non-EU member country of the least importance. 

Because of our articulated stand, the open Nazi was effectively muted since the day one of his term at the EP for all five years there. After his hanging around in Brussels, he was expelled even from his own racist party back home in the dispute of financial matters. 

During my involvement in that important process, I was threatened seriously and multiple times. Those people breeding the Rottweilers with such names, are real bandits and are connected with professionals in the field. My husband was also contacted, repeatedly, with strong recommendations to convince his wife ‘to retreat from her annoying activities, or else’. ‘What is she gaining personally in this campaign?’ – was one of the arguments of the people who pressured us persistently. I gather that their question might be even genuine. How could they understand, really? 

At a certain stage, a close friend, one of the Queen barristers, got so worried for my safety, based on his own information, that he demanded that the corresponding security authorities would be briefed on the escalating situation. The situation was taken under scrutiny and tight control. And I was wondering again: how on earth it was I who needed protection from the Nazi and his trained dogs, metaphorically too, almost 65 years after the ultimate defeat of Nazi Germany worldwide? I still wonder. 

Praising Hitler next to the Capitol

I remembered that decade-back episode vividly now, watching the painful unfolding of that unbelievable-but-true last turn of events preceding the change of the US Administration in Washington D.C.

Just next to the Capitol where I am visiting regularly and so very often during last three decades, a newly elected Congresswoman from Illinois with no trace of intelligence on her face whatsoever was screaming in that typical abrasive provinciality manner addressing the huge crowd that we saw a bit later in their incredibly stupid and clearly criminal action, indoctrinating them that ‘Hitler was right…’. As  it is known and recorded, her full phrase was ‘Hitler was right on one thing: who has the youth, has the future’.   But I am not interested in anything that this moronic creature pronounced after the beginning of her phrase in her capacity of an elected Member of the US Congress, “Hitler was right…”  in front of the US Capitol. Neither do I interested in her apology, as stupid and as provincial as her speech at the rally on December 6th, 2021 was. I am convinced that a creature like that shall be dismissed from the Congress, and that there is existing legislation that allows it. Plus there has to be bipartisan demand of her to resign. Now. 

This was an unpardonable precedent which has to be addressed further than it has been done by now, with all the just storm risen in the media and by many Jewish organisations, both Americans and international ones. That Congresswoman’s escapade has nothing to do with the First Amendment, or democracy , or anything else from the category of applied American domestic policies. It has everything to do with sheer racism and unwarranted Nazi glorification and thus has to be cut off instantly. That message, its phrasing, and more importantly what is behind it, is a menace. There are  consequences of such statements, always.  

And – in the first place, really – the outgoing US President, or anyone else, for that matter, from any side of the US political spectrum – should not have this kind of humanoids as their supporters, not to speak as the representative of their party at the highest US legislation body. It is always screamingly counter-productive, to say the very least. 

Many of us know from history about both awful and shameful pro-Nazi rally in February 1939 in New York when 20 000 people gathered at the Madison Square in support of the Nazis – this is after the Kristallnacht, mind you. It is also sobering to remember how The New York Times covered the Holocaust, with its unimaginable 6 mentioning of Jews as the primary victims of the Shoah in just 24 front-page articles dedicated to the theme during all six years of the Second World War, from September 1, 1939 until September 2, 1945. It stands in history as the one of the most shameful phenomenon of the public response to the ultimate global tragedy and the crime of unheard scale by the leading American media. 

One could expect that with having all terrible Holocaust-related data available in so many ways and forms nowadays, those who are seeking to become a statesman or stateswoman, would know what is permissible to state publicly and what is not. But as we are seeing it, they do not care.  What is also important and worrisome, they are not dismissed or rebuked by the leaders at whose rallies they are rallying. Rallying for what? – we all have the right to ask. For applying some of Hitler lessons? Seriously? 

I firmly disagree with followed regular laments that the Hitler-praising Congresswoman ‘needs more and better Holocaust education’, and alike. Give me a break. This kind of creatures are immune to any education on Holocaust, and the other topics of humanity. It is simply naive to lull oneself with this kind of suggestion. This kind of person should never be accepted to run a party ticket to any office. And the core of the problem is in the fact that she and alike were accepted and then promoted at the huge rallies.  There are highly problematic representatives of the Democratic party as well, as we all know and fighting against it for years by now. But this ‘Hitler was right…’ bomb-shell was dropped by the fresh Republican representative.

That Hitler admirer farmer-turned-Congresswoman was not rebuked by none of the top bosses of the Republican party. More, the Republican Jewish Coalition leadership ‘ thanked her for her ( apologising) statement’, with not an inch of anything beyond it. Great. And telling. 

Out of my long personal active experience in international public diplomacy, I have to say that such a muted reaction would be absolutely impossible under any previous US Administration from the end of WWII onward. And this fact alone is disturbing, to say the least. 

Leaders and their Legacies 

The breeder of the Rottweiler dogs that he called Anne and Frank, was from the country which was the earliest, selflessly brave and decisively anti-Nazi fighter during the six devastating years of the Second World War. Prior to the war, from the end of the 1920s and until mid-1930s, in that country, the United Kingdom, there were also quite strong pro-German sentiments among the certain part of the British establishment, and enough pro-fascists movements and small parties, none of which came to power, however. 

That country – and the entire world, as it happened – was extremely lucky with having a leader at the most daring hour of the XX century history whose brilliant mind was combined with ultimately and unwavering strong will, and who did bring the honour to that country and relief to mankind, becoming the first and the principal opposer, global-wise, to the evil of Nazism.  If not for  Sir Winston Churchill, the entire course and the ultimate result of the Second World War could be tragically different. One should always remember that.  

Sir Churchill hated Nazism unequivocally. He did it being not only an extremely well-educated person with genuine strategic thinking and broad vision, but also because he had a highly developed sense of decency as a prerequisite for anything else in the vast array of his activities. Decency is not only one of life-saving vitamins. It is a vital component of the  preserving legacy,  especially if it is a legacy of a politician or public figure. 

In the wake of  the recent outrage at the US Capitol conducted by a delirious rabble of jerks, there are some important aspects, out of many,  that I think is necessary to emphasise. It is astonishing to unparalleled degree that a statesman, not to say the president of a country, can allow himself to exercise such utter irresponsibility as to call people ‘to walk down to the Capitol’, not to mention him saying to the multi-thousand rally that “I will be going with you’ having a zero intention to do so. For the record: political affiliation has nothing to do with this. Personal qualities and choice of behaviour do.

It is pathetic – although expected – that the president of the leading country in the world does not bother to get the basic legal proceedings of his country, to allow to himself to pressurise and bully, all publicly, his own Vice President and senior figures of his party whom he repeatedly and publicly calls ‘weak ones’, instigating the chain of escalating public bullying them, already after the amok at the Capitol Hill,  by the same rabble of the same delirious jerks, with ‘Hang Mike Pence’ hashtags that Twitter allows, incomprehensibly, and with  mass threatening senior  politicians in public places days on after the assault of the Capitol.

As if directly from a third-rate movie, the  Vice-President of the USA with his family had had to hide in a protected bunker while hearing the mad crowd screaming ‘Hang Mike Pence!’, in that idiotic inciting hateful ‘lock-em’up’ motion, with Number One not bothering to check on how safe is his Vice-President. To revoke personally the access to the White House to the Vice-President Chief of the Cabinet? What scheme is this? Where this came from? From  a fourth-rate movie? The world being totally dumbfounded is watching how that wilder-than-wild scenario unfolds. And there is seemingly no limit to this show of disgraceful incompetence. 

In a sharp contrast, it was Vice-President Pence who did demonstrate to his country and the world that there are leaders in the USA today who know what decency is and who live by that. I have a honour to know Mike Pence for over 20 years, and can attest to his honourable and very able conduct, on any of many of his governing positions and in various situations  always. To attack this man and to instigate the marginalised mob to do it in their wild way is indecent. 

But most disturbingly, to me, is the utterly disappointing fact of harbouring all those lowlives whom we all saw on our TV and other screens on December 6th, 2021 at the Capitol vulgar, stupid, and cheap assault, and incorporating them verbally, in a repeated motion,  into the range of ‘great American patriots’. 

Is that scumbag in Camp Auschwitz hoodie ‘a great American patriot’? So many people are indignant about that hoodie, but for some reason, not many have mentioned that the black hoodie has its back, and that there is one more sign on that back, namely ‘Staff’. Nazi supporter during the assault of the US Capitol, Washington D.C., January 6, 2021. Open Internet Library.

Does it differ from an owner of Anne and Frank  Rottweiler dogs? Not, it does not. Does it differ from ‘Hitler was right..’ screams earlier the same day at the nearby place? No, it does not. Is it acceptable? Absolutely not. Should it be overseen, let it go, written it off for ‘wing-off’ ones? Those who are accepting such positions in their understanding of loyalty are self-deluding themselves badly. They are shielding themselves from common sense and from both intellectual honesty and human integrity.  

The same as it is absolutely unacceptable to incorporate into the rank of supporters all those whom the world had a shock to see in that show of imbeciles ramming the Capitol: the Nazis, the QAnon, Proud Boys, all those wacky ultras of various breeds. How on earth these kinds of creatures have become acceptable by the president of the United States and those of his advisers who gave their go-ahead of usage of these kinds of organisations and creatures who are its members?  

Telling the Truth to the Power

When watching that third-rate real-life movie from the US Capitol during its assault on January 6th, 2021, I was thinking about our dear friend and teacher Elie Wiesel. I know that his son Elisha and his entire family which is very small, because of the Shoah, were in-tuned, as well, in an emotional way. I was thinking that thanks to Heaven that Elie does not see Camp Auschwitz moron and other alike roaming the US Capitol. I simply cannot imagine what Elie Wiesel would feel at such a moment.

And I also remembered how in the spring 1985, Elie, without thinking on political surviving code and maneuvering, has decided to come to to see and to speak directly with President Reagan to discuss with him face to face the very troubling decision of Reagan who gave into the pressure of German Chancellor Kohl to visit the military Bitsburg cemetery of German soldiers, including some Waffen-SS members,  during his official visit to Germany to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in May 1985. The truth is that the Reagan Administration was not told by the German side initially that there were members of Waffen-SS buried at the Bitsburg cemetery. Reagan agreed to visit. Then the truth unfolded, to the horror of many. But there was the only one who did confront the president of the USA directly and openly about it, Elie Wiesel. 

Only Wiesel’s family and close friends know quite turbulent events around that his meeting  with President Reagan. We know that Elie was seriously thinking about ignoring, rejecting  the ceremony at the White House honouring him with the Golden Medal of the US Congress in the protest against a planned Reagan visit to Germany with that outrageous symbolic visit to the German military cemetery ahead. I also remember how Elie did recall in our conversations that in the end, he decided to go to the ceremony at the White House  – primarily for the opportunity for him to speak with President Reagan face to face before accepting the medal.  It was not an easy decision for him, I know that first-hand. 

I also heard the insights on that episode from inside the Reagan team, among whom I have many good friends and colleagues.  The Reagan Administration, as any US Presidential Administration, was divided on many things, including the inflammatory episode with the visit to Germany in May 1985 and with regard to Elie Wiesel’s lonely, I emphasise, and brave stand on that. Some of the Reagan White House team petty apparatchiks  were trying to cut planned Elie’s speech to an insulting mini-version of it. They were overcome with normal people in a higher positions within the Administration. Then the ceremony was moved from the planned big hall with capacity of accommodating 300 people to the smallest possible room in the White House with capacity of accommodating 40 people maximum, in a pitiful understanding of  ‘a possible damage-control’ preventive measures. 

Elie did not care how many people would attend the ceremony honouring him at the White House. As I know it from him personally, all he cared about was an opportunity to speak with President Reagan one to one, to see him in the eye, as Elie has put it. 

Their meeting lasted about a half an hour which is a lot by the White House protocol and which was three times longer than planned. 

Elie Wiesel was unable to change the very wrong visit of President Reagan’s visit to the German military cemetery in Bitsburg. But he succeeded in amending the President’s agenda for his commemorative visit to Germany with Reagan visiting the site of Bergen-Belsen first, prior to his visit to the cemetery that Chancellor Kohl was so extraordinary pushy about visiting it along with the US President. That Reagan’s unplanned – for some reason, let me put it this way – visit to Bergen-Belsen prior to the German military cemetery has put a proper balance in place, at least. 

I know that Elie wanted very much and tried very hard to convince President Reagan to visit the Bergen-Belsen site only. Reagan excused himself for his inability to do so after he gave his personal word to Chancellor Kohl. Elie Wiesel speaking at the White House ceremony in presence of President Ronald Reagan and Vice-President George Bush Sr. April 19, 1985. Credits: White House Television Office. The Reagan Library. The Rogatchi Archive.

Importantly, Elie Wiesel did see President Reagan in the eye. And yet more importantly, President Ronald Reagan saw in the eye of Elie Wiesel too – which I do think, and always was thinking this way since the time I heard about it from Elie just five years after the event – was a very healthy thing to do. 

During that eye to eye conversation, Elie Wiesel was simple in his phraseology, as he always was. I remember some of it: “ Mr President, the issue here is not politics, but good and evil. And we must never confuse them. For I have seen the SS at work. And I have seen their victims. They were my friends. They were my family.”  

And during his short speech during the public ceremony in overcrowded very small room, Elie Wiesel did remind to President Reagan, Vice-President Bush Sr and everybody else present that ‘Jewish tradition commands us to tell truth to the power’. Exactly so.

It was an unforgettable lesson of humanity to politics. I know that Ronald Reagan did remember it until the end of his life. And so shall anyone else who would like to leave the legacy of decency. 

This is another important point, the legacy. While watching that impotent cheap show at the Capitol, I was thinking that with these vulgar scenes of trashed chaos, the legacy of the 45th President of the USA will be sealed for good. And there is nothing that can be done about it. Surely enough, the following issue of The Economist appeared in a day or two exactly with this verdict on its cover. The cover of The Economist magazine. January 9-15, 2021

As far as I can see it, the President and those who had assisted him in such an ill way, has caused irreparable damage by overseeing the inclusion of these surreal elements into the rank of his supporters.   Irreparable damage that has crossed, to the large extent, some of his serious achievements both domestically and internationally. 

One does not deal with Nazis. One does not rely on the support of a Staffer at Camp Auschwitz. One does not support scums praising Hitler. How grotesque it is to be  in necessity to state the obvious.  At this level, in this context. How terrible it all is for all decent conservatives who are terrified on what unfolds in front of our eyes. 

In the Talmud, there are two leaders of the Jewish nations regarded as the most important and the best ones, Moses and David. Why? Because both of them, according to the great Baal Haturim, ‘were faithful shepherds who put the fate of the people before their own, and therefore the people had faith in them” (Baal Haturim Chumash, Shemot, The ArtScroll Series, 2000 ).  

Leadership is not about personal success. It is about one’s country, one’s people. It is the social mutual pact with society conducted with mutual respect. Leadership is not about slogans. It is about the ability to convince – not to push, to convince the majority or necessary qualified number of people in the society to follow your agenda wilfully and consciously. To be able to convince a qualifying amount of society, one has to be able to respect.  It is about sharing, not imposing.  It is not an intuition for a deal. It is very difficult, and often quite ungratifying work. It is not about ‘I’, it is about ‘you’. Some people might be surprised, and some maybe even laughing, but it is also about modesty. And decency. And dignity. What a fantasy list.

The only glimpse of some hope in the outcome of the disgrace at the Capitol lays in a prospect that after that shocking show, some leaders world-wide would think more carefully on what their legacy would become like. 

Escalating Damage

The damage that has been done by the real-life drama on the top of the US power at the moment of the transition of power in the beginning of 2021 will be the long-lasting one, sadly. This damage is multilateral, dangerously. The Republican party is damaged very seriously, with the prospect of debilitating schism inside the party being quite real. The conservatism movement in general in the world that traditionally relied on the might of the US Republican party is damaged powerfully, as well. Conservatism as a world-view is undermined, even if briefly so, having a blow of stupidity and irresponsibility into its face, with  people with conservative views being marred by association, so to say, both consciously and gaining on purpose by the opposers, or even subconsciously, or automatically, as a way of associative thinking. 

The status of the American state, the leading country in the world, is changed now, being diminished seriously, with years in need for recovering it. 

The ugly demonstration of jerks storming the seat of power has become a precedent instantly – thus, the damage has a potency to become an international one. 

Incomprehensible, but true. Depressing, but real. Unacceptable, but done. This is what happens when kitsch gets dangerous. 

Memory Stones series 

Never Again what?  

There are two schools of thinking on the matter of the way of commemoration of our tragic Jewish past in the parts of the world where Jewish life has been eradicated during Holocaust so efficiently. According to one school, everything ruined should be restored, for the sake of historical fairness if not for any other sake. The representatives of the  other school are more pragmatic and they are asking: who will be praying in those restored giant synagogues? Is it good and proper if they will be staying empty? 

I can see the points in both opinions, actually. Normal human logic prescribes to restore the objects which were destroyed. But normal human logic also wonders on who will be going there. The fact is that that unspeakable sadness which has become the overwhelming, ever-lasting constant after the Shoah is still in effect, 75 years on, three generations after the end of the Second World War. Will it ever go away? No, it will not. Such is the character of the crime committed against the Jews in Europe. Michael Rogatchi (C). Shtetl Memories IV. Homage to Devilspiel novel by Grigory Kanovich. Mixed technique. 50 x 40 cm. 2020.

In those places which were not made if not entirely Judenfrei, but quite close to that, the vicious goal has been almost achieved to the chilling effect, with the consequences palpable to this day. Eradication of Judaism in the vast part of Europe has been successful to a stunning proportion. 

This change is qualitative. It has to be admitted and understood as it is. Without these irrelevant ‘never again’ chants. Never again what? It is never again already: never again Volozhin, Mir and all this myriad of great yeshivas will be teaching Jewish boys in Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland, and all the places where they were flourishing. Never again there won’t be charming self-sufficient life streams in all thousands of shtetls all Eastern and Central Europe however modernised it all could be with time. Never again hundreds of Jewish professors will be teaching thousands of students all over in Poland, Germany, France and any other places. Never again Jewish musicians will bring that brilliance to their home countries all over Europe. Never again millions of Jewish people, substantially more than six million, will be living all over the places they lived during centuries enormously and indisputably enriching European economy, trade, science, industry, culture, everything. It. Will. Never. Happen. Again. Period. 

So, how to commemorate the life and the people which had been destroyed in all this unspeakable cruelty with all this barbarian enthusiasm? 

Der Vaser-Treger on the Vilna street  

On Monday, October 19th, 2020, a new sculpture was unveiled right on the street of Vilnius. The place is  the corner of  Lidos and Kedainiu streets, the one of the entrances into the Vilnius Jewish ghetto. Some people with whom I am speaking today, are calling it, fully organically for themselves, ‘former Jewish ghetto’. I understand what they mean. For me, the Vilna Jewish ghetto, as any other our ghetto anywhere in the world,  is always in present tense. I just feel like that. But there are some ghettos in which the air is an open wound. Vilna ghetto is just like that, for me, my husband and some of our friends. Romualdas Kvintas (C). The Water-Carrier. Bronze. 2010. Unveiled in Vilnius on October 19, 2020. Courtesy: Egle Kvintiene. With kind permission of Egle Kvintiene.

So, the  street has its new street-walker, the one casted in bronze, of a human figure size. His face is beautiful. He looks up. Many of us do. And did, always. Such a habit.  The shape of his figure brings us a hundred years back, at very least. There is a well-known photograph of a similar figure, alive man, from a Vilna street taken in 1922. The minister of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania, a known friend of Israel, Linas Linkevičius, has referred to that picture in his tweet about the recent event. There is another similar picture from Vilna taken five years earlier in 1917, which exists on the archival postcard in the collection at Beit Hatfutsot, The Museum of Jewish People in Tel-Aviv. Archive photo of water-carrier from Vilnius. 1922. Courtesy: The Library of Congress, the USA. No reproduction restrictions.

In a nice ceremony organised by the City of Vilnius and Vilnius Mayor Remigijus Šimašius, and supported by the Embassies of the Netherlands and Germany, gathered 30 people, the maximum permitted by the corona restrictions. The ceremony commemorated the second anniversary of the death of the author of that soulful sculpture, The Water Carrier, Der Vaser-Treger in Yiddish, Romas Kvintas, the outstanding Lithuanian sculptor who passed away so tragically and so early in October 2018. I have written about Romas and his input into the our commemoration process before, just after his death, in connection with his sculpture of Leonard Cohen which is also on the street of Vilnius. 

Romualdas Kvintas and his Way of Memory

In a paradoxical phenomenon, due to the number of reasons, the outside world beyond culturally sophisticated and advanced, but laconic behaviourally countries, such as Lithuania or Czech Republic, do not necessarily know enough about big artists and cultural figures there, as it ought to. Romualdas Kvintas, or Romas as he was  known to his family and friends, is one of those artists. He is widely known and appreciated in Lithuania, but not that much outside it as he should have been.  

There are millions of tourists who are coming to Vilnius annually, all of them are seeing Romas’ sculptures in bronze all over the city, and the same is the case outside Vilnius, all over Lithuania. Kvintas was a Master: top professional who worked very fast, but always  in a great fashion, a deep person, soulful thinker, he produced his sculptures with love and understanding. Rare love and rare understanding. His works are the rare case when a bronze and stone figures communicates with a viewer in a special way and conveys palpable emotions. Sculptor Romualdas Kvintas ( 953- 2018). Courtesy: (C) Egle Kvintiene. With kind permission of Egle Kvintiene.

Kvintas knew precisely not only what and whom he was sculpting , but also why. His tributes to the leading Jewish figures of Lithuania, which are – importantly – are also the leading figures in the entire Jewish heritage, are works of love, and for that, our appreciation of Romas Kvintas’ contribution in the process of living memory will last forever. 

In the case of The Water Carrier, Der Vaser-Treger, the story which was told to me by Romas’ widow Egle Kvintiene tells that Kvintas was working on a big project which included possible numerous sculptures, bas-relieves, and other possible sculpting creations which would be placed all over the territory of the former Jewish ghetto of Vilnius, as a sign of commemoration to the people and culture which had been whipped off from the Jerusalem of the North for good. 

‘Romas has finished the 3D model of this Water Carrier ten years ago, in 2010, and then, sadly, there was not enough interest to place the sculpture. There were various ideas regarding the suitable place, but it ended nowhere at the time. But now, fortunately, it is not just placed in the ( Vilnius) down-town, it stands at the place which was the one of the entrances of the  ( Jewish ) ghetto. You cannot make it more symbolic”, – Egle has told me. Indeed. 

Lasting Gift of Friendship

It was largely thanks to two notable personalities in Lithuanian culture, both close friends of Romualdas Kvintas that his charming, warm, evocative Der Vasser-Treger had been erected on the Vilnius street now, ten years after its creation and two years after its creator’s death. Romas’ widow Egle has told me with warm gratitude that former long-term principal of the Vilnius Academy of Arts Audrius Klimas  and well-known Lithuanian architect Alvidas Songlaila had put forceful effort in order to make the Water-Carrier standing in the street of the former Ghetto in Vilnius. 

The one of the leading Lithuanian designers, professor Audris Klimas himself has navigated me through the details of the story behind the erection of this new sculpture in Vilnius: it has to be finished, casted in bronze ( a very good work has been done by Martynas Gaubas and Rimantas Keturka ), and importantly, a prominent and suitable place has to be found, with getting all the necessary permissions and funding. “ Fortunately, we in Vilnius, as in many European capitals,  do have a special ongoing program for public art, and this is within this program that the City of Vilnius decided in support of our application of The Water Carrier project” – professor Klimas has told me. Good for the City of Vilnius and for its Mayor Remigijus Simasius who decided this way and who is consistent in  his policy in this regard. Ceremony of unveiling The Water Carrier sculpture in Vilnius. 19 October 2022. Photo : (C) Saulius Ziura. With kind permission of The Water Carrier project, Lithuania.

I personally would like to see more decisions like that in so many European cities which do have this program, and which do have so many reasons for statues like that, from Barcelona to Prague and from Paris to Krakow, but so far, we haven’t to see this kind of sculptures on the streets of those and so many other cities. So many others.   

Unveiled on the sad second anniversary of Romas Kvintas’ passing, his Water-Carrier stands now just next to a new stylish building resolved in the style of the historical epoch of the architecture of Vilnius downtown.  The building is authored by another close friend of Kvintas, known Lithuanian architect Alvidas Songaila. I was  told that Romas used to work with his architect friend closely in anything regarding many architectural decisions for his sculptures, during many years. 

I am thinking of that so special gift of friendship. What would we all do without it, without our friends? In the case of truly important for Vilnius work of Lithuania’s best sculptor, it is solely thanks to the love, memory and devotion of his friends  that his memory has been honoured in the way which has become a cultural and historical lasting commemoration. 

Inspiration In Parallel Worlds – and Time

Kvintas’s widow and his friends did share with me the background and source of inspiration for Romas while he was working on his Vaser-Treger. “ Romas got the inspiration for his sculpture from that famous Moyshe Kulbak’s  poem, Vilno”, – tells Egle. “ Yes, it was exactly from that canonic Kulbak’s poem that the personage for this sculpture came to Romas’ mind’ , – mentioned also prof. Klimas.

More precisely, Kulbak’s image comes from these lines that back in 1926 he dedicated to the city he loved:

You are a dark amulet set in Lithuania

Old grey writing – mossy, peeling.

Each stone a book; parchment every wall.

Pages turn, secretly open in the night,

As, on the old synagogue, a frozen water carrier,

Small beard tilted, stands counting the stars.

At the earlier stage of this special project, it was discussed a possibility to engrave the quote from Kulbak’s poem on the sculpture’s initially planned base under the figure in eight languages. Now, the Water-Carrier ‘walks’ straight on the street, so there is no basement, but anyone can read the whole story about the sculpture, its author, Kulbak and his poem in an efficient way of sharing QR-code on a smartphone from a wall nearby the sculpture.  

Moyshe Kulbak is the one of the leading names in the group of superbly talented Litvak poets, writers, artists and musicians from the first third of the XX century. He was the star even in such a star-made group, and his Vilno poem, the source of Romas Kvintas idea and inspiration for his Der Vasser-Treger, has become a canonic one, far beyond the circles of Yiddish and Jewish cultures. Poet Moyshe Kulbak ( 1896 – 1937). Open Sources Archive, The Water-Carrier Project.

After torturous interrogations, along with more than 20 other Jewish writers Moyshe Kulbak was murdered by the NKVD in Minsk on 29th October 1937. Almost all his family perished tragically in the Minsk ghetto a few years later. His wife was a prisoner of Gulag for over 10 years, and his youngest daughter Raya who was found by Kulbak’s survived brother after the Second World War in one of the orphanages in Soviet Union, is living with her family in Israel nowadays. 

There has been the most interesting twist of synchronised inspiration that has occurred with regard to this symbolic Der Vaser-Treger figure almost a century ago. Looking into some historical material, I found the poster of the performance played at the Yiddish Art Theatre in New York 86 years ago, in December 1936.  Poster for Der Vaser-Treger play performance at the Yiddish Art Theatre in New York, December 1936. Courtesy (C) American Jewish Historical Society. Permitted for reproductions in cultural and educational publications.

The play which is Der Vasser Trager, had the Water Carrier as its central personage, and there were even Lithuanian personages in it, like  Jewish merchant from Lithuania and some others. The author of the play was  Jacob Prager who lived before the Second World War  in Warsaw, in close proximity to Vilnius. According to my research supported by some YIVO documentation, Prager was known for  creating some of characters in his plays from the poems popular at the time. 

As Moyshe Kulbak wrote his Vilno poem ten years before the Prager’s play was performed  in New York, and as he was a cult figure among Yiddish intelligentsia both in Lithuania and Poland, Prager definitely knew that poem well. My guess is that his Der Vaser-Tregger theatrical hit in the mid-1930s in New York with the main character of Simcha Vaser-Treger was quite likely inspired by Kulbak’s poem, as well, the same as Romas Kvintas sculpture 80 years later. And what a painful irony turned it out to be the Water-Carrier’s name in the play. Simcha means joy in Hebrew, and it was very popular given name among our people always, before the Shoah yet more so. 

One of my great uncles, a renowned doctor, was Simcha too. He survived by hiding in France, but his son, also a doctor, as his father, did not. Simcha’s son Alexander who escaped just after the occupation from France to Switzerland in an extremely daring escape and who tirelessly treated his brethren in the DPC in northern Italy, was infected by typhus and died aged 29.

The resemblance of the Water-Carrier on the Yiddish Art Theatre poster of 1936 and the bronze sculpture on the street in Vilnius today is remarkable. Yet, Romas Kvintas never saw it. We all, Kvintas’ widow and his friends, and I and my husband  just love the fact of this incredible spiral of creative inspiration and humanity that whirled  around the globe and time in this special Water-Carrier small figure. 

Enlightening Memory and the Drama of an Orphaned Street

The first reaction that I have heard to the appearance of a bronze Jewish Der Vaser-Treger on the Vilna street from the residents of the city was from a 40-something IT-manager, who is not Jewish. He lives in the house on the street with a sculpture. This modern Lithuanian man has said: “ I am glad that every day I will be going to work and to return home walking next to this figure of that water-carrier. I am glad because the figure and everything that is behind it does remind us about the Vilnius where we all have come from. And this is enlightening memory”.  I was glad to see such a normal human reaction. 

Of course, I am fully aware of the situation regarding the ongoing struggle around recognition of guilt with regard to the local collaborators of the Nazis in Lithuania.  I know about the continuing efforts of those who strive to revise the factual history of the Shoah in Lithuania – and many other European countries – to insist that some of the collaborators should be regarded as national heroes by Lithuania. 

I know about smashed memorials to the victims of the Holocaust and about flowers and candles next to the outrageous memorial desks to the people who would be justly treated as military criminals in Germany and many other countries. I am in Lithuania often and am following the situation there closely. My and my husband’s families are Litvaks. We do care. 

Very much as in the case with the sculpture in the Vilna street, my thought was that there are so many European countries that had had all the reasons in the world to name the one of years to honour their noble Jewish sons and daughters, and to mint some memorable collectible coins as  so well deserved by never delivered tribute to their memories , from  to , and from to. 

The erection of the Jewish symbolic figure in the centre of Vilnius has revived the conversation about the topic which is still hot in Lithuania today. Some people, again, not Jewish ones,  have observed with this regard: “ Despite all those memorial plaques, at the Holocaust spots including ( like in Paneriai forest) , we still cannot admit our guilt. We just need conscience and courage to do that, but we still lack it”. 

What is important here is that those are reactions and thoughts of ordinary people, not politicians, not public figures. It is the reactions of these people which always tells about the real ‘temperature’ and conditions of a given society. 

There are also those from Lithuanian public today who have mentioned with regard to the Water-Carrier: “It is the message for those who want and who can understand”. Exactly so. At the unveiling ceremony of Romualdas Kvintas’ The Water Carrier sculpture. Photo: (C) Saulius Ziura. With kind permission of The Water-Carrier Project.

From that perspective, the words of Bonnie Horbach , the Ambassador of the Netherlands in Lithuania who was actively and kindly supporting the Water-Carrier project, the words that she said at the opening ceremony in Vilnius are the words of so natural human attitude:

“We all share the history of what happened here in the Second World War, and we all have a responsibility to investigate that history, even when it’s uncomfortable. Because it’s only then that we can understand what happened at that time. The statue of the Water Carrier is a constant reminder of the promise we made to acknowledge the inconvenient truth to ensure such a history will not repeat itself” ( Ambassador Bonnie Horbach, Opening remark at the Water-Carrier sculpture unveiling ceremony, Vilnius, Lithuania, October 19, 2020). 

Elie Wiesel’s one of the most often used phrases in his both speeches and writings was ‘and yet, and yet’.  This phrase said in Elie’s voice so many times still sounds in my head. When the subjects were those which dear Elie had to cover for over 70 years – just imagine – there always were ‘and yet, and yet’, and more of ‘and yets’. 

Remembering our dearest friend, and especially at the times when I deal with this ever present in our conscience – and sub-conscience – theme of my annihilated people, I am saying Elie’s  ‘and yet’  again when thinking on Vilna Street and its new inhabitant, the Water-Carrier, Der Vaser-Treger, Jewish man named Simcha, with all that piercing irony in that naming just before the WII that one just cannot invent. 

And yet, a few days after unveiling the sculpture, I received  another photo of it from my Lithuanian friends. Arunas Kuliskausjas (C). Yesterday in Vilnius. 2020. With kind permission of the author.

One of international Litvaks, dear friend, reacted in the way that resonates with every single Litvak world-wide, I am positive on that: “ Where are you, Jews? I brought some water for Shabbes dinner…”. 

The original capture of the work by its author, known Lithuanian photographer Arunas Kulikauskas, says it all, to me. It is simple: “Yesterday in Vilnius”. 

All the years after the extermination of the Lithuanian Jewry, the streets of Vilna were depressingly, very sadly blank-empty, despite any number of people walking there, for the Jews who remained. It was always the case, all the years from 1945 onward. There is such sadness from a dust of memories on the walls, in the air, under your feet, such a tangible  heart-ache  when you are walking there and looking into the inner court-yards, such helplessness, such never going away pain. This is the Jewish Vilna legacy after the Shoah,  permanently so.  

This sepia photo portrays it exactly. Before, until October 19th, 2020, these streets with its street lights were completely orphaned for us, Jews. They were orphaned for 75 years. From now on, at least our Simcha , Der Vaser-Treger is there, standing for all of us. More far more importantly, for all of them. 

Aciu, dearest Romas for thinking of us and making your Water Carrier as real, as one can make real a soul in bronze. Aciu, dear Audrius, Alvidas, Remigijus and all those who did help Romas’ Water Carrier to stand up there now, to make this street of Vilna a bit less orphaned. Just a bit.