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What would it mean to see another person so completely that something in you shifted?I call that experience Radical Compassion - and it is what my paintings are reaching toward.
Radical Compassion is a way of seeing. It begins in the willingness to stop and look at another human being long enough that their particularity, the weight of their specific life, becomes undeniable. When that seeing truly happens, the boundary between self and other becomes briefly porous. In that openness is an antidote to the forces that make strangers of us: prejudice, indifference, the slow habituation by which we stop registering the humanity of those who seem unlike us.
My paintings live at the juncture of myth and social realism - drawing on photographs from European WWII archives to reimagine girls and women murdered in the Holocaust into worlds of beauty and infinite possibility. Each canvas is an act of restoration, each face an invitation into the sudden cellular recognition that their humanity and yours are made of the same material - the same limitless capacity for dreaming, the same unchartered potential, the same irreducible light.
Harnessing both my personal lineage and my inner language of symbols and imagery, I strive for this work to hold beauty and haunting in equal measure; beckoning the viewer toward a story that never got to unfold. My goal is to honor these lost lives; to give back something that was stolen, and remind the world that these young people once lived and loved, and had stories to tell. It asks nothing except to see - to witness the particular, the individual, the irreplaceable. It is an invitation to experience Radical Compassion. And it is available to everyone who stands before these paintings.
MIRJAM KALDERON
Mirjam Kalderon was born in Bitolj, Yugoslavia in 1929. Prior to WWII she lived in Bitolj, Yugoslavia.
Mirjam was murdered in the Holocaust.
RUTH TOBIAS
Berlijn, 11 December 1928 -
Sobibor, 23 July 1943
Reached the age of 14 years.
DAISY LOWOSITZOVÁ
Born 02.04.1930
Address/place of registration: Prague X, Přerovská 8
Transport Cv, no. 607 (06. 03. 1943, -> )
Transport Et, no. 1355 (23. 10. 1944, -> Auschwitz) Murdered
LILIANE PAULETTE BUSCHEL
BIRTH - 22 Apr 1932
Antwerp (Antwerpen), Belgium DEATH - 30 Sep 1943 (aged 11)
Auschwitz Concentration CampHANA JUNGOVA
Born 02.07.1929,
Prague
Transport Ck, nr. 339 (December 22, 1942, Prague -> Theresienstadt) Transport Er, no. 846 (10/16/1944, Theresienstadt -> Auschwitz) MurderedFLOWER CROWN
The black and white image of this anonymous girl was taken by Henryk Ross in the Lodz Ghetto.
Ross risked his life taking photos that documented life there before the ghetto was liquidated and its residents were exrerminated in the death camps.
Emmy Stein
This portrait of Emmy Stein was commissioned by a school in the town of Seligenstadt, Germany that is named for her.
Despite her family’s efforts to flee the country, they were sent to the Treblinka extermination camp where Emmy was murdered on September 30, 1942. She was seven years old.
REGINE AJDELSON
Nationality: French (Jewish)
Residence: Paris, France
Death: 1942 Cause: Murdered in Auschwitz Age: 7 years
RUTH ZIMMERMANNOVA
Born 02 16. 1926
Last residential address before deportation: Prague
Transport B, no. 41 October 21, 1941, Prague -> Łódź
Murdered
DOLLY FLORENTIN
27 May 1927 Greek Jewish girl Dolly Florentin was born in Thessaloniki, Greece.
In 1943 she was deported to Auschwitz.
She did not survive.
DVORA BIRNBERG
Dvora Birnberg was born in Bistrita, Romania in 1934. Prior to WWII she lived in Muresenii Bargaului, Romania.
Dvora was murdered in the Holocaust
Sarah Klutstein
Sarah Klutstein was born in Saarbruecken, Germany in 1933. Prior to WWII she lived in Metz, France.
Sarah was murdered in Auschwitz on November 22, 1943
Ester Itkind
Ester Itkind was born in Wilno, Poland in 1932
She was murdered on July 4, 1944 in the Wilno ghetto