SHOAH HOLOCAUST RELATED ART
At the age of 69, I was born in 1953 and suffer from COPD ( Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease ) As a result, I have difficulty breathing and eating and I'm on excessive medication. I am asking for a donation in exchange for help with securing my other historical art and paying my remaining storage rent and move all my over 200 artworks to a cheeper location. To be able to do this during the spring of 2022, I estimate I will need at least 50 thousand euros. I'm worried that my achievements in the arts will disappear if nothing is done soon.
The SHOAH ART Collection
Over the last 40 years, this collection of works has gradually evolved. It's vital to keep the story alive and to ensure the truth reaches out, especially during these denial times, with the help of this project that combines my interest in history, humanity, and the urge to share the Holocaust's story loudly and clearly. Moreover, I see it as a warning and wake-up call for the younger generation, which is so easily misled. Today, we face new dangers in the form of anti-Semitism, Neo-Nazism and Islamic fundamentalism. We all need to take these threats very seriously. We must do everything we can to prevent a repetition of this aspect of modern history.
My interest in the Holocaust evolved as a child from my grandmother's stories of how, as a Swedish tourist in Germany, she was thrown off a tram by two SA soldiers- Sturmabteilung - for insisting on seeing a Swedish flag instead of the star of David on her coat and my mother's. As a result of these stories and many others about the Holocaust, I began creating art about its horrors at the age of ten. My child's drawings and watercolours remain in my possession. During the 1920s, my grandmother was good friends with Raoul Wallenberg's mother in Stockholm, so I have also had contact with his family.
My Shoah collection includes one of his Swedish military hats, as well as his newspaper birth ad and other memorabilia. Additionally, I have been in contact with Per Anger since 1986 when he visited my art exhibit in New York. During the Holocaust, Mr Anger was Raoul Wallenberg's associate in Budapest. Together with Wallenberg, he saved many Jewish people risking their lives. In 2000, I had the opportunity to meet Elie Wiesel when I exhibited some of my Shoah art at the first International Forum on the Holocaust Conference in Stockholm. As an Absolut Vodka Artist, I donated a Shoah artwork titled "Playing for Time" to Michel Roux. It now resides in the collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
The Shoah project uses a range of media, including painting, collage on canvas, and sculptural pieces that relate to the persecutions and exterminations, or to the lives of Jewish families before the deportations. Aside from traditional photography and video installations, I also used remnants of the actual places where the crimes took place.
The short film "White Silent Hell" documents the remnants of Auschwitz Birkenau's architecture of evil. Filmed and edited chronologically to show the gradual humiliation of those who walked their way to death. In the midst of this, death technicians who handle death machines go about their routines in ice cold, calculated ways. Several of my works have an educational approach, but others are more poetic in their reflection upon one of mankind's darkest periods. It is impossible to portray the horrors of the Holocaust justly, since the scale of the crime is beyond all comprehension. Despite this, we must still try for the sake of our children and the millions who died. Moreover, I believe that we must approach the subject in different ways in order to reach as many people as possible while also conveying the message to future generations, not just to Jews for whom the Holocaust may be a family memory.
We must tell all people, regardless of their faith or nationality, the story of the Shoah so they won't be deceived. While it may be hard to understand, or even accept, the truth cannot be questioned or denied. Art is only one tool, but often a very effective one, in this mission to "tell the story." Through art, we reach and connect with groups of people who aren't interested in reading books about history or watching documentaries about the Holocaust.
I see my humble involvement, through this collection of pictures, as no more than a handful of dust, yet this dust is a part of our testament, my contribution to collective memory, one could say. I photographed both Auschwitz Birkenau and Kazimierz the Jewish quarter in Krakow during the winter of 2007, and I have combined images so that I can tell the story chronologically. The 'triptychs' in the form of vast landscapes in silence, and crumbling ruins of gas chambers take the form of organic monsters.
Images of piled-up shoes, glasses, pots, and pans serve as harsh reminders of people's scattered lives. The walls still bearing inscriptions of pain, and the worn down floors on which thousands walked on their way to a premature death, bear evidence of the agony of those men and women. As if by a razor, the barbed wire cuts through the clear blue sky. There is all of this, frozen in time, covered in frosty ice, like the annual rings of a tree in the forest of remembrance. At the same time, the images contrast with each other while telling the same story. In short, they tell a story of pain. In this frozen landscape, time stands still, but thought and spirit travel freely: A silent hell, in which ashes, and everyday items, such as spoons and forks, hide under a frozen pond. In silence and respect for the victims of this landscape, I entered it.
Thomas Dellert - Bergh
