Introduction
Shoe Mountain is a site dedicated to the work I have made on and around the subject of the Holocaust. In October 2006, my girlfriend and I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau and have since that time visited numerous other sites such as Majdanek, Bełżec and Natzweiler-Struthof. Even places one would not associate with the Holocaust yielded their stories; Chania in Crete one example.
All new projects from now on will feature in the Projects section of the Shoe Mountain website. Work which I have made up until this moment and all future completed work will be listed under Gallery.
It goes without saying that the subject of the Holocaust is a particularly sensitive one, especially its representation, whether in art, literature or cinema. As an artist, I am not attempting to show the Holocaust as it was, nor am I pretending to show what it was like to be there. No-one who has not lived through such a catastrophe could ever know. I can only, in the words of survivor Elie Wiesel, stand at the gate. As he himself wrote: "I would bring the viewer closer to the gate but not inside, because he can't go inside, but that's close enough."
We can't know what it was like, but we should at least try to know. We will fail, but it is the effort of trying which counts. My work then is this attempt, made in response to my visiting the sites of the Holocaust in the present day.
As I wrote as part of my Mine the Mountain exhibition:
We will never know the victims within such places as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Bełżec and Natzweiler-Struthof. And we will never comprehend their suffering, for suffering lies in the present, in the uncertainty of the future.
To find the individuals who suffered in the camps and ghettoes, we have to understand what it means to be human and live within the present; in that small space between the past and the future; that which is trapped by the click of a camera – ‘clocks for seeing’ as Barthes poetically called them. A space wherein lies the mundane. Our ordinary, everyday existence. Fear as well as hope.
Tadeusz Borowski, a Polish author, himself imprisoned in Auschwitz, wrote that hope:
" …makes people go without a murmur to the gas chambers, keeps them from risking a revolt, paralyses them into numb inactivity… It is hope that compels man to hold on to one more day of life, because that day may be the day of liberation. Ah, and not even the hope for a different, better world, but simply for a life, a life of peace and rest. Never before in the history of mankind has hope been stronger than man, but never also has it done so much harm as it has in this war, in this concentration camp. We were never taught how to give up hope, and this is why today we perish in gas chambers."
Hope was something which Adam Czerniakow, chairman of the Warsaw Jewish Council never appeared to give up on until the day the Ghetto’s liquidation began (July 22nd 1942) when the Nazis began to deport the Warsaw Jews to Treblinka. The following day Czerniakow took his own life.
In an entry the year before (September 14, 1941), he wrote:
" ...In Otwock. The air, the woods, breathing."
It’s a sparse entry, a single moment, but one full of life and meaning nevertheless. And it’s in stark contrast to the unremitting catastrophe which pervaded the life of the Jews at the time. Czerniakow had not had a day’s rest since the start of the war, and in these few words we sense his relief at having some time to himself. He doesn’t need to elucidate or explain what he’s thinking; ‘the air, the woods, breathing,’ says it all, about what it is to be alive and free - even for just a few hours. It also tells us by contrast, what it means to be a prisoner.
For most of the time, the only freedom Czerniakow could find was in the books he read at night. One of those books was ‘Pilgrims of the Forest’ by ‘Grey Owl’, and of that book, on January 19, 1940 Czerniakow wrote:
“…During the night I read a novel, 'The Pilgrims of the Forest' - Grey Owl - Szara Sowa. The forest, little wild animals - a veritable Eden.” In a previous entry, dated December 26, 1939, he wrote of how when reading “… [I am] constantly envying all the heroes of my novels because they lived in different times..." and in many ways, he seems to envy Grey Owl and the animals of the forest for the freedom they enjoy, one which he only discovers for a moment in Otwock.
Since my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, my work has taken me in many directions, looking at what makes us human, at memory, time and the anatomy of the moment, and through this work I have been able to do what Wiesel said and stand at the gate.