needlework related article in today's Washington Post - long
YankeeStch
in Poland before and during the Nazi invasion of her country. She stitched a
total of 36 pieces using embroidery, applique and sewing. And they are on view
at the Washington D.C. Jewish Community Center through Monday, May 14th.
The paragraph that got me was this - "Nobody knows quite what to call them.
"They're not tapestries, in the formal sense. And they're not really collages,"
says Liz Diament, director of the JCC's Ann Loeb Bronfman Gallery, where the
works are displayed. "Needle art" sounds like tattoos. "Stitchery" sounds like
arts and crafts. Let's settle for "three-dimensional works on fabric." "
Donna J
A Survivor's Poignant Patchwork of Memories
Esther Krinitz Told Her Story in Needlework
By Megan Rosenfeld
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 10, 2001; Page C01
In the picture, three girls stand in the foreground, their backs to the viewer.
They wear bright dresses but no shoes, as though they had been running free in
the summer warmth. The girl in the middle is touching the shoulder of the one
on her left, while the third has her hands behind her back, clasped at the
elbows. Unfolding before them is a terrifying scene, described in carefully
embroidered letters at the bottom.
My friends and I ran to see the first Nazis entering our village, Mniszek. They
stopped in front of my grandparents' house, where one got off his horse to
rough up my grandfather and cut his beard as my grandmother screamed.
Esther Nisenthal Krinitz made this picture in 1993, 55 years after the events
she described. By that time, long after she'd escaped the Nazis and started a
new life in America, run two dress shops and raised two children, she wanted to
record her past. She remembered dreams from the horrible years, turned the
dreams into pictures, using the art she knew -- embroidery, applique and
sewing. She stitched with the same fierce energy that had seen her through the
war, creating, with wisps of fabric and strands of thread, her story.
The dreams prompted other memories, scenes of life, terror, death and survival.
By the time she died almost six weeks ago at the age of 74 she'd made 36
amazing pieces; 22 of them are on view through Monday at the D.C. Jewish
Community Center.
Nobody knows quite what to call them. "They're not tapestries, in the formal
sense. And they're not really collages," says Liz Diament, director of the
JCC's Ann Loeb Bronfman Gallery, where the works are displayed. "Needle art"
sounds like tattoos. "Stitchery" sounds like arts and crafts. Let's settle for
"three-dimensional works on fabric."
What Krinitz did was re-create her world in a way that is somehow truer and
more vivid than a photograph or film. In the tiny braided pigtails, the thin
line of blue trim on a girl's white anklets, the lace curtains at a window or
the pattern in a matzoh, you can sense real people living ordinary lives. The
colors -- in contrast to the black-and-whitepictures in which so much of our
information about the war and the Holocaust is captured -- are bright and
lively. The scenes are full of exquisite flowers, impassive witnesses to scenes
of disruption and horror. Using embroidery as an art form to document the
Holocaust -- so homely and familiar and yet adapted to such an unfamiliar
purpose -- has a nearly surreal effect.
Although Diament has arranged the pictures chronologically for easier
comprehension, Krinitz did not produce them that way. The first scene in the
show, from June 1937,which depicts her making a bowl of borscht for her
misbehaving brother Rueven, was created in 1996. A day in April 1941 when her
father, praying on the first night of Passover, was beaten and nearly shot by
Nazi soldiers, emerged three years earlier.
There are disarming elements of whimsy in her story pictures, as in one labeled
"Shavuot 1938," in which she is walking on stilts, leading her siblings to
their grandparents' house. In another she has nail polish on her toes, tiny
stitches in red. There are chilling stitches, too -- the red ones making welts
on the back of a boy being beaten by the Gestapo, and the tiny pale pink tears
on white cheeks you must squint to see. The perspective of every picture is
hers, what she saw, straightforward and without sentimental commentary. It is
her story.
The Nisenthals lived in a small Polish village called Mniszek.At that time most
of the residents were Jewish; today none of them is. During three years of Nazi
occupation, the years that Esther was 12 to 15, the Jews were increasingly
restricted and threatened. When, on Oct. 15, 1942, the Gestapo ordered her
family and all the other Jews deported, Esther talked her parents into letting
her and her younger sister, Mania, seek shelter with gentiles.
Five of her pictures depict scenes from this one day. One scene she made twice
-- the leave-taking. "This was the hardest thing for her," says her daughter,
Bernice Steinhardt, who has had most of the works hung in her home in Chevy
Chase. "She felt so guilty that she left them, that she was so selfish." Esther
felt, without knowing exactly why, that the Jews who were being deported were
doomed. Something deep within her wanted to take responsibility for her own
survival. "Goodbye, my children, maybe you will live," she remembered her
mother saying. The guilt came later.
In the first rendering of the farewell scene, her father holds her by the arms
affectionately; there are two baskets with potato spades -- the girls' ticket
for work -- at their feet. Yellow daisies cheer up one corner, but there are
crows on the roof, their red eyes shiningominously. The second version, made
seven years later, is more detailed. The Jews are loaded into carts, layered
with clothes and bundles, while Esther and Mania can be seen in the distance,
walking up the road carrying their spades. Each piece of gravel in the road is
another knot of thread. They never saw their mother, father, sisters or brother
again. (Neither of these works is at the JCC, but three others of Oct. 15 are.)
Another series, most of it created in 1994, depicts what happened to the two
girls in subsequent weeks. A neighbor reneged on her promise to take them to a
farmer who had promised shelter; they walked to his village alone. This farmer,
Stefan, took them in for two days, then turned them out in the pouring rain.
They hid in a forest. This episode is shown in one large work -- Stefan's
initial embrace, the two girls working in his attic, the rain, then Esther and
Mania drying their boots in the forest when the sun shone again.
There were other rejections before they found refuge in Grabowka, changed their
names and masqueraded as Polish Catholics. Esther worked for an elderly farmer
whose wife had died, and Mania as a housekeeper for the local sheriff. A year
and eight months later, Russian soldiers liberated the village, and they were
safe. After a month, Esther returned to Mniszek to find her family, but there
was no trace of them. She next went to the camp she believed they'd been taken
to -- Maidanek -- but found only gas chambers and crematoriums.
One of her most stunning works shows her at Maidanek, a girl in a bright yellow
dress standing at the gate. Inside there is a small building filled with shoes;
she went through them, looking for one she recognized, but they were all so
worn "they looked the same." There is a small pile of hair -- even a brown
braid -- and barbed wire made with minusculeX's. She found no record of her
parents or siblings.
Esther began the rest of her life. She joined the Polish army and worked with
the Russians at the camp. She was 17.
She cooked and changed truck tires, and her unit ended up in Berlin. She made
her way to a displaced persons camp. There she met Max Krinitz and, at 19,
married him. She wore the one wedding dress in the camp, a garment passed from
one newly hopeful refugee bride to the next. Mania also met her husband there;
they moved to Israel and had children before coming to the United States in
1960.
The rest of the Krinitzes' story is not unlike those of the many who came to
this country after the war to make new lives and families. Esther and Max (he
had his own story of survival) moved to Brooklyn; he managed a supermarket and
she opened a dress shop. They had ambitions for their two daughters, and they
took great pride in their house. After Bernice had her first child, the
Krinitzes moved to Frederick to be closer to them, and opened a dress shop
called Esther's. Max died in 1998.
She was never reluctant to tell her story, Steinhardt recalls. It was a regular
refrain, generally starring Esther, but always with the theme "How did I ever
do that?" She wanted one of her daughters to write it for her, or paint it for
her. She thought she couldn't do it herself.
There was an 11-year gap between her first picture and her second, years in
which her sewing energies were directed toward her grandchildren. But one night
in the late '80s she had a dream, the same dream she'd had that first night in
Grabowka. From then on her fingers were on fire. She described the dream in a
caption.
"I had a dream that my mother came to get me, running and pulling me along.
'Why are we running?' I asked her. She said, 'Because the sky is falling, and
when it reaches the ground, we will die.' When I looked back, black pieces of
clouds were falling to the earth."
She embroidered the dream, and cut out black pieces of clouds from cloth, and
sewed them to a canvas. And gave the picture to her daughters. Between 1991 and
1999 she made more than 30 pictures while also running her dress shop.
"She never thought of herself as an artist," says Steinhardt. "She was making
them for us."
But Steinhardt and her sister, Helene McQuade, could see that these were more
than needlework. Where their mother saw a kind of documentary, they saw art;
where Esther thought of them as a private family legacy, the daughters saw
creations that should be seen and acknowledged by others.
Eventually they arranged this exhibit at the JCC. Others have joined in their
enthusiasm; Tuesday night the Polish ambassador, in one of his country's
ongoing efforts of expiation, hosted a reception and showing of the works at
his embassy. A nonprofit organization called the Cultural Exchange Foundation
is raising money to send the works to Poland, Germany, Israel and other cities
in the United States.
The exhibit was scheduled before Esther Krinitz died March 30. Her daughters
say she would have been thrilled to see it.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
Denise F. Hayden
Denise
Indianapolis
Meredith Dill
(not snipped so others can read it)
Meredith
Bea
All I can say is thank you for posting this.
Bea (delete the hi to reply)
Dave Sherberg
mentioned in this article. Anyone have any idea where a schedule may be?
I'd love to go see. My in-laws are survivors of the Holocaust & this would
be a terrific way for them to see another view.
Troy Adams
YankeeStch <yanke...@aol.combrain> wrote in message
news:20010510083723...@ng-fw1.aol.com...
akmo...@icok.net
wrote:
>I searched the net, there's no indication of a show anywhere else, as
>mentioned in this article. Anyone have any idea where a schedule may be?
>I'd love to go see. My in-laws are survivors of the Holocaust & this would
>be a terrific way for them to see another view.
Go to: http://www.dcjcc.org/gallery_exhib.htm#esther
to see the schedule and one of the works. If someone on this
newsgroup gets a chance to see this, please let the rest of us know
about it - it is very interesting.
Amy
rosaleah
As for what it to call them: I say call them Art. Though my own inclination
is to call it Literature.
--Rosaleah, hoping they'll make it to NYC on their travels
"YankeeStch" <yanke...@aol.combrain> wrote in message
news:20010510083723...@ng-fw1.aol.com...
rosaleah
--Rosaleah, can't make it to DC in time, hopes to get to see these some day!
<akmo...@icok.net> wrote in message
news:3afbdad...@news-server.stny.rr.com...