You might have heard of the Sonderkommando Revolt that took place in Auschwitz on October 7, 1944. You might know that on this day, a group of Sonderkommando—Jewish prisoners who were forced to haul bodies out of gas chambers and dispose of them in crematoriums—blew up Crematorium IV and cut through the barbed wire fence surrounding the camp, allowing two hundred prisoners to escape, albeit only temporarily. But you are probably not familiar with the four women who made the revolt possible by smuggling gunpowder from an Auschwitz munitions factory, where they worked as slave laborers.

“October 7, 1944,” a small exhibit at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan, pays tribute to Roza Robota, Estera Wajcblum, Regina Szafirsztajn, and Ala Gertner—the female leaders of the Auschwitz resistance, who were ultimately tortured and hanged for their participation in the revolt. Their names, faded from the annals of history, are painted in stark white against one of the gallery’s dark walls. The centerpiece of the exhibit is “Four Women,” a film of interpretive dance by the celebrated choreographer Jonah Bokaer.

Bokaer shot the film in a sparse, grey warehouse, where four dancers took on the personas of Robota, Wajcblum, Szafirsztajn, and Gertner. Because the women were forced into manual labor, and because they hid illicit gunpowder under their nails, much of the performance is preoccupied with the dancers’ hands. They scrape at the ground, paw frantically at their fingertips, and grasp at each other in a desperate, sometimes violent way that evokes the terrifying circumstances of their relationship. For most of the performance, the dancers’ features are obscured by their long hair, until, in a jarring shift of focus, the film cuts between lingering close-ups of their faces. It is a powerful moment of revelation in a performance that strives to shine the spotlight on four courageous women whose stories are often excluded from histories of the Holocaust.

Another reel is projected on the opposite wall, a steady shot of the ruins of Crematorium IV, which Bokaer filmed during a five-day period of immersion at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The gallery also displays a series of documents that relate to the revolt with varying degrees of directness; among them are an Auschwitz logbook that contains the name of a man who is believed to be Szafirsztajn’s father, an eyewitness account of the work of the Sonderkommando, and another eyewitness account that describes dead bodies being carried out of a crematorium as a band of prisoner-musicians played in the background.

Though the four women at the center of the exhibit were not part of Auschwitz’s prisoner band, music is central to the installation. Bach’s Violin Partita in D Minor, which Auschwitz’s band was regularly forced to perform, plays in an incessant loop. Behind each glass case containing primary source documents hangs an illuminated sheet of paper, onto which Bokaer painted segments of the Partita’s score.

I know the significance of many of these details because I was given a tour of the exhibit by the museum’s director. But for those who peruse “October 7, 1944” unattended, the gallery offers little curatorial direction. There is no text explaining that the plinths in front of each primary source document are bricks from the ruins of Crematorium IV; no indication that the muddy ruins depicted in the exhibit’s second film are the exploded remnants of that very same crematorium; no hint that Bokaer chose Bach’s Partita as a soundtrack for his installation because it was one of the few melancholy scores to be played in Auschwitz (the others were jaunty polkas, meant to lull Jewish prisoners into a false sense of calm before they were gassed to death).

The decision to keep the exhibit free of textual explanations was deliberate, and there is certainly something to be said for unburdening art installations of belabored discussions about meaning and intention. But the relevance of so many poignant, thoughtful touches is lost as a result of the exhibit’s minimalism. Significantly, I left the gallery knowing very little about Robota, Wajcblum, Szafirsztajn, and Gertner, aside from their names. Though the brochure for “October 7, 1944” claims that the installation strives to “[give] four heroines their place in Holocaust history,” the gallery offers no biographical information about the women who sacrificed themselves for the sake of the resistance. They remain colorless figures, shrouded in the mystery of their hidden pasts.

And so I thought I would divert the course of this review to put forth what little information is known about these four brave women, who were hanged in the last public execution to take place at Auschwitz before the camp was liberated.

Estera Wajcblum was born in Warsaw in 1924. Both of her parents were deaf-mutes, and they were murdered immediately upon the family’s arrival at Auschwitz. After the revolt failed and Wajcblum was contained in a prison block, she smuggled a note to her little sister, who was also a prisoner in the camp. The note read: “Not for me the glad tidings of forthcoming salvation; everything is lost and so I want to live.”

Regina Szafirsztajn was born in Bedzin, Poland. She was deported to Auschwitz in 1943.

Ala Gertner, also from Bedzin, belonged to a wealthy family. She was well-educated, and fluent in German. In late 1940, Gertner was ordered to work at the office of a labor camp in Sosnowiec, Poland. There, she met a man named Bernhard Holtz, and the two were married in the Sosnowiec Ghetto in 1941. The couple was deported to Auschwitz in 1943. Twenty-eight letters that Gertner wrote to her friend Sala Kirschner are on display in a permanent collection at the New York Public Library.

Roza Robota was a member of the Hashomer Hatzair socialist movement as a young woman living in Ciechanów, Poland. She liked to be called by her Hebrew name, Shoshanna. After being deported to Auschwitz in 1942, Robota worked in a clothing depot next to Crematorium III. She had connections to the underground resistance, and convinced Wajcblum, Szafirsztajn, and Gertner to join the movement and capitalize on their access to the camp’s munitions factory. Before the noose was tightened around her neck on the day of her execution, Robota called out to the prisoners assembled before the gallows: “Sisters, revenge!”

Four Women (Excerpt), 2014 from Jonah Bokaer on Vimeo.

“October 7, 1944” runs through December 30 at Yeshiva University Museum at the Center for Jewish History in New York.

(Image credit: Janek Skarzynski/Getty Images)

The post Through Dance, New Exhibit Pays Tribute to Women of Auschwitz Resistance appeared first on Jewcy.

Walking into the current installation at Soapbox Gallery in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn is like walking into an alternate reality.

At the gallery’s entrance sits a twin bed made up with worn, floral linens. On the wall, the outfit of an ultra-Orthodox girl hangs unassumingly. A sign indicates that this piece is called Gut Nacht Hindy (“Good Night Hindy”). The bed is flanked by two aged bedside tables. On the left-hand side, a tattered book of tehillim (psalms) lies unopened. To the right, dying flowers sit in a mason jar, atop an open drawer exposing a collection of old family pictures.

The exhibit—emphatically titled “BE!“—is a personal memoir of sorts, inspired by artist Sara Erenthal‘s upbringing as an ultra-Orthodox Jew, and subsequent departure from that world.

Erenthal, 33, resides in New York, and has been showing her work publicly for the last two-and-a-half years. “I was challenged to bring my life story into this gallery,” she says, and indeed she has: while I was there, one of her cousins—who also “broke free” from Orthodoxy (his words)—visited the gallery to show his support, and recognized himself and his parents in a few of the family photos.

Erenthal was raised by Neturei Karta parents in ultra-Orthodox communities in the Mea Shearim neighborhood of Jerusalem, Borough Park in Brooklyn, and Kiryas Joel in upstate New York. She ran away from home to escape an arranged marriage at 17, and her entire community rejected her.

The community, she remembers, is a strict one. A large-scale sculpture that stands out as the centerpiece of the show, Eidele Meidele, channels this very memory. The giant papier-mâché sculpture depicts a girl’s face, eyes turned down, with long, thick braids made of coarse rope. Braids were the singular hairstyle permitted to the artist as a child; here they are secured to the floor, representing the community’s expectations and limitations.

In Erenthal’s world, “everything is imperfect, it’s flawed in some way.” Her portrait series of an ultra-Orthodox mother, father, and son are deliberately imperfect. The portraits, which hang prominently around the gallery, are made of different materials, including burlap, like the sacks Neturei Karta members wear to anti-Zionist protests. Their clothing is frayed, with strands still sticking up from the final product. “It’s imperfect,” Erenthal reiterates, “but it’s intentional.” It tells her story.

“My family didn’t really fit in anywhere,” she recalls. There is no Neturei Karta community in New York, so even though Erenthal grew up among other ultra-Orthodox Jews, she was never really fully one of them. Furthermore, she revels, “my mother’s a little bit of a hippie and artsy,” which is not mainstream within those communities. When asked more specifically about her family, she looked visibly uncomfortable. “I’d rather not talk about them,” she said.

In addition to telling her story, Erenthal’s exhibit also considers what her life would have looked like had she not fled her community and marital expectations. Taking up a prominent section of the gallery, 22 Styrofoam wig heads manipulated with papier-mâché sit in near-perfect lines on the cement floor. The installation, she explains, depicts “what would have happened if I stayed in the community and got pregnant and then kept getting pregnant.” She chose the number 22, she explains, “because it is visually powerful.” Above the heads, speakers provide a soundtrack of ultra-Orthodox Israeli children playing in Hebrew and Yiddish, courtesy of Matan Dorembus, a film student in Be’er Sheva.

Directly parallel to this hypothetical reality, Erenthal depicts her actual reality. She did not remain in her community, nor get pregnant. Instead she forged a new path for herself, enlisting in the Israeli army and then backpacking through India. A video installation dramatically depicts this process of emancipation. In the video, she stands naked, bound in tefillin, at first looking dejected and passive, and then trying with growing intensity to break free of the religious bonds.

The show is open at Soapbox Gallery this Thursday, Friday and Saturday through September 13, with a special concert this Friday night from 7-10pm.

(Image by the author)

The post Artist Sara Erenthal Reflects on Her Ultra-Orthodox Upbringing, And Life Beyond appeared first on Jewcy.