LINKS TO THE PAST
BRIDGES TO THE FUTURE
THE FAMILY HISTORY PROJECT OF DRAISY FRIEDMAN
My great aunt Leah Ashkenazi grew up in Arad, Romania, where she was fortuante enough to avoid the horros of ghettos and concentration camps. While she was travelling from country to country in an attempt to escape Nazi persecution, Leah wrote about her experiences and the suffering endured by her fellow Jews. When Leah arrived in America, she took art classes and began translating her writing into paintings, of which, a select few are depicted here.
In this piece, Leah reimagines the Nazi’s as grotesque, fire breathing monsters to give over the feeling of a child growing up amidst such terror. The girl stands behind a river, protected yet unable to do anything but watch as the monsters destroy her home and everything she has ever known.
This piece depicts a survivor sitting in an empty park, reading a newspaper. A closer look reveals that the newspapers headline reads ‘Nazis Gas Six Million Jews.’ By contrasting such horrifying news with beautiful, idyllic surroundings, Leah is attempting to capture the isolation she and so many others faced after surviving the death and destruction of the Holocaust.
In this piece, Leah reimagines the Nazi’s as grotesque, fire breathing monsters to give over the feeling of a child growing up amidst such terror. The girl stands behind a river, protected yet unable to do anything but watch as the monsters destroy her home and everything she has ever known.