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Shelomo
Selinger
The Death Camps - Drawings by a
Survivor
Memoir from Beyond a
Life
Somogy- Editions d'ART. (2005)
ISBN: 2-85056-861-9 (30
€)
This book is published with
the support for the Fondation pour la
Mémoire de la Shoah
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Presentation
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Sixty years after a red
Army doctor snatched him from the jaws of death at
Theresienstadt, Shelomo Selinger unveils sixty
drawings upon his own concentration camp
experience. Needless to say that nothing he draws
is made up, as he has himself been an inmate in
nine different camps. The artist had already
established himself as a fine sculptor when? some
twenty years after taking up the chisel, he started
working with charcoal and ink. If, like Goya,
Selinger is more than an artist of the horrors of
war, it is perhaps when he uses line to describe
what he lived through that we are most aware of the
great mastery. These drawing are terrible
testimony to the unthinkable atrocity of the
Shoah. They are also masterpieces from the art
of se second half of the twentieth
century.
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Table of
contents
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When I Met
Schelomo
"I have seen the
unthinkable"
Shelomo
Selinger: One Man Destiny
Shelomo Selinger
or the Silo of Silence
Drawings
Awards,
Exhibitions, Publications
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Henry
Bulawko
Marie-Françoise
Bonicel
Ruth
Shapirovsky-Selinger
Michel
Garel
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p. 6
p. 10
p. 18
p. 38
p. 47
p.115
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"To the
Gaz Chamber"
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_____
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A
passage
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"I have seen
the unthinkable"
<<Dedicated for
the most part to the images-cum-memories of the
nine deportation camps and two death marches that
he survived, these drawings in charcoal by Shelomo
Selinger translate into black and white the
voiceless cry of an experience beyond the reach of
thought. In these pages, too, he draws the
fractured lines of tragic moments that he carries
within himself although he himself did not live
through them, moments that belong to his people's
collective memory, such as the Warsaw Ghetto
uprising, the deportation of Janusz Korczak and the
liberation of Auschwitz.
In this segment of time
that still holds him captive is both the raw wound
and a memory to be shared, one that he works
through here in some sixty works chosen fortheir
evocative power.
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Each is a marker,
evoking the places of internment and the death
marches, alongside which he invites us to make our
awn journey. Alongside, only alongside, for we can
never do more than stand on the threshold of what
was experienced, of what still surges forth in the
ghoulish dreams of hisnights and the thoughts of
his day. What he gives us to see is in effect only
the cast shadow of figures marching towards a
destiny of
ashes.>>
Marie
Françoise
Bonicel p.
10
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One can see his
sculptures
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