Art Against Oblivion

Through my works
I have created a memorial
for all nations of the world.

No one,
regardless of religion or
political conviction, should ever again
suffer such - or similar - atrocities!

So says the introductory page to the book that compiles Adolf Frankl's art. Frankl was a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and an artist who expressed his memories of the Shoah through paintings. This afternoon, I had the tremendous fortune of holding a conversation with his son, Thomas Frankl, who runs the gallery that displays his father's work on the Judenplatz. And for that I must thank Stephanie Merrill for inviting me there first.

Frankl had so much to tell us about himself and about his father as well. It's so hard for me to decide where to begin. Should I start with how he once had to dress as a girl in order to avoid being checked to see if he was circumcised? Or how he showed us his mother's handbag which she used to cover up the yellow star she had to wear, and how the contents of her bag were for event that she would be caught outside in an air-raid? Or maybe how he showed us an actual cap worn by Jewish prisoners that was typically maliciously thrown by guards towards the electric fences?

There's one story Thomas Frankl told us about his father that I think says volumes about him. Adolf Frankl was hiding in an upstairs residence when the authorities were gathering together all the Jews of the town (present-day Bratislava) for deportation. The son of the janitor of the complex betrayed Adolf by saying aloud that there were Jews hiding upstairs - thus he was taken. Years later, after surviving Auschwitz, Adolf Frankl was approached by the same man who begged forgiveness from him and apologized on his knees. Incredibly, Frankl didn't just forgive him, he hired him as a janitor for his own office.

Thomas Frankl seems to have much of this same kind spirit in him. "I don't make generalizations" was one of the sentences he spoke several times. He said this to imply that he did not think that all Viennese were anti-Semetic, and hence why he was able to let his father's art have a gallery here. I believe he also spoke of Simon Wiesenthal's idea of "fighting [anti-Semitism] in the lion's den."

The art itself is incredible. It is meant to be provocative and disturbing - they are all scenes related to the Holocaust, whether they be scenes of deportation or of life in the camps or of anything else. The human figures often appear abstract, and spatial perspective is done away with a lot. The colors are also meant to be bright. As Thomas tried to explain to us, Adolf wanted his colors to "burn like fire." Also, when you look up close at the paintings, you can see that there are huge gobs of dried paint on them, giving them a rough, almost three-dimensional look.

Here are a couple of his paintings that I was able to find online:



I will admit that I did not talk a whole lot. I let Stephanie and Professor Stuart (she was there too) do much of the talking and occasional translating. It's not that I wasn't interested in the art and in the Frankls; nothing could be further from the truth! But sometimes I get silent just listening to another's stories. I hope Thomas did not mind my silence too much.

I was making a remark to Professor Stuart about a particular painting that was sticking out in my mind, called The Last Scream - The End. Thomas heard me speaking and asked what it was I was talking about. I motioned to the painting behind him and slowly stammered out a few words when he said "Give me your hand" and took my right hand in his - his hand which has surely felt far more in this world than I can imagine. It was a gesture of comfort. I automatically brought up something that had come up in our group's conversation. "Mauthausen was...tough." Thomas seemed to have read my mind.

We only meant to stay at the gallery for an hour and a half; it ended up being three. By the end of those three hours Thomas Frankl had agreed to host next year's Vienna students from UC Davis as well as signed the copy of the book of his father's art that I bought. Professor Stuart, Stephanie, and I really could not believe just how fortunate we were in having this experience together.

The German word of the day is "Fußball," meaning "soccer."