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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 based upon his own concentration camp experience. Needless to say, nothing he draws is fictional, as he himself was 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. Like Goya, Selinger is more than an artist of the horrors of war, especially when he uses line to describe what he lived through. In this medium, we become most aware of his great mastery. These drawings are terrible testimony to the unthinkable atrocity of the Shoah. They are also masterpieces from the art of the second-half of the twentieth century.
Shelomo Selinger, juif polonais, est entré dans l’enfer nazi à l’âge de quatorze ans. En quatre années d’horreur, il a connu neuf camps de concentration et deux marches de la mort. Comment a-t-il pu survivre ? « L’instinct, le hasard, la fraternité. Et puis l’oubli », répond-il. Une amnésie totale s’est en effet emparée de lui du jour même où il a été libéré. Elle l’a protégé pendant sept longues années des fantômes de la Shoah, et ne s’est dissipée que lorsqu’il est vraiment revenu à la vie par la grâce d’une double rencontre : celle de l’amour et de l’art. Depuis, Shelomo Selinger ne cesse de témoigner par ses dessins et ses sculptures monumentales qui se dressent à Drancy, La Courneuve, Luxembourg, ou dans l’Allée des Justes des Nations au mémorial Yad Vashem de Jérusalem. Mais l’artiste chante aussi l’enfance, la femme, l’espérance qu’il incarne dans le bois et le granit. Et dans ce livre où l’écrivaine Laurence Nobécourt lui a prêté sa plume de feu, il déclare son amour inaltérable de la Vie : « Il n’y a rien de plus sacré que la vie. Même Dieu n’est pas aussi sacré. »
Over a half a century after World War II, Germany and France still struggle to understand the Holocaust and to confront their roles in the tragedy. Through an interpretation of a wide array of contemporary cultural texts--including memorials and memorial sites, museums and exhibits, national commemorations, books, and films--Caroline Wiedmer traces the evolution of an often conflicted postwar politics of memory in these two nations. Her analyses of sites of memory and of policies and national debates reveal the two countries' deep-seated ambivalence in the face of a desire to forget the horrors of the Holocaust and the need to remember them. Among the issues Wiedmer examines are France's eme...