The Art of Remembering : Docent of Holocaust Exhibit Is No Aficionado of Culture, But Draws on Memories as Survivor

Sidonia Lax peers at three dull canvases hanging in the Finegood Art Gallery, checks their titles and looks again. A little anxious--that is how the paintings of an attic where a Jewish family once hid from the Germans make her feel, she says. Claustrophobic, maybe. Perplexed. Yes, thoroughly perplexed.

“I am trying to understand why an artist would pick this type of subject. . . . It must be hard to sell,” she says, sighing, giving one of the pictures a gentle pat.

Lax, 68, a retired garment manufacturer from Sherman Oaks, readily admits that she is no art critic. Yet she comes well-prepared to her new job as a docent for the gallery’s latest exhibit, “Witness and Legacy: Contemporary Art About the Holocaust.”

Her credentials are seared in the still-numb psyche of a teenage girl who lost her parents and her youth to the Nazis and tattooed in numbers on her still-sturdy left forearm.

Although she is not a fan of contemporary art--her taste is more Norman Rockwell than Andy Warhol--Lax volunteered to help guide gallery visitors through the multimedia show when its sponsor, the Valley Alliance of the Jewish Federation, began advertising two months ago. As a Holocaust survivor who outlived six concentration camps and 60 family members, Lax said she is obligated to speak about her painful past whenever she gets the opportunity.

“The force of education, to me, is more important than my pain,” she said.

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Developed by the Minnesota Museum of American Art, “Witness and Legacy” features 80 works by 27 contemporary American artists, one-third of whom are Holocaust survivors. It opened last weekend at the Bernard Milken Jewish Community Campus, its only West Coast stop on a nationwide tour. A lecture series is being held in conjunction with the exhibit.

Lax said she does not mind artists reducing mass murder to paper and paint, metal and wood. For too long, people were afraid to confront the horror of the Holocaust, she said. The artistic renderings are an important part of that process, “expressing the dreams and the nightmares of the survivors,” Lax said.

But according to Lax, gallery-goers stand a poor chance of taking meaningful impressions away from the show unless people like her illuminate the often-esoteric art with their personal experiences.

Face it, she said, most viewers gazing at “Bird Sanctuary, Minneapolis I,” artist Joyce Lyon’s reflections on being a child of a Holocaust survivor, will not easily grasp its meaning. The painting in gray and brown hues depicts a wooded scene.

“Trees in woods. What would you get from that without an explanation? You look at this and you wonder what the artist was thinking,” Lax mused.

To Lax, the most powerful piece in the show is “Schlafwagen: Who Will Say Kaddish for Them?” a sculpture of a baby buggy carrying small, bloodied corpses and a Jewish prayer shawl. It evokes horrible memories from the Jewish ghetto in southern Poland where she lived with her parents and saw babies speared on the swords of German soldiers, thrown through windows, and tossed onto trucks like trash, she said.

The sculpture is “a powerful picture of the truth. This is fact. Everyone will remember this piece,” Lax said.

The same sensibility that informs her taste in art is what probably saved her life after her parents perished three years into the war, leaving her a 16-year-old orphan, Lax said.

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“I am very realistic. That is what helped me,” she said. “I did not philosophize from day to day. I did not try to imagine what would happen. I lived from day to day to have something to eat and to survive.”

Her family had been living in an underground bunker, in conditions not unlike the crowded attic portrayed in the exhibit paintings, when her mother went aboveground to make plans for their escape. She never returned. Two days later, Lax’s father heard there were apples for sale in the ghetto. He went out to find one for his only child. He, too, disappeared without a trace.

Several weeks later, dogs sniffed out the bunker were Lax was living, and she was jailed in a local concentration camp. Before the war’s end, she would live in six different camps, including the notorious death camps of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and a working camp in Torgan, Germany, where she filled grenades with explosives.

She won her freedom in a fiery train wreck after Allies bombed a train carrying prisoners. Lax believes the train was targeted because Allies thought it carried explosives from the camp. She said she was one of a few prisoners who survived the crash and escaped on foot. The war ended two days later.

After the war, she moved to Los Angeles to live with an uncle, one of her few surviving relatives. Within two years she married her late husband, Lewis, a fellow survivor who spent much of the war disguising himself as a non-Jew and working in the Polish resistance. It was important to create a family, Lax said, to reclaim what had been stolen from her. She raised three children and is a grandmother to five.

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“I have always tried very hard to educate my children about the possibility of it happening again, to look for the little fires of injustice and racism before they blow up into big ones,” Lax said.

Five years ago, Lax decided to take her message to a wider audience. Already a longtime member of the Brandeis-Bardin Institute, a Jewish education center near Simi Valley, she started speaking to groups of schoolchildren about the Holocaust. Wherever she appeared, she told the story of the father who died so his daughter could have an apple to eat.

Recently, she signed on as a volunteer with Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which is creating a video archive of the stories of Holocaust survivors. It was there that Lax heard about the “Witness and Legacy” exhibit.

So it was that she found herself last Wednesday braving the rain to give an informal tour of the exhibit. She entered a walk-through installation titled “Shadows of Auschwitz,” a dark room dominated by a glass and barbed-wire fence that is covered with prisoner numbers taken from the death camp’s ledgers.

“It’s a memory of dead souls,” Lax said. “Every one of these is a vibrant human being who perished because of some crazy idiots.”

The artist, Pearl Hirshfield, has promised that she will erase the ledger numbers and replace them as survivors send the ones from their tattoos. In that way, the installation will become a memorial to the living.

Lax likes that idea. She plans to make sure Hirshfield gets her number, A-14821. In the meantime, she plans to work on deepening her appreciation of contemporary art, starting with the Hirshfield piece.

“My number will be on there,” she said of the work. “But I can’t tell you right now exactly what it is about.”