Death Camp Exhibitions Reveal Satire Amid Horror

Two compelling exhibitions at the Jewish Federation recall the idea that close neighbors can live in dramatically differing realities. Approach the Federation building on Wilshire Boulevard on a sunny day--you notice its sidewalk is ringed with giant planting pots. The L.A. trademark palm trees they contain look decorative until you realize they form a car-bomb barrier. Visitors enter the building through a metal detector.

Inside, the galleries of the Martyrs Memorial and Museum of the Holocaust present “Terezin: Then and Now,” two linked exhibitions concerning a Czech village that served the Nazis as the chessboard for a grotesque con game.

Terezin (rendered as “Theresienstadt” in German) was promoted as a “paradise camp,” a rest home and spa for elderly and prominent Jews waiting to immigrate to safety. In fact, it was a transit point for some 140,000 souls who--if they survived the ghetto--were slaughtered in the death camps.

The most prominent of the exhibitions is “Eli Leskly: Ghetto Diary,” which contains about 40 colored drawings made on-site by a survivor. A Czech Jew born Erich Lichtbau in 1911, he was sent to the camp in 1941 and assigned to the sign shop where he had access to art materials. Secretly he made drawings of the life of the ghetto--an infraction punishable by death. Alarmed by a search of the camp in April 1945, he destroyed his captions, tore up his drawings and hid the fragments.

He reassembled and reworked them for 10 years after war’s end, when he immigrated to Israel, where he still lives. In most cases, fragments and re-creations are shown together. By any measure they are flatly astonishing.

Where one might expect harried sketches bemoaning the monstrosity of the Nazis and waxing lugubrious over the quiet heroism of their victims, we are faced--of all things--with satire.

Leskly draws less like a professional artist than like a man obliged to express indescribable horror in the language of a stand-up comic. What emerges from the mixture is a quality of common-man courage that raises joking to a level of existential absurdity where pain, anger and empathy become virtually palpable.

Most of the time life in the ghetto was so grim that about 150 people died daily of everything from dysentery to despair. One of the camp’s most active workplaces was the coffin shop. Leskly shows a young woman nailing a body box together while an old one picks up wood scraps for fire. Those were the good old days, before bodies where just dumped in a hole.

However, when the Red Cross announced a humanitarian visit, the SS had inmates fix the place up like a Potemkin village. Leskly shows the jolly fake facades, the dining room with white tablecloths, flowers and pretty waitresses, the announcement of athletic contests that had been briefly postponed due to slight indisposition among the athletes. That the problem was starvation was not mentioned.

The genius of the work is the way it captures what Hannah Arendt called evil’s banality. Inmates were allowed packages from home that rarely got to them. When goodies filtered through, the great prize was cigarettes. If somebody was transported, the greatest legacy he could leave behind was his smokes.

One of Leskly’s most trenchant drawings depicts a Jew encountering an SS officer. In such circumstances, the inmate was required to raise his hat or be shipped to the ovens. The Jew doffs, causing his cache of cigarettes to fall out and exposing another infraction that got you immolated. The camp was a lose-lose situation.

The Nazis installed a puppet administration of Jewish leaders, managers and internal police to allegedly run the place. The motives of the collaborators ranged from a sincere desire to make life easier for their fellows to sheer self-serving opportunism. The most mordant and graphically striking of Leskly’s images symbolizes “Jewish Anti-Semites in the Ghetto” as a stupid scraggly black bird with a grimy Star of David on its chest.

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About the only shortcoming of this remarkable exhibition is its lack of a catalog. The work encompasses such a rare combination of authentic historical and aesthetic force it deserves to be much more widely known. The showing was organized by museum curator Marcia Rennes Josephy.

The companion exhibition, “Theresienstadt,” is an entirely worthy exercise made possible by an Austrian outreach program, Project Gedenkendienst, which allows young Austrians to work in Holocaust museums instead of doing military duty. The show includes the work of 14 young painters from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. In 1993, they went to the site of the camp and set down their feelings in pictorial form. Somehow the most moving images are old buildings that--even though haunted by the spirits of the dead--endure.

* Martyrs Memorial Museum of the Holocaust and the Pauline Hirsh Gallery, 6505 Wilshire Blvd.; through Aug. 26, closed Saturdays and holidays, (213) 852-3242.