Survivors to Leave Mark on Holocaust Sculpture

The bronze sculpture memorializing Jewish Holocaust victims is a study in contrasts. Life and death. Joy and sorrow. Past and future.

The huddled, emaciated figures of a grandmother, father, mother and three children--all dressed in gowns for burial--appear to bow under the weight of imminent death.

Still, there is hope. A seventh figure, a young boy, stands apart from his family. Dressed in city clothes, he symbolizes those who would survive to raise families and see freedom.

“The boy is facing a future that he does not know,” sculptor Mario Jason said. “But he wants to survive.”

Over the weekend, art and life converged as local Holocaust survivors visited Jason’s North Hollywood studio to press their fingerprints into the wax forms of the boy’s coat. Their fingerprints will bring the sculpture to life when it is finally cast, Jason said, and serve as a testament to those whose plight is being commemorated today on Yom Ha Shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Jason, 62, said he created the sculpture as an ode to Holocaust victims and as a reminder of the persecution that Jews have suffered. He said he intends to present the completed work later this year to his temple, Sharrey Zedek Synagogue in North Hollywood.

“We don’t want to forget what happened,” said Jason, whose father fled persecution in Lithuania in 1920 and resettled in Argentina. “The moment we forget is the moment when it could happen again.”

Holocaust survivor Alex Pollak, 70, of Sherman Oaks said he tried for years to erase the memory of being taken from his Romanian village and forced into concentration camps.

Eventually, Pollak said, he realized that he could never forget Nazi Germany’s slaughter of 6 million Jews during World War II.

“I wanted to add my fingerprints to the sculpture because I was one of the people who was there,” Pollak said. “[The sculpture] is going to be meaningful to the families who will come after us and who will realize what we went through.”

Since immigrating to Los Angeles in 1947, Pollak has married, raised four children and built a business selling store fixtures.

Pollak has returned to Romania on several occasions. “I tell my kids to know who you are, and where you come from,” he said.

Another Holocaust survivor, Steve Teichman, 68, of Sherman Oaks agreed to add his fingerprints to the sculpture because, “It’s going to be a monument for eternity.”

Born in Czechoslovakia, Teichman said he was taken to Auschwitz when he was 12. He was moved to concentration camps in Warsaw and Munich, where he was liberated by U.S. Army soldiers in April 1945.

Teichman, his father and a brother survived. They immigrated to Los Angeles in 1949. Teichman’s mother and four siblings died during Adolf Hitler’s reign of terror.

Jason said he attempted to capture victims’ emotional torment and physical exhaustion as he sculpted the figures’ starved bodies and disconsolate faces.

The grandmother sits on a suitcase filled with mementos, lamenting what she has lost and what is yet to come. The father cannot understand the destruction all around him and cries out to God in agony. The mother seeks to shield her children from death. The little boy’s face appears aged by the responsibility of being the sole survivor and telling the world what he has seen.

“To create a sculpture depicting the Holocaust, I had to dig deep into my soul in order to understand the psychological impact that passed through the minds of victims,” Jason said.

He decided to ask Holocaust survivors from his temple to add their fingerprints as a means of linking past, present and future, he said.

“Without the fingerprints, it would be just another sculpture.”