Memorial Holds Personal Touch

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

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

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 the Holocaust, raise families and live to see freedom.

“The boy is facing a future that he does not know,” sculptor Mario Jason said, standing near the work-in-progress in his Atoll Avenue studio. “But he wants to survive.”

Over the weekend, art and life converged as Holocaust survivors visited Jason’s studio to press their fingerprints into the boy’s coat as a permanent testament to those whose plight is being commemorated today on Yom Ha Shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Jason, 62, said he intends to present the completed work to his temple, Sharrey Zedek Synagogue in North Hollywood, by early summer.

Jason said he created the sculpture as an ode to Holocaust victims and as a reminder of the persecution Jews have suffered from time immemorial.

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

Even so, 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 several concentration camps.

Eventually, Pollak said, he realized that he could never forget Nazi Germany’s systematic 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.

Yet Pollak has returned to Romania on several occasions, visits that remind him of the atrocities committed against European Jews. “I tell my kids to know who you are, and where you come from.”

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.”

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Born in Czechoslovakia, Teichman said he was taken to Auschwitz when he was 12.

He was then forced into concentration camps in Warsaw and Munich, where he was liberated by U.S. Army soldiers in April 1945.

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

“It’s very hard for me to talk about this,” Teichman said, his voice just above a whisper.

Jason said he attempted to capture victims’ emotional torment and physical exhaustion as he sculpted the figures’ emaciated 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 certain death.

The little boy’s face appears aged by the responsibility of being the sole survivor and telling the world everything he has seen.

Jason said he works on the piece in a room away from his usual pieces depicting jazz and ballet dancers so that he can better artistically express his deepest feelings of faith, identity and culture.

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“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.

“The fingerprints bring an infusion of energy that makes the sculpture come alive,” Jason said. “Without the fingerprints, it would be just another sculpture.”