Monthly Archives: June 2014

Arbeit Macht Frei/Work makes who free?

work makes who free?

 

Is there a moral responsibility to engage in social and political issues?

what is the relationship between racism and anti-Semitism?

This multimedia installation examines issues of race, class, and oppression through an exploration of the connections between the Nazi slave labor campaign and American slavery. The work also looks at the way unjust systems are enforced by tyranny and result in benefit only to those people “at the top of the pyramid”

the welded sign recreates the sign on the gate to Auschwitz: the welded sign is help up by two wooden columns forms, which refer to the Auschwitz on the right and to a southern plantation to the left. surrounding the center images are painting that describe the treatment of slave laborers in Nazi camps and of African Americans in the Southern plantation system.

Judy Chicago, The Holocaust Project, 1995, pg. 17.

HOLOCAUST PRISM

JC HOLOCAUST PRISM

words: Genocide and Holocaust

Nearly 11 million civilians were killed during World War II. Poles, gypsies, homosexuals, the physically and mentally handicapped, dissident priests and nuns, political opponents, and intellectuals who were considered “enemies of the state” were eliminated. But Hitler and the Nazis waged a special war that resulted in the genocide of nearly six million Jews, fully two thirds of European Jewry.

The nazis employed the code term “the final solution” to refer to this particular war. The word Holcaust, which derives from the Greek word meaning “fully burnt,” is now most commonly used to refer to the genocide of European Jewry. The term Shoah, from the Hebrew meaning, “utterly destroyed,” also refers to this crime. (The Holacaust Project, Judy Chicago, pg. 15).

Dancing in the Morning

dancer in morning

 

….what the Jews felt during the Holocaust and the desperate freedom felt by these Jewish captives. 

Trying to give a message of something……

Somebody’s Pain.

Finding freedom.

Motivation to stay up.

Trying to see the other side.

What happened in the world—

,,,,,,the dance is a reflection or expression and it is sad.

It is hard for her to get up and walk when she doesn’t have a lot of strength and hunger. Maye she is scared or lost. Or she is threatened by people.

Wall of Indifference by Judy Chicago

wall of indifference

What is the role of bystanders and the free world during this period? During the Holocaust?

What is the experience of women during the Holocaust?

On September 1, 1939 marks the invasion of Poland by German forces and the beginning of World War II. Jews were forcibly concentrated in ghettos within major cities. In these ghettos, Jews were forced to live in walled quarters. This idea was not new, but had existed since the 16th century. The Nazis revived this older form of anti-semitism.

During 1941-42 the Nazis secretly built six death camps with gas installations in Poland. their names were Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, majdanek, Auschwitz and Chelmno. Death camps were camoflouged to look like labor camps. When the Jews arrived, they were separated into two lines; women and children and men in the other. This process was called selection. This led to them being examined by a doctor who would decide if should be kept alive or die.

German women had a special purpose for the Nazis, the reproduce a healthy, genetically correct children. In 1933 when the Nazis came into power, concentration camps were established in Germany for degenerate peoples, which included:

Jews

gypsies

political prisoners

homosexuals

women that were ‘unnatural’ for example, lesbians and prostitutes

Many historians believe that the German decision of genocide was made in1941. By late 1941-1942 the United States and Great Britain had received numerous reports about massacres in Germany. Yet no one made any decision to help or rescue the Jews. In November of 1941, the head of the State department’s Division of European Affairs, Cavendish Cannon said, “So far as I know we are not ready to tackle the whole Jewish problem.”