Miriam Mörsel Nathan

Artist Statement

ZDENA


My mother’s name was Zdena.


In 1937 my parents were married in Prague.  By 1939 their lives were changed inalterably when the Nazi party began its assault on Europe as part of their WWII invasion.  Under the threat of deportation to a Nazi concentration camp, my father escaped persecution after an odyssey through the former Yugoslavia, Greece and Italy. He eventually found refuge in the settlement of Sosua in the Dominican Republic.  My mother was to follow but was denied a transit visa and was forced to remain in Prague.  All attempts to obtain transit papers were to no avail and in 1942 she was deported to the concentration camp Terezin.  After the war ended— and after 7 years separated by war— my parents reunited in the Dominican Republic, where I was born.


I carry a story of Terezin, told to me by my mother.  The words are my mother’s, not mine.  The experience was my mother’s, not mine.  But the details are indelibly etched in my psyche, and now, for the first time, I tell the story through my work.


This is a two-part installation.  The first part is comprised of ten panels of abstract images and text. The images, which appear above the text, are my responses to the text – my mother’s words, written in white ink.  In order to read it, you must come close.  That is the intention.  Like a poem, the narrative is built on stanzas.  Each “stanza” or panel offers only a fragment of the story.  Each is meant to be a prompt to you, the viewer, to ask for more of the story.


The details and phrasing of the text are taken directly from my mother’s survivor’s testimony and her essay in Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust, edited by Vera Laska.


The second part of the work included in the exhibition is a collection of painted cardboard boxes. Although there were no gas chambers in Terezin, crematoria were built to manage the overwhelming number of deaths that occurred there.  Approximately 30,000 Jews were cremated in Terezin.  Their ashes were placed in cardboard urns and kept until 1944 when the Nazis ordered the urns to be emptied into the river Ohře.  These boxes reflect on those cardboard urns. 

The work in this exhibition presents a fragmented, spare, unfinished telling of a few episodes during my mother’s time in Prague, and more specifically, her time in Terezin.

© 2019 Miriam Mörsel Nathan, Untitled, Carboard & Acrylic, 24 boxes, each 12 x 6 x 6

These boxes allude to the cardboard urns into which women, children and men, reduced to ashes, were stored in disposable containers on a shelf in Terezin. In November 1944, the prisoners - my mother among them - were lined up to form a human chain to pass these boxes from hand-to-hand and then dump the ashes into the river for disposal.



© 2019 Miriam Mörsel Nathan, Untitled, Ink on Gampi, 9 x 6.25

This image of a hand, drawn in ink, hovers above the passage “I didn’t even want to look whether my father’s ashes would pass through my hands…” - my mother’s words as she told of this November day.