“I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his beret on his head, swaying backwards and forwards violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been chosen. Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking any more? Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again? If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn's prayer”
― Primo Levi
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| Katharina "Gatti" Kawacz, 8 years |
The Blumenkrieg in March 1938 brought the Nazi war machine to the streets of Vienna and even the gods fled. There remains a bunker deep in the Leopold Museum of Vienna where the innocent faces of murdered children bear testament to the gods' retreat.
And all the horror and all the guilt in the world descended upon these children.
The large charcoal portraits by Manfred Bockelmann are based upon police shots taken by the authorities at the time - the Gestapo, the SS, the medical profession. Many already wear the striped convicts' clothing of the death camps. Others are in their best clothes, having wanted to make a good impression when called for a photo shoot. Many were Jews, others were Roma and Sinti.
The soft charcoal seems to bring out the person within better than a cold photograph, but this is an act of remembrance rather than art. Lifting just a few individuals from the anonymity of statistics.
Mengele had drawn an arbitrary line on a wall just a few short feet from the earth in Auschwitz. Those who failed to reach the line were gassed immediately. Karura's mind recoiled at the pitiless contrast as he saw again his own son's anguish at being above the line which would have allowed him to enter his chosen bouncy castle. How could Karura even have that thought in the face of what he was witnessing? Many of those who survived the first cull were killed later, either by gas, starvation, disease or by 'medical experimentation'.
Karura would have avoided the gaze of others, conscious of the vacuity of his self-indulgently red eyes in the face of such primitive evil. Except he was alone. Utterly alone. Karura knew that he was not 'only' looking at murdered children in that room. He was confronted by nothing less than the execution of God himself.
