VOLUME 5 NO. 2 Dear Child Survivors, Welcome to this special edition of Connections celebrating the Child Survivors portrait exhibition TRIBUTE. We are grateful to Artist Jeffrey Kelson for creating paintings that reflect child survivors’ journey from childhood to adult. The short biography displayed alongside the artwork, gave insight to each child survivors’ personal story. We were honoured to have as our special guest, Prof Hon Barry Jones, who spoke of his personal association with the Holocaust Centre’s early founders as well as sharing his thoughts about child survivors and the enormous challenges they faced during the Holocaust. Dr Paul Valent, much loved and admired founding president
JUNE 2017
of the CSH spoke first; his speech follows for all to share. It is no surprise his words truly reflect the essence of the child survivor experience. A crowd of over 300 CSH their families and friends attended this special event, we thank all participants and guests for their support. We thank the Holocaust Centre for facilitating the exhibition and in particular Curator, Jayne Josem for her tireless effort to create an inspired display. Best Wishes: We send our best wishes to child survivors who are unwell at this time, our thoughts are with you and we hope your recovery to good health is well on the way. Viv Parry, Chairperson, CSH
Launch of Child Survivors of the Holocaust Portraits 2 April 2017 at the JHC - speech by Dr Paul Valent Thank you very much for the privilege of speaking to you on this auspicious occasion of the launch of the Jeffrey Kelson series of portraits of child survivors of the Holocaust. We look at ourselves every day and make judgements of ourselves. Looking in the mirror, we might say, “I don’t like the look of myself today.” We might judge a photo as a flattering or uncomplimentary depiction of ourselves. In other words, we have an inner picture of ourselves, which may or may not be in harmony with the reality of our facial reflections. We Child Survivors of the Holocaust are a strange assortment. We did not have clear inner images of ourselves because our parents’ eyes, the original mirrors, didn’t reflect, in fact they tried to hide as much as possible, our realities. And so for decades we didn’t even have an image of ourselves as child survivors. For instance, I remember at the first international conference of child survivors, seeing two distressed women looking in my direction. I looked behind me to see what the matter was. But they pointed at me. I realised that the two women were in fact responding to my story, which I was narrating. It was only then that I realised deep
down how distressing my story actually was. We needed outsiders to discover us. They were two other women. We were lucky that we experienced both of them in our group. One of them was Sarah Moskovitz who wrote “Love Despite Hate; Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Their Adult Lives”. The other was Judith Kestenberg, a psychoanalyst, who wrote extensively on child survivors of the Holocaust. These were the original mothers who listened attentively to us, reflected us, and exhibited us to the world in their literature. Well, today we have Jeffrey Kelson. He is exhibiting us differently. He has offered to transmit our stories visually, as against verbal exposes, in the apparent immediacy of pictures. I said apparent immediacy. In fact there is nothing immediate about a portrait. From the portraitist’s point of view, it requires years of practising skills and techniques to be able to portray the physical face and what lies behind its expressions. The artist has to reveal an inner significance, an essence. This essence, unlike fleeting reflections in mirrors or photos, reveals character, moral quality, and a new perspective of