I don’t know whether the geography of morality was simpler in the past. Perhaps the compass for most people used to point in a single direction? Today, it can be hard to find the right way to turn, facing a never-ending avalanche of crises, wars and tragedies, amplified by omnipresent news and social media. With current events, you have to make a choice – to take a side, see the nuance, or simply ignore them.

Researching history is often a way to reflect on the present. When you learn about the past, it is almost impossible not to compare and contrast with what is happening in the world right now. This has been a difficult couple of years in my life. A time when I found myself revisiting events like the Holocaust, and contemporary accounts such as Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the banality of evil, in order to be able to process my views about current events and personal tragedies.

That’s why when I saw the open call for a residency at the Holocaust Centre North in summer 2023, I applied the same day. I finally felt ready to unpack this chapter of history, to go beyond the curated perspectives of others in documentaries, books and museums, and to engage directly myself with the raw materials.

I think it is hard for younger people to get their head around this kind of trauma, particularly when it happened on such an overwhelming scale. One of the few silver linings in living through terrible experiences is an opening of the mind to new depths of empathy and understanding. This was what I found when I had a stillbirth last year and had to face the loss of my daughter.

There is an absence of words. An inability or impossibility to adequately express what you feel. Life developed new layers of complexity. It made me realise that behind every account of tragedy, there is more than just the edited storytelling. There is a lot to unpack in the gaps, what goes unsaid and exists in the spaces in between. This is what I want to find by looking into the archives of Holocaust survivors – to hear their voices, not just the lurid or gruesome details, but the way their experience shaped their perspectives, choices and inner emotional lives.

For me and many other Jewish people of my generation– a child of the 1990s– the Holocaust has an unusual place in our lives. We knew the facts. Many of us knew the survivors personally. But the events were distant and removed from our daily experiences. It was like something you keep in a box on a shelf in your living room – too important to store away in a dusty cupboard, but not something you want to unpack and look at all the time.

As someone who was born and grew up in Russia, the war with Ukraine forced me to open this box and take a long, hard look inside it. There are now people I went to school with, sat next to on the bus, passed in the supermarket or on the street, that are actively supporting the killing and destruction. Some may even have committed the atrocities themselves. My nation. My neighbours.

I had always placed myself on the side of victims, which is easy to do when you are a Jew. There was plenty of oppression in my family history and their experiences of antisemitism. But all of a sudden, I had to ask whether I too was a possible perpetrator. Did I do enough to change things and stop the evils that are still happening today? Should I feel any guilt or personal responsibility?

Before I was able to visit the Holocaust Centre North and explore the archives, I decided to look more deeply into my own family history, imagining that I would be able to unearth unknown traumatic stories from my own ancestors. Instead of finding victimhood, I discovered my own great-grandfather was likely involved as a perpetrator, carrying out dreadful deeds ordered by an ideological state. Not the Holocaust, but Stalin’s Great Terror.

Records show that he rose to become a colonel in the NKVD (the domestic counterpart in Russia to the KGB abroad). He had multiple accolades and praise from the Communist Party for his deeds. When I asked, my mother just remembered that he was strict.

This is a pivotal moment when it comes to preserving the memory and the lessons of the Holocaust. The last remaining witnesses to events are leaving us. It was their lives, but what will be left when it only becomes our history?

I have witnessed how quickly history can be distorted, hidden or misused in the wrong hands. In the course of my lifetime, I have seen things change in Russia to ensure that those who researched and helped record the details of Stalin’s mass-murders have become criminalised as foreign agents and members of extremist organisations. It made me realise how brittle or malleable history can be, how crucial it is to properly preserve memories and experiences, to fight the misuse of facts and outright falsification.

With this residency, I feel a sense of purpose. I am playing my own small part in the important task of helping to ensure future generations never forget one of the greatest crimes in history. I am honoured to be a part of it.

Researching the archive has been an unusual and emotional journey for me. A few weeks after I was selected for the residency, I discovered I was pregnant again. I have had to look into how people lost their humanity, while growing a human inside me. I hope for a better future for my daughter, while reading accounts of how quickly an apparently civilised society can fall apart.

For my project, I want to explore the topic of belonging and trust, how people that went through the trauma of the Holocaust could find a new community in a different place in the world. At the same time, I was keen to reflect on the role of small actions and choices, that mean little in the context of great historical events but can be incredibly meaningful in individual lives.

For example, one of the most moving stories I found in the archive was in the correspondence of the warden of the Bradford Hostel for Jewish Refugees, which was host to many children that came to the UK as part of the Kindertransport. One boy, Fritz Terkfeld, had died tragically in an accident. There were dozens of letters over the course of two years, where the warden reached out to multiple organisations – bureaucratic and religious, in the UK and Germany – to try to find out Fritz’s “Jewish name” that was required for Fritz’s headstone and proper memorial prayers.

The archive also provided evidence that children in the Bradford Hostel experienced a highly structured and disciplined environment, typical of the era’s norms. The same warden who took great care in commemorating Fritz might appear stern to the contemporary eye. The boys were encouraged to speak English at all times and had to follow a disciplined routine. And although I realise this approach may have been quite normal at that time, I wonder how this experience impacted the boys.

For the final artwork I am developing as part of this residency, I will be working in clay, which is my primary medium as a sculptor. I have always found that ceramics can be incredibly expressive, both in terms of language and cultural context. Clay has played an important role in civilisation throughout history. Archaeologists and historians can interpret it to understand how people lived, what they held sacred, how they interacted with one another, and even find traces of what they ate and drank. It also preserves some of the earliest records of writing and laws.

This is still very much a work in progress, but I want to create a piece that helps to evoke the same unbearable choices and moral questions and that I have uncovered while studying the archives. Choices and questions that are not entirely absent from our lives today, although perhaps not at the same scale. Alongside this, I want to comment on the disappearance and fragility of evidence and memories, and how we are today witnessing the Holocaust passing beyond living memory.

In the studio, I have been exploring concepts around creating an installation composed of a series of porcelain slabs, that show a gradual progression of breaking and shattering, as if the inevitable consequences from earlier choices.

On these slabs, I am intending to use fragments of the letters, photographs, and poetry of one particular survivor, Iby Knill. Iby came from Bratislava to Leeds, via Hungary and after surviving several forced labour camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and a death march, facing torture and using her talents as a nurse to help others escape the gas chambers, before eventually marrying a British Army Officer and settling in England.

I am looking at ways to recreate these documents on specially developed ceramic materials that will go through a process of change in the kiln, cracking and deteriorating – crystallising the soft and easily remolded porcelain into a permanent form, but losing details along the way. In this way, we can witness important personal stories, but see how they have become more fragile and precious when they can no longer be changed, and questioning the role each of us has in keeping the memories alive.

Around eighty years after my paternal grandparents and aunt became Holocaust refugees, I began reflecting on this part of my family’s past. In the midst of that, I applied for the Memorial Gestures Residency at the Holocaust Centre North.   

Weeks before the application I found a stack of envelopes sent between my grandparents when they were forced to be apart during the war. Folded into every few letters was a four-leaf clover. I read these tiny, dried and pressed plants as vessels that had carried love, hope and confidence in the future. Today, they seemed just as, if not more, powerful, having the ability to crush distances created by unspoken pain, buried deeper still by death and time.  

In my application I wrote how I saw that stories could reflect fact, create meaning, hold a centre and provide us with what we need at a given moment. Some stories, I wrote, harden over time, or get tidied up. They may lose bits, facets or complexities, sometimes big chunks get hidden or stored away out of sight, but moreover what we need from them is likely to change. This, or elements of this, was true for me when receiving my family’s stories – so much was silenced. The clovers played an active role in revealing that which had previously gone unseen or unspoken. They were like tiny wands motioning at the past – waving in order to release, open, awaken or transform.

The residency began, and among the compiled resources the residency offered, was a talk by memory studies scholar Michael Rothberg in which he speaks about his book Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. One part of the talk stood out to me. Rothberg describes his ideas about a French documentary film, or rather a moment in the film Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer), in which cast member, Marceline, gives an account of her time in Auschwitz. 

Rothberg speaks about having been drawn to the film because of its release date, 1961: the same year as the Eichmann trial, a pivotal moment in the construction of how the Holocaust is predominantly represented and remembered today, and also, the year before the end of the Algerian War of Independence against France. 

I watched Chronicle of a Summer. It features Parisian students, workers, immigrants and the filmmakers themselves having conversations about how they live and if they are happy, they branch out broadly and loosely from their core questions to topics like human connection, work, prejudice, racism and colonialism.  

Marceline’s testimony arrives around midway, as if folded into or tucked inside the film. The sequence feels separate from the rest of the documentary as the only moment belonging to a single person, not a couple or group. Marceline speaks, seemingly to herself, but more likely to or for the viewer. The sequence feels like a pocket within the film made of different material, distinct but dependent on the rest and hidden within its structure. It allowed me to slip inside, or maybe it released what had been held in. The unspoken, or unseen, finds a way out, and things, once again, felt like they were being revealed.  

For Rothberg, Marceline’s testimony demonstrates the possibility of multidirectional memory, the idea that memories can be intertwined or layered in order to speak of or shed light onto other moments. The testimony, for example, set within the film, layers experiences of the Holocaust with those of the Algerian War and more broadly of racism and colonialism. Marceline’s story can be read as an allegory of public violence, and in particular the violence that took place during the Algerian War. This interpretation is all the more important given the censorship enforced in France in 1961 around the Algerian War: tools like allegory were the only way to speak of what was happening. The testimony was a breaking of various silences. Film critic Richard Brody speaks of these in his 2013 article about the film: “Silence, whether due to the official censorship regarding the war in Algeria or the social censorship of the experience of the Holocaust, comes off as a prolongation and repetition of trauma, a primary obstacle to self-realisation and self-fulfilment”.   

As I watched Marceline’s testimony, something about the way it’s introduced, that which immediately precedes it, reminded me of how I had experienced the clovers. They too had broken a form of silence. I had imagined them as coming from a different reality, from the realm of magic, where things have the power to break the spells that bind people to silence or hold them captive in towers, far from loved ones. The testimony surfaces in the midst of a discussion on racism and colonialism, as one of the filmmakers points out the numbers tattooed on Marceline’s arm. She responds: “I was sent to a concentration camp because I am Jewish, this number was done to me in that camp. Do you know what that is, a concentration camp? “Yes, I saw a film about concentration camps, Night and Fog”. A man answers, as he does, we see a close-up of Marcelines hands.  

She holds the stem of a light-coloured rose in her left hand. In her right hand, her index and middle finger hold a cigarette. Her thumb, ring and little finger caress the rose. She strokes it, starting at the base of the petals and following them up before pinching the flower slightly shut towards the top of the petals, as if to close the flower back up. She does this twice before the film cuts to Marceline walking holding her jacket closed against the wind and she begins her story.  

Marceline’s rose acts like a genie’s bottle, as she touches it something held within is released. Her past as a Holocaust survivor had been alluded to in a previous conversation between Marceline, Marceline’s ex-boyfriend and one of the filmmakers, but it had gone unaddressed, maybe even suppressed. Marceline’s ex talks about his dissatisfaction with life. Marceline looks uncomfortable and says that she feels responsible for his sadness, because she took him out of his world and exposed him to things he might not have otherwise known. She desperately wanted their relationship not to fail. She wished for his youth to be different to hers. She thought she could make him happy in spite of it all, she loved him and still does. As she says ‘happy’ the camera moves down to her tattooed arm, and silence follows. The rose, a few scenes after, enables a breaking of that silence. It allows her story to emerge.  

I came to the archives at Holocaust Centre North searching for clovers and roses, for moments of connection. I came looking for, and perhaps hoping to create, instances of magical release from spells of silence. In the archives, I was introduced to the stories and collections of Edith and Emil Culman.  

Edith was a Holocaust refugee from Germany who arrived in the UK in 1939. Emil was a Dachau Survivor from Poland who also arrived in 1939 only to be held in two internment camps, one in Surrey and another in Liverpool, before being deported to the Hay internment camp in Australia. He was released and returned to the UK late 1941. Edith and Emil met in St Albans and married not far from there in December 1942. They had one son, Emanuel who was born in 1945. They moved to Leeds in 1954.  

Their collection is multifaceted. It holds the traces of what I have started to imagine as two tenaciously hopeful people. I started to tell myself stories of their unwavering commitment to one another, but more over to themselves. I found cards they exchanged on special occasions and boxes full of moments they captured in photographs, affectionately, artistically, candidly and experimentally.  

Edith drew and her sketches had me imagining her sitting in the landscapes I held. I followed her to language and art history classes. I read letters she wrote to artists she admired, and their answers, that they had no time to meet her in person. I found Emils letter to the British Embassy in Warsaw as he searched for his parents and sister and the reply that gave him no answer. I found fiction Emil wrote in evening classes over many years, in some he looked back on what he had experienced in his earlier life. Through all this and more I saw them chipping away at walls of isolation to build bridges with the rubble they gleaned.  

The collection held another important story too, that of their son Emanuel, born in 1945, who emigrated to the USA in the 1970’s. Emanuel wrote his parents countless, long typewritten letters, with details of his life, his hopes and dreams and struggles. After travelling across the USA, he settled in LA, the city of dreams, where he wrote stories, plays and screenplays for many years before moving to North Dakota and restoring a local movie theatre in a small town called Beach.  

I am a multidisciplinary visual artist. For years, I have worked with a variety of different mediums, ranging from film and video, sculpture, photography and sound. This has taught me much about different techniques and how to playfully incorporate one into another. Working with many mediums can be challenging. I often feel that I am working without a safety net, as I constantly need to learn new skills. This difficulty is also beneficial, as it helps me avoid making work that is formulaic, habitual, or repetitive. Also, it is important for me that I use different methods depending on the subject I am working with and the type of emotions or aesthetic experience I want to convey.

The political and socio-economic crises that have engulfed Europe over the last ten years have informed a step change in my practice. In 2019, reflecting on my own family history, I took the decision to make a video work based on the repercussions of immigration over different generations. It has taken me years to feel confident enough to address, within my practice, subjects that have political or ethical implications. Coming from a family of political refugees and having myself moved away from the country where I was born, I have always felt concerned by the ethical responsibility of broaching such complex questions. The Waves, pictured above, is the portrait of three individuals born of political refugees. The film implicates the audience in difficult narratives as a way to generate open and empathetic responses.

Since The Waves, my work has continued to focus on revealing difficult subjects or bringing to the forefront unheard or seldom heard voices. That said, it is also important for me to make work that is engaging. I do not wish to burden audiences with the trauma of others. I am always striving to employ modes of representation that will emotionally engage the viewers. I want to make work that I find aesthetically pleasing, that retains some poetic ambiguity, that asks questions instead of imposing meanings.

Another important aspect of my current practice is that I often draw from archives and collections to create artworks that reclaim past narratives and interpret them in a way that is relevant to the time we live in. Taking part in Memorial Gestures at the Holocaust Centre North is a fantastic opportunity, as the residency facilitates and encourages this way of working, while also offering creative freedom. Another crucial benefit is the regular critical exchange with the other Artists and with the team here at the centre. I am truly honoured to be one of the selected artists.

It is always difficult to talk about a work while in the midst of making it. It is fragile, full of uncertainties and engaged on a path that might later be abandoned. I travelled to France last winter to film the last concentration camp where my grandfather was interned. In parallel to this, I have found some extremely moving letters at the Holocaust Centre North Archive. In these letters, one can read the desperate pleas of Rachel Mendel’s parents to leave their country and find refuge elsewhere, anywhere else. I would like to create a conversation between these letters and the filming I did in the winter. Also residing at the back of my mind is the current refugee crisis and the rise of far-right political movements in Europe. Death, wars, destruction… I am currently trying to find a way to make a new body of work that will respond to these themes whilst maintaining a sense of levity and hope.