 Welcome, and good afternoon. I'm Elizabeth Sackler, and it's really nice to welcome you to the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art for a program today, which is really very special. And I think it's a particularly important day that we're together. We look at the horrors of violence around the world as it continues. And we all search for a way to live in a world of peace and live in a world of justice and civility. And today is going to be, I think, particularly poignant. I also want to mention that UJA Westchester is here. And my friend Debra Lane, please, old UJA Westchester, put your hands up. And I want to thank you because you know, UJA does such very important work around the world and here nationally to take care of people who are in conflict, to take care of people who have suffered from conflict. And I want to thank you. And I want to welcome you for this day particularly. So the order of the day is going to be fairly straightforward. I'm going to give you a very brief introduction. And follow up that we will watch this wonderful film. You're really in for an extraordinary opportunity to see through the eye of the needle the art of Esther Niesenthal-Krenetz. And then after that, her daughters, Helene, and my, how was it that I cannot remember your name? It's so silly. Helene and, thank you, Bernice. I'm glad we're all of the same contemporary age range. Anyway, and Bernice are going to do a PowerPoint. And then we're going to be in conversation. And then we'll open the floor up for a Q&A. And I want to go through the thread. That's why it's particularly ludicrous that I was blacking out on Bernice's name. Because there's always a thread that leads to moments. And I just wanted to share with you how we ended up here today because it's really very wonderful. Last August, I was out in Santa Fe where I go for the summer. And I was invited to the Women's International Study Center to do, and if you don't know them, it's a whisk, but you should look them up online, to do an introduction of Susan Fisher Sterling, who is the director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. And if you don't know Nemois, you should look that up online. And so after Susan did her presentation, Cecile Lipworth, whom I had met many years ago when she was working for Eve Ensler, and had come up to me to talk about a million rising on V Day, which we did, a billion rising, which we did here, a piece of in Brooklyn, came up to me. And she said, oh, I really want you to meet Bernice Steinhardt, who is here with me today. So we met briefly after that lecture. And then I went home, and Cecile was nice enough to send me information. She sent me a link to the film. And I watched the film, and I said, oh my god, this has to come to the Brooklyn Museum. It has to come to the Sackler Center. And so we had tea. Bernice and Cecile and I under the blue skies of the gorgeous Santa Fe. And that's why we're here. And that's the way things happen in life. And it's always so nice. So now, more than 40 years after the Holocaust, Bernice and Helene's mother, Esther Niesenthal-Crinets, depicted her story of survival through an extraordinary series of 36 fabric collage and embroidery tapestry panels. And this documentary through the eye of a needle, the art of Esther Niesenthal-Crinets, profoundly and powerfully reveals the capacity of human beings to heal. And it can't help but address the acts of baseless hatred. And it is an inspiration, this film, to work for peace in the world. It has been in many film festivals as a selected piece in the US and abroad, and has won numerous awards and been broadcast nationally on PBS here in the United States. So with that, let us watch the film and enjoy it. We will be in the back watching with you. And then after that, you'll enjoy a PowerPoint, which will give you a closer look at this incredible work of art, or these works of art that Esther has created for history and her story. OK, thank you. I always thought of my mother as different from other mothers. She sounded different from other mothers. She pronounced words differently. And she had a past that other mothers didn't have. She loved to sew. She loved to embroider. She loved creating beautiful things. Our mother was very driven to tell the story. She wanted us to know it. She wanted us to remember. It was a way of connecting me and my sister with the family that she had lost, her mother, her father, her sisters, her brother, nearly everyone that she loved in the world. At some point, she really began to look to me to be the storyteller. I had just read the diary of Anne Frank, which came out around then. And so I started writing it. But I knew even then that nobody could really tell my mother's story. It was her story to tell. I wanted to show my kids how I grew up. And I was trying desperately. But I never drew anything in my life. I said, well, I'm going to try. So I bought this piece of cheap fabric. I thought I was just going to mess around with it. And I took a ruler. And I still see my house the way it was. And I just drew the lines. And then I started filling it out with crew work. And then I made the straw roof sort of. Now, when I finished the house, I was really satisfied the way it looked. That's the way it looked. And once she found that way, it just poured out of her. We grew up in Brooklyn, in a working class neighborhood. My father worked as a manager for a supermarket. And until I was about 10, my mother was at home. Very often while she was cooking, I would be sitting at the kitchen table. And she would tell me stories. She might, for example, be making a potato coogle. And she would tell me about how her mother used to make potato cobbles and growing the potatoes and then going to get the eggs from the chickens. And so she would create this whole other world for me of her life before the war. My mother grew up in a little tiny village in the center of Poland and where she came from. Everything was done by animals. They had no cars, no machines, no electricity, no running water. My childhood home in the village of Niszek, Poland. I am carrying Wada up the hill to our house. My sister, Manja, waits for me. My brother, Ruben, is standing with the wagon. My father and my sister, Hannah, are in front of the house, along with my mother, who holds my youngest sister, Leah. All the Jews raised their chickens. They all have chickens. And a few people had the cows for milking. And she recalls swimming in the river and the cows grazing in the pasture. She was very happy at what she had created because she was able to show us what her childhood home looked like. The celebration of the Jewish holidays was central to their lives. It was how they marked the passage of time. Shavu was 1938. My brother and sisters followed as I walked on stilts to our grandparents' house. My brother was always the one that they would make toys. And I was the one to test them. So he built these tall stilts. And I was supposed to walk on them. And all the kids are following me. And he is my brother's following me and see if I'm going to fall down. But I made it all the way to the latest house. March 1939. Every year before Passover, the Jewish women of Mnishik would gather at the model the shoemaker's house to bake matzas. The aroma of the matzas filling the room. These were the last matzas we ever had in Mnishik. When I was in high school, my mother decided to open a women's clothing store. At first, she had the store in Brooklyn for a number of years, Esther's clothing store. And then in 1983, she and my father moved the business to Frederick, Maryland, to be close to her grandchildren. And then she started making things for her grandchildren. She had a very full life with her beautiful grandchildren. After this period of sweetness when she was about 60, she returned to these memory pictures. She continued until the time she died. And by that point, she had created 36 pictures altogether. And the first picture that she did was a dream that she had had during the war that left these very deep impressions on her. And I had this dream about my mother. And she dragged me. And she pulled me. And I said, mom, where are we running? She said, the sky is falling. See the black sky where I turned around? There was the sky with the stars in it reaching the bomb. She said, if it falls on the ground, we all die. When she created those pictures of her dreams, she realized that she could tell the story that way, that the whole story could be told. In 1939, the word came around and the Nazis, the Germans, are already in Rakhov. As we spotted them, that they were coming and horses, one of them jumped off the horse and he said, how do you do it? And they saw a beard. Anybody with a beard was a Jew. And he started beating up by his head. And he grabbed the beard, cut it with his bandit. He cut his beard off. He was an elder of the village. He was a very respected and venerated person. And he was her grandfather besides. And to see him treated in that way marked the beginning of the war for my mother. In the countryside, there simply weren't enough Jews to make it worthwhile to create a ghetto. And so Jews suffered in other ways. Roundups for labor camps, random shootings, mass shootings in the woods. It became a time of terror for the entire village and for my mother. Her childhood vanished when she was 12 years old. My sister and I brought our cows to the good pasture near the Vistula River. Through the trees, I discovered Viva next to the Yannishev prison camp. And I didn't know how close I was to this camp. It was so close. Just I saw everything that was going on through the bushes. The guys, you know, wheeling the wheelbarrows up the hill with the mud. And then I saw them leading these boys into the forest. And I heard shots, shots. All the time I was there, I heard shots in the forest. They called it a death camp because it was a death camp. Nobody came alive out of that. One of the paradoxes in an image like the Heaven and Hell image is that no matter how horrible the Holocaust the flowers kept blooming. The trees kept bearing fruit. The cows had to be milked. And there was a way in which that normalcy in the midst of horror is something she captures. What she's saying is, look. Look what happened here. It's so stark, the contrast. It's a way of really riveting your attention. On one morning there was still like the beginning of September. There were knocks on the window. Rows too far flew through the shrine. A young rose, it was still darker. Once my father opened the door, they got in and pushed us all out. We were all in the shouts, you know, the white shouts. And they lined us up and I thought they were going to kill us right by the river, lined us up. And we were all hysterical, the children. My mother was begging them and one guy stays at the machine gun with a real machine gun. And then the day was breaking and the poles came out. All a lot of poles standing in the other side street and looking at us like we were freaks. After the morning raid, they got stopped over returning. We fled across the fields to the woods. My mother directing me to separate. So we thought the horror was over, right? And my brother came running, they're coming again. So my brother and father ran into the bushes. And my mother took us, myself and the two younger kids, out in the fields. In the fields, September there was still something blooming. Yellow strip and a blue strip. So we went through these blooming fields and we're heading for the forest. Like my mother always knew that I'm responsible, that I know how to take care of myself. And she thought if the Nazis chase around and look for us, they'd want to be all caught. She said, you go that way. And they were going that way. The act of a child separating from her mother has to be very, very dramatic, very traumatic. And the question I think for Esther was how to represent it. And the way in which Esther has brilliantly stitched the meadow into the body, I would call the immersion in the meadow. And the field itself seems to stretch out into infinity and stretch out into a massive hiding place. Her mother keeps giving her permission to survive. You go that way. Her mother has told her. And so it holds what comes later. My mother did five pictures describing the events of October 15, 1942. It was clearly the center of her body of work and clearly a central memory. This is my family on the morning of October 15, 1942. We were ordered by the Gestapo to leave our homes by 10 a.m. to join all the other Jews on the road to Krashnik Railroad Station. And then to their death. They find you after 10 o'clock on your property. You shot to death. I screamed all night. I cried. I am not going to Krashnik. My father became mute. He couldn't talk. My mother was trying to calm us down. So I begged my mother. I said, Mama, Dad, I said, you have so many friends, farmers, friends. Can't you think of anybody that I could go to? Mama said, Havish. You know somebody? So my father said, Feshe Stefan and Don Brova. I called a Stefan. That's all I need. I'm going to Stefan. So the little one, the youngest one, Leica, who I actually brought up, started crying. Esther, name me. Take me, Esther. It's still ringing in my ears. Take me. And actually my mother pulled her back. She said, you're too little. You have to be able to work on a farm. So Mama says, Mani, go with Esther. We left our house for good and walked down the road. Model sat in the front wagon holding the Torah. My parents went to join him while my brother helped my little sister settle into the wagon. Suddenly, Model's daughter-in-law stood up and cried to my mother. We will never come back. We will all perish. It was horrible. We all clinked and my mother says, Gates, Kindes, Efshavati, Blavne, go. Maybe you will live. She and her sister Mani are already out of the picture and what she's recalling in the foreground are her parents and the rest of her family getting into the wagons. When she did this picture, she was imagining what it must have been like for her mother to say goodbye, to let her children go because she could no longer protect them. And that was so emotional. The wagons left for Krashnikorei Road Station and we never saw our family again. It was the beginning of the end, the somber march of the Rakhiv Jews to their death. She includes at the very center this line of humanity on its way to the train station in Krashnik and it could be the Jews from all over Europe. The skies, from morning to night, they were black, Larry. I mean black and black clouds. It was horrible. The way we were crying, the sky was filled with blackness and the crows. They were flying like vultures all over us. There's no way that one image can fully capture and fully express what the nature of that experience was. And so to return to it over and over again is to indicate how enormous it was in her life and in her memory. I think that by stitching this, she was giving herself some emotional space, some emotional distance to relive it again but in a way in which she could she could confront it safely. You can tell the whole story in five or ten minutes but it could take her days, weeks, even months to tell the story by stitching it a stitch at a time. It's almost a metaphor for any kind of remembering that you pull a thread out and you put it in and you pull it out and you put it in. Every time she returns to it, she's saying I know this moment. I remember this moment and I remember the people. My sister and I arrived in the village of Dombrova and went to the house of Stefan, our father's friend. So we found Stefan. I said, we are her stories. Please help us. We took ourselves on him and we broke down. I felt his hands when I ran both of us. He squeezed us and he said, shh, and he closed the door. I'll help you. And he put us up at the attic. Big torrential rains came Friday night. It was staring us apart just to think of what they're doing there out in the field by the railroad. Sunday morning, he called us down. When we came down, I saw the baskets by the door already. And he said, dear children, the whole Mnishek knows you are here and if the joiners will come, they'll kill you, they'll burn my farm and kill my family. After two days, he sent us out into the rain with no place to go but the forest. I said, we cannot stay here in the woods, they're going to be suspected of Jewish right away. My mother realizes that for them to survive, they cannot be Hersh's daughters anymore. And so she comes up with a new identity for herself and for Mania, Polish Catholic farm girls. I tell her, here what we're going to do. Her name is Maria, I'm Josephine. They had to pretend that they could not understand German because Yiddish, their native tongue was a German derivative. After they left Stefan's house, they went back to Mnishek, to their home village to see what had happened. They went to their next-door neighbor, Zambina. She said, go to hell, don't ever come back here. The Germans, the Nazis are looking for Jews every day. And when she said that, there was no other farm I would go to. It was so dark. We had to hold on by hand not to get lost. We head out into the fields. We stumbled into this pile of debris. And I said, this is where we're going to dug in. Pushed herself in, she went through because who could sleep? I was cold. Sometimes I was angry, I was telling her, look, wherever we spend the night, we don't spend the day. What's going to be with us? Well, she said, don't worry, we're going to survive. God will help. We stopped blaming each other. She didn't blame me anymore, we were in it. That's it. And they came to the village of Grabovka. She was working for this elderly man whose wife was in firm and really needed a lot of help on his farm. He had beehives, honeybees. And there was an empty lot. And I said to him, can I dig up and plant vegetables like chaff and strawberries and dill and parsley and all that. He said, do whatever you want. It's all yours. So I was the boss. There's no question that she felt protected by nature. That nature was a place that could hide her. It's a place that could feed her. And the beauty of it is something she never lost. While I was tending the garden I had planted, two Nazi soldiers appeared and began to talk to me. I couldn't let them know that I understood them. So I just shook my head as they spoke. Jadik, the old farmer, came to stand watch nearby. But the honeybees rescued me first, swarming around the soldiers. Why aren't they stinging you, the soldier asked Jadik as they ran out of the garden? I think she was kind of tickled by the fact that this tiny little creature could do what nobody else could do, which was to drive off the Germans. And sometimes I used to work in the fields, even by the moon. I cried. Say I was alone and I was thinking of them. And I see the abundance that we eat here. And I always thought, what are they eating? Where are they? And I even taught Mane that we had to learn and we did train ourselves not to get emotional, not to come to it. We told each other, we cry inside. July 1944. At sundown, Russian infantry marched into the village of Grabovka. The neighbors and I rushed to the fence to look at the soldiers. Finally, freedom had come for Manya and me. I left Grabovka and returned to Mnisik. None of my family was there. There were no Jews that had come back. There were no survivors. But one of the neighbors thought that perhaps the Jews might have been taken to Maidanik, a concentration camp, not terribly far from where they lived. So my mother decided to go to Maidanik. This was the first time where she saw with her own eyes what had actually happened to the Jews during the war. I went to Maidanik to search for signs of them. I looked through the piles of worn shoes, but they all looked the same. She shows horrendous detail, things that you really don't want to know. The cabbages that are in a field that's built on the ashes of the Jews. The crematoria, the shoes, thousands of pairs of shoes. It became expressed in zillions of little stitches, but I think her need was every single bit of this has to be confronted with hand turn away from it. After seeing the guest chambers and the crematorium, I joined the Polish and Russian army station there and soon left for Germany. She was with an army. She wasn't just a girl hiding with her sister. She was now part of the victors. After the war ended, my mother went back to Poland to get Mania and the two of them made their way to a DP camp, a displaced persons camp, in the American zone in Germany. And there, my mother met my father, who was also a survivor from Poland. My aunt met her husband, likewise a survivor, and they each got married in the camp. Everybody was looking to start a new life. My aunt and uncle emigrated to Palestine, Israel, and my father had relatives in New York, so they decided to emigrate to the United States. They stopped in Belgium when I was born there. June 10, 1949. We arrive in New York. The sky is wide open. There are white birds, seagulls flying in the sky. Max's cousin Clara came aboard the ship to greet us. As our daughter Bernice slept in her father's arms, Clara said to her, my dear child, this will be your America. Esther has left us an extraordinary account of her personal experience, transformed by her exceptional artistry. It is a way for a new generation to begin to explore these terrible events. They are very different from the way in which the Holocaust is generally taught. Genocide has not stopped, so her message is as fresh and as important as ever. People still starve or people are still murdered or children are turned into killing soldiers and there's a stillness in the world about it. But it's my hope that passing on witnessing of the Holocaust helps put light on all atrocities. She wanted to record her memories of her family. She was never really interested in doing this as an artist. She was doing this simply to record. It was documentary to her. To us, it was art. So here we all are together. I'm so glad that Bernice and Helene are with us today. I find this film as moving the second time as it was the first and the third as it was the second and so on. And I thank you and your family for bringing this to the world. I'd like to read your bios just to be sort of formal about it and introduce you so you can then come and speak to everybody. Bernice Steinhardt is the president of Art and Remembrance, a non-profit arts and educational organization which she and her sister Helene McQuade founded to honor the legacy of their mother, Esther Nezenthal-Crinets. Recognizing the power of their mother's art to change hearts and minds, they created art and remembrance as a means to share their work and to inspire others to share their experiences as victims of war, oppression, and injustice. Bernice is the co-author with her mother, posthumously, of Memories of Survival and the executive producer of the award-winning film that we have just seen through the eye of the needle of the art of Esther Nezenthal-Crinets. Until her retirement from federal service, Bernice served as a senior executive with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, Congress's investigative and analytic arm. She continues to work as a consultant to various government agencies in the U.S. and abroad. And Helene McQuade, the younger of Esther's two daughters, was born in Brooklyn, New York, where her parents emigrated after World War II, encouraged by her mother to draw, paint, and play the flute as a child. Helene developed a lasting love for art and music, a graduate of the City College of New York with a bachelor's degree in art history. Her early career was in the arts and publishing. During the 1970s and 80s, she was assistant to the artist Dan Flavin. Now residing with her husband and son in the Hudson Valley of New York, Helene is a development officer for the Not-For-Profit Foundation for Vassar Brothers Medical Center in Poughkeepsie. Valuing the importance of community service, Helene has volunteered as a member of the Pine Plains School District Board of Education, the Pine Plains Zoning Commission, and the Pine Plains Free Library. Please join me in welcoming Bernice and Helene. I want to thank everyone for coming. It is, as you can see, a real effort of the heart. These works are so personal to us, to our family. I wanted also to mention we were going, Helene and I were just going to share with you a few images of works that you may not have seen in the film. But it is such a joy to be back in Brooklyn, where I wasn't born, but where Helene and I both grew up. And so to be here at the Brooklyn Museum, which I visited countless times as part of school groups and just for the sheer pleasure of it, is really so meaningful. And it's also especially meaningful, I think, to be here after having just returned from Poland, where I had a similar program in towns and villages very close to where my mother lived. And so to be able to share her art and her story in places like Krasnick and Gosceradov and Lublin, and to be with the people who were the children and grandchildren and sometimes great-grandchildren of the people who were her neighbors and sometimes her friends in Poland, that was just a really remarkable experience. And to have them, I think, appreciated in a way different from audiences here. So let me begin by showing you one of the images, as I said, that was not in the film. I think this is the image that's most poignant of all to me. This was the story behind this, is that after the Russians had driven the Germans out of Poland and Esther returned to her village of Nysiek, she was looking for some signs of her family, and she went to the family home, which was now occupied by a Polish family. And she talks in the caption here about standing by the kitchen window and closing her eyes and feeling the breeze and remembering the time that she brought her brother. Her brother had gotten into trouble with their mother for something that boys do or did. And so he was hiding from their mother. And so she had sneaked out to him with a bowl of borscht. And here she is looking up at him, admiring him. And this was the memory that she had after everyone was gone. And so this memory of a memory is heartbreaking and beautiful at the same time. And it really describes so much about the love that she had for the family that she lost. So this is now in October 1939, one month after the Germans invaded her village, occupied her village. And immediately they conscripted all the young boys and girls in the village and set them to work digging tank trenches. And she explains in the caption that when her father saw the direction in which this trench was going, he predicted that the Germans would eventually go to war against Russia because the trenches were heading eastward in that direction. But she used this picture as an opportunity to memorialize the people, the young people, including her brother, who were working on this trench, none of whom survived. So she listed their names at the bottom of the, just below the caption of the picture. One of the things that I wanted to point out in this was the way in which my mother selected her fabric. She was always looking for fabric that, patterns that would, she could use somehow as part of the landscape of her pictures. And here she found this fabric that resembled Doug Earth, that kind of modeled earth and white. And then she stitched in that fabric, she stitched finally these circles around the base of the trench to resemble the rocks that would have been dug up there. So she was always thinking about how to depict elements that weren't so readily depicted. This was early in the occupation. I think it's the summer of 1940. Our mother had a very terrible toothache and she knew that the Nazis had a dentist in the medical camp near the village and she decided she had to go to the dentist for help, but she knew that if he knew she was Jewish, he wouldn't help her. So she pretended not to be able to speak because she didn't want to give herself away. She brought a Polish friend with her who she taught to say in German, my sister has a toothache, knowing that it would sound authentically stilted by a Polish speaking person. And she just held her mouth, didn't speak and so the dentist pulled the tooth and then gave her a bar of chocolate afterwards. And so she hadn't told anybody in her family that she was going to do this, but she did tell her mother when she got back home and her mother was shocked at the audacity of her daughter, her young daughter. She was 13 years old at the time. And we always talk about this as very foretelling of the way in which she learned how to hide in plain sight when she was separated from her family. Well, she didn't. She would say that her mother was shocked that she had had the nerve to go to the dentist to make up this whole story and go to the dentist. But when she told the story, when my mother would tell us the story, she was shocked that she had had the nerve to do it. But she was desperate and her desperation led her to some very creative acts. So this is now in July 1942, just a couple of months before the deportation. And you remember in the film that labor camp of Yanishev that my mother describes. So at this time, the German officers sent word that her brother was to report to that camp. And when her mother heard this, she was, she just became frantic because she knew that her son would never come back if he went to that camp. So she begged her husband, my mother's father, to go in his place. And her father said, no, neither one of us is going to go. And he took her brother and they went into the pine forest and they spent the summer in there tapping the pine trees for the pintar which they sold to Polish farmers for turpentine, I think. And one of the things that I think is just kind of brilliant that I particularly love about this picture is the pine cones, rather, which she crocheted and then added some stuffing too. So it really has enormous texture. But in terms of the subject of this picture, I was so impressed by how my grandfather, my mother's father, how he also was thinking that he was not going to follow orders, that he had another solution that he would defy authority by going off into the forest with his son. And I have to think that he was, in a sense, a role model for what my mother was later to do. But, of course, by the time of the deportation orders, just a couple of months later, he was broken and he just didn't have the spirit to defy authority anymore. This is Brooklyn. And this is where I make my first appearance in pink and Bernice is standing next to me in blue. And we lived in a house that had a small backyard and there was a neglected cherry tree back there, a sour cherry tree. And our mother, who in addition to her many skills with needle and thread, was an incredible cook. And there are people here who can attest to this. Yes. In fact, one of her stories about being with the Russian, this Polish detachment of the Russian army is she was with Marshal Zhukov, who was the supreme commander of the Russian army, leading his troops to Berlin. And she talked about making blintzes for Marshal Zhukov and how much he liked them. So she saw that cherry tree and she thought of all the things that she could make, including blintzes. And so, of course, she went up to the top of the cherry tree and she depicts herself here lowering a bucket. She's sort of hidden by the leaves and branches. And she's lowering a bucket of cherries down to us and we would empty it out into bowls and then let her pull the bucket back up. And there's a young neighbor, a boy that we were friends with on the other side of the fence and calling out to Bernice saying, who is that up in the cherry tree? And we were so incredibly proud that we could say it was our mother. She was up there. And the story that she tells here in the caption is that when she was a little girl in Poland, they dreamed of going to America and she said to her grandmother, her grandmother said to her that when you go to America, money grows on trees. And so she says in the caption here that every time she was in that cherry tree, she thought of those words from her grandmother. And what I love about this one is she, our mother, for all that she had endured as you saw in the film, she had such devotion to her family and that gave her great happiness in her life here after the war. And so it was important to her to share that as part of her whole story. And it's a treasure to have this one. And the last two pictures that I want to share with you were in fact among the last two pictures that she did. And as Helene was saying, so much of what she created in her pictures brought that love of family. And here is the picture that she did of my father, a portrait of my father, who died in 1998. And right after he died, she took all his old ties and she cut them up and created this kind of patchwork background and then placed on top of that a portrait of him as he looked when we came to the United States. And she made three of these pictures. One she gave to Helene, one for me, and one for my father's sister who is still living in Israel. And I think after she did this picture, it just gave her the idea of doing a series of family portraits to remember as she had with the family she lost to remember the family she created. The only one that she ever finished was this one of her first grandchild, my daughter, Rachel. And she remembered Rachel in this picture when she was about three years old, two and a half years old, standing at the base of this tree and looking up at the tree with this expression that my mother says in the caption, she never forgot. And in this picture, she actually is speaking to my daughter. She's addressing her. My dear mommy, Shayna, she calls her my sweet little girl. And at the end she describes this time when she watched her looking up into the tree and the expression on her face and then in the last sentence she says, Grandma loves you so much. And I think that's the first time I've been able to say this without being overcome myself because it is my mother's voice and I hear her voice so clearly. But it's because she wanted to remember her family that she created all of these pictures, the ones of the family that she lost, so that she could pass them on to the family that she had created. And in that spirit, after our mother died, Helene and I decided to create Art and Remembrance, our non-profit organization, as a way to share our mother's legacy to us. As I said in the film, she only intended this really for me and Helene and our children. But when we saw what she was producing, it was clear it was a work of art that needed to be out in the world. So through Art and Remembrance, we've created a traveling exhibit, actually two traveling exhibits, a book which we have for sale and we'll be happy to do a signing afterwards, a book and of course the film that you saw. And we always had in mind that we wanted our mother's work to serve as a way to inspire other people to tell their stories as well. And one of the projects that we've done is something we call Heart and Story, in which we show our film and then provide fabric and lots of notions, ornaments and so on, for people to tell their own stories. And we've worked, done this a number of times with groups of immigrant women, adults and teenagers who have their own experience of hardship and injustice and great challenges, life challenges. But I would encourage you to visit our website and again this is our website address because you can see this video there and learn more about the Heart and Story project. Finally, I just wanted to share a slide with you. I mentioned to you that we want to, in the film especially, we talk about how these horrific events are still with us and war and genocide, violence against women and others is still part of, very much a part of our lives. And through the work that we are doing through the exhibits and these workshops as well we want to focus the light on those other experiences. The Holocaust was a part of our past that we will never forget but we also must never forget that those events are still or similar events are still part of the world in which we live. And I wanted to just share with you finally a slide that I put together. The one on the left, it was on the front page of the New York Times only a few weeks ago. And this was the image of refugees fleeing Syrian refugees trying to get into, I think this was at the border of Croatia trying to find safety and refuge. And it just, I was so struck by the resemblance of that photograph that line of people to the one that my mother created. But of course in the picture that my mother did this was a line of people who were on their way to their deaths. This was a line of people who were hoping to find safety to flee from death. And yet of course what they found was in some instances hopefully in most instances refuge but of course many of them died along the way experienced terrible tragic events along the way and so we want to remember that what happened 70 years ago is still happening in our world today and that this story should resonate with us very deeply as a way to make sure that we aren't seeing another holocaust of the scale we saw 70 years ago. So with that on that sobering note we'll end it there and turn the program back to Elizabeth. Thank you. First I need to apologize to Bernice for having a senior or a young moment depending on how you want to look at it. It was too silly not to remember your name I apologize. And you know as I watched it's so, it is sobering. I think we all feel what we feel as we watch this. It's so painful. At the same time there is enormous life in your mother and the fact that she survived and the way in which she chose to share her story is filled with such incredible beauty and so it must have been kind of amazing for the two of you to grow up with that. So I know in the movie you talk about how your mom spoke about when she was cooking talked about some of her experiences. How did you come to learn of some of those experiences Helene? Our mother was always talking about her story and as you could see from the film she was a very animated and very wonderful storyteller and so all of the stories that she told of life before the war, life during the war I was just so impressed with the force of her will to accomplish. She took great pride in her stories, great pride in her family, great pride in all of their activities before the war and of her own survival. And she took great pride in accomplishment in everything that she did and so that was to me a very powerful, she was a very powerful role model for me and I just want to draw a connection. We're here in the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art. No one I think would call our mother a feminist but she embodied feminist ideals. Well, she was a feminist. She wasn't an activist. And so she just in living her life and in not defining herself by limitations but by what she could accomplish and taking pride in those accomplishments and we were her greatest accomplishments and she took great pride in us and I think she instilled that pride of accomplishment in us and I think it taught us a path for the way we lead our lives. That's wonderful. I was thinking about the dentist and the toothache. Do you think that that event gave information to her mother, to your grandmother about her intelligence and her widening, her ability to survive under these circumstances and that may have also led her to say to her, go that way. Did your mother ever discuss that with you at all? Well, my mother says in the interview in the film that her mother knew that she was responsible. Right. So I think that much she had so many responsibilities for the family as she was growing up but I think that kind of resourcefulness and that kind of cleverness was something that I agree with you that she probably saw in that incident that gave her the confidence to send her daughter, her daughters off with my mother leading the way. So other than in the film, she never discussed that particularly. Well, she would always talk about how responsible she was and how her mother gave her great responsibilities for her younger sibling. She was the oldest girl in the family. Her brother was older. Right, yeah. And so she had a lot of responsibilities. I don't know that her mother and my mother, I don't think she ever talked about other things that might have put her in a situation where she had to kind of think on her feet in that way. So perhaps as you say, that was a very compelling instance of what my mother, the stuff she was made of. What do you think, Helen? Well, I'm just thinking that in the stories that she told us, her grandmother and her mother were very strong models for her and they were very strong women. They were problem solvers. They were the backbone of the family and those were always at the heart of many of the stories that she told about them. So I don't think it would have come as any, even though her mother was shocked at the audacity of her going to the dentist. I don't think she would have been completely surprised at her ability to survive because it was in them. It was who they were. Well, we used to say, everybody used to tell my mother what a fabulous cook she was and she really was. But she would say, well, it's easy to be a good cook if you have food. She said, but my mother, she was a great cook because she could make something from nothing. So there must have been that characteristic in the family. We're going to open up for questions in a few minutes and I suspect that you may not be the only people here who are daughters or children of survivors, but you are children of both your parents survived the Holocaust. How do you think that affected each of you in terms of the way in which your parents brought you up and what you learned or what you felt about history and about the present time, not now, but as children? I don't know which of you would like to begin. Well, you know, I was always so proud of their survival. It was yet another point of pride and of their difference and I always felt that somehow that part of our family history really made us, it was, it made us different from the other children and families that we grew up with, but it was important then to make sure that we shared it. So I do know and I, at other presentations and meetings with people we have and people have told us, we know of Holocaust survivors who have had very difficult, there's nothing but difficult memories of the experience, but some who come out on the other side are very damaged by it. Our parents, if they were damaged somehow, it wasn't in their day-to-day life to be that way. They were positive about where they were. They were positive in the way they brought us up and so, but it was important to tell the story and the story was a way of preserving, as we've said today and Bernie says in the film, it was preserving their memory and by creating the pictures she was preserving a legacy of their memory, not just her oral telling. Do you have any other thoughts? Certainly I share a lot of the same feelings as Helene. I think in addition though, I so admired the way in which both my parents, in fact, defied the authorities, defied the dictated behaviors and also because I was a child of the 60s, the whole question authority of Timothy Leary really resonated with me, but that's something that I think first came from my parents that it was important to consider what we were being told to do and to consider the source and the rightness of it and if it was wrong to defy it. And I still think that that's one of their legacies to me. One of the major life lessons. It's interesting here, of course, we always talk about art and the place of art, the value of art, both for the artist and also for the viewer of the art and what it does. It's so interesting to see something that is so profoundly historical about something that we all know so much about and have seen so many images of. And yet clearly, this is an extraordinary work of art and you spoke about that earlier in terms of her, for her, I know she was using this, this was her way with each stitch to tell the story. How, did she ever discuss it with you in terms of art or art work? Was that a piece of the conversation at all? Interesting question. I think she came to appreciate the fact that other people, when they saw her work, people who didn't know her, who weren't related to her or didn't know her history, that they could appreciate it. And I think it came as something of a surprise to her. I think she really appreciated it and felt very reaffirmed in her, very validated in her desire to keep telling the story and keep depicting the story in this way. But it did come, I think, as something of a surprise to her as appreciated by people who didn't know her. You know, I don't know if anybody remembers that the new school had an exhibition going back now. It must be at least 15, maybe 20 years of photographs of Parisian children and their families when they were taken from Paris and sent down to, I'm trying to think which cap they were sent to. There was one particular cap when they were rounding up children in Paris and taking the kids out of their schools in Paris. And those photographs of children with their families, photographs of passport photographs, school photographs were such a different approach to looking at victims of the Holocaust because we have been so, I don't want to say I'm a part of it, but the images that we have seen from our childhood on are already of people who have been in the camps and who are already looking so dehumanized. And to see photographs of people who are us. One of the things that I notice about your mom's fabulous work is that you are seeing life. You are seeing the fields, you are seeing the flowers, you are seeing the beauty. And that is what is so alive in her. And I have often said that one of the reasons why I think the images are so powerful is because you are drawn into them by their beauty, they are colorful, they are full of life. And it is not until you get close to them and start reading the story that you understand the fullness of what it is that you are seeing but by that point you are there. And so you don't put up those kinds of defenses to protect yourself from those black and white images of concentration camp prisoners. You see life as it was. To me, I think that image of what we call heaven and hell, of the Yanishev labor camp, where my mother and her sister are on one side and the labor camp is on the other, that captures, it summarizes in a way what the experience of war is, that life goes on and it is side by side with that brutality and terror that war brings. I would like to open the floor up for questions for Bernice or Helene. I think the most striking thing about the story of your family is the love that transferred from generation to generation. Having grown up in Brooklyn, I had many friends whose parents were Holocaust survivors. Usually within the family was such a bitterness that it was held on to and passed on to the next generations that when the sixties came around, it wasn't freedom-loving, seeking, being drawn towards that. It was kind of defiance against the bitterness of their families and needing to get away and create a whole other world. So knowing Helene and knowing the family and your son, it just, I'm really struck by the way love is transferred. Now, it's transferred to John Henry. Thank you. I think that's the, that that love is the predominant feeling that my mother put into her work and certainly it's feeling that infuses all of these pieces. But that's the feeling. It's the feeling of love and I think it makes it particularly moving. You mentioned in the film about Anne Frank and you see, I see a photograph of you writing and so on and so forth. What role did Anne Frank and the diary of Anne Frank, if any, play in your lives or in the conversations with your mother and father? Well, my mother used to write. She actually started. She would tell us stories and I don't remember a time when I didn't know her stories but so she was always telling her stories but she would also have all these little school, you know, the black and white composition books that she would write in and she would write in Yiddish and sort of a broken English but she never felt really comfortable with writing so she wanted me to. And then I read the diary of Anne Frank and I thought, oh, that's how it could be told but I was wrong. I wrote a page, I think, and abandoned it because it just was so much less interesting than my mother's story, as she would tell them and also because I realized how all the details that would make it an interesting story, I didn't have them. When you have lived through that. Yeah, please introduce yourself. I saw this telling on the director of the film and I felt how it visualized and the artwork was absolutely stupendous and I think it had a sense of heart and story as a way of allowing other people to really express themselves and we do something very similar and parallel to that and there are less than a few problems throughout New York with the public schools but I'm always curious to know, you know all of this, what kind of stories your mother might have also told about the neighbors and your foals and the bystanders and does that ever come to light or was it ever just so painful because I've actually worn back to some of these, my whole family was with the waltz and I've just worn back to some of the foals who are contemporaries of mine, probably of mine and say, well, your parents happened to have been in the city that was the largest point of departure for Jews in Poland, what were they thinking and it's really hard to get to that. Great question. Well, especially for me having just been in Poland and been to places that were a few kilometers from my mother's village, I mean, we went to my mother's village and so these were literally the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of my mother's neighbors and friends. I think it's just very complicated. You know, it's... My mother, there were people who saved her, Poles, the village that Grabovka, that eventually they found refuge in. There were people who stood by and watched as Jews were beaten, I mean, even before the deportation. And then there were Poles who very actively collaborated with the Germans and were able to vent their anti-Semitism on the people in the village. So it was that full spectrum of humanity. And so today, I think when being in those places, the people there, or at least the people that I met who came to see the film and talk and meet me, they were people who had lost a piece of their history. When the Jews were deported, a big part of the life of their towns died. And now, a couple of generations later, they realized that there's a big hole in their history and they were so interested to have it filled in. They wanted to know what it was like. And in fact, when I was in this one town, Kosceradov, which is literally just, you could walk as my mother did from her village to the next, I did a program in the library there and the director of the library asked if I would... They have been collecting histories of their town. This is a project that their high school students are doing. And she asked if I could write something based on my mother's memories of Jewish life there because there is no one around who knows that history. So for them, this is a different kind of experience. Yes. You mentioned something about your mother's pictures. They were so bright, they were colorful, they were beautiful to see, and you had to really get them close, really what they depicted was the horror of it. You know the artist, Amy Cutler, she does these very interesting things and they're very illustrative and they're very interesting things but you really have to come see the things which are very dark. And it's just when you said that just now, it just struck me that there were some similarities and I wonder if Amy... I would love for her to. Thank you for that. Yes. I was struck when you were talking during the slideshow about... I think you mentioned that your mom went back to her old house and there was a Polish family living there and as an American it really struck me that you described it that way, that if you're born in America, you're American and that was there a distinction between Jewish families and Polish families? How long had your family lived in Poland? Did they consider themselves Polish? They were Polish Jews and there was that distinction and Poles didn't call themselves or weren't referred to by our mother anyway as Polish Catholics but we understood that when she talked about Poles they were different from the Polish Jews. So the Jews really... that was an important part of who they were, of their identity. Well, it's interesting. I think even for us we identify with Oskar Nazik or Sofarnak that we say, well, we're Polish Jews or Russian Jews. I mean, there is, you know, sort of going back to our own descendants and where our parents, grandparents or great-grandparents came from. There's that, but it's interesting that within the town there was that. When you were in Poland, Debbie, did you... Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you had been there. Yeah, Budapest in Poland. Well, how was that there then? In Budapest in terms of... Now, the anti-Semitism now... But what's wrong with you? The young Jews, a lot of them from the East, some of the center of Eastern Europe, are very optimistic in fighting hard to reintroduce the Jewish tradition. The government's never been like me. In Hungary. But it's palpable, I mean, it's certainly palpable. And how did you find that in Poland? It's a real contrast in Poland. You know, interestingly, today, Poland may be the least anti-Semitic country in Europe. Well, that also has a few issues. Right. Well, that is true. But there is a... You know, and it may be the same kind of nostalgia that we felt for Native Americans once we kind of decimated that population, but now that there are so hardly any Jews left in Poland, there's a real interest, a very strong interest, in Jewish culture. Jewish music is really popular. It's very trendy to be Polish and have a Jewish friend or Jewish friends. They have an annual Jewish culture festival in Kraków, which brings in thousands of people from around the world, most of them, you know, people come from the States and from Israel, but most of them come from Poland. They're Poles. And just to respond to your point, for centuries, you know, Poland invited Jews to come after the expulsion from Spain. So Jews were welcome in Poland, but there were certain places where Jews could live or would live, and so there was always a distinction between Jews and Gentiles, Jews and Poles. And it was very, very well understood. Do you find that in Poland that... I mean, like when I was in Berlin, you know, it is so over the top in a good way, you know, that they're guilt and they're by every monument, by everything that a Jewish from the Holocaust was in there, by everything. Is Poland in any way apologetic? No, actually, they feel like they were victims themselves, and they are very defensive about... Well, many of them are very defensive about just the term Polish camps, because they, to them, they're German camps that were in Poland, but to call them Polish camps really causes them to bristle. I wonder if that's true in Austria, too, because that was a whole other... You know, it may be different country by country, depending on how populations responded to... And Poland had the largest population of Jews in Poland, in Europe, rather, and so it was... But, of course, Poles were victims, were victims of the Germans as well. And interestingly, when you go to... I don't know if any of you have been to any of the concentration camps in Poland. Well, Auschwitz and Majdanek are the ones that I've been to, and they feature very prominently photographs in the museums. They're now photographs of Poles who were imprisoned and perished there. Yeah, well, certainly Gypsy's homosexuals. I mean, we know that there are layers and layers of people. Are there other questions before we go to purchasing, signing? I just want to take this opportunity to recognize a few people here, and I really appreciate their being here. And the three women who were both inspired by, I would say, my mother's work and who were, in turn, inspiring to us. And one is Anne Rosenthal, who is an artist and an art teacher at Hunter College Elementary School, who does storycloths with her students, and they do brilliant work because Anne is a brilliant teacher. And the other two are Peggy Hartwell and Rachel Cohen. Peggy is an African-American story quilt. Put your hands up. Thank you. And she has been doing this amazing project called The Quilted Conscience with another colleague who unfortunately couldn't be here today. And Peggy, you're part of the, or one of the co-founders of the Women of Color quilters. And then she's with Rachel Cohen, who is a psychotherapist now living in, or near Geneva. You're living in New York? Well, we really need to catch up. It's just a few weeks. Well, for the moment in New York, but who was inspired in part by my mother's work and became a therapist working in refugee camps and with women in particular, I guess, and families who fled violence in the Congo and in South America elsewhere who's doing great work with them. So as I said, they were inspired and inspiring at the same time. Well, there's so many layers. Concurrently, we had concentration camps here, internment camps that Japanese-Americans were brought into. And currently, as we all know with mass incarceration, we have really concentration camps going on in this country that really have to be focused on and deserve our attention at this time. We do have, just as a little advertisement, states of denial, the illegal incarceration of women, children, and people of color. And we do six programs a year. We've done our full programming. And in the spring, March 13, Brian Stevenson is coming with Ray Hinton. Brian wrote Just Mercy. And then we have two other programs, which are still to be announced, but women from Black Lives Matter. And so there's a lot going on around that because the work is ongoing. Thank you for this. I'm so glad to have met you. And thank you for being here today. Bernice and Helene will be in the back if you're interested in purchasing a book. I'm sure they'd be happy to sign it for you.