 Okay, we're ready to start the program. So I will start by first introducing myself. So good evening everyone. I'm not sure I can repeat that, but good evening. I'm Romero Salazar. I'm the Director of the San Antonio Public Library System. So on behalf of the Library Board of Trustees and all of our employees, I want to extend to you a very warm welcome to the Central Library and to this program. Tonight we're honored to have a very special guest speaker, Dr. Edward B. Westerman. He's here to help us conclude the sixth annual the Holocaust and Learn and Remember program. We look forward to his presentation because his talk will help put into perspective this year's theme of art and survival. We are also joined by our partners from the Holocaust Memorial Museum of San Antonio, represented by museum director, Ellen Alertes. She will be making remarks shortly after I conclude my remarks. Of course, I would like to thank and acknowledge my friend and co-chair. Where's Howie? Actually, the story is Howie and I and sorry, Howie, if you were going to tell that story. But Howie and I, six years ago, we met at a breakfast meeting and together we came up with this idea of how could we collaborate or develop a program that would help the library because we have a large footprint in the community. We have 28 branches. How could we, through our programming efforts and through partnerships with the Holocaust Museum, how could we enlighten the community, educate the community about the Holocaust and what happened and how can we communicate that message of learning that if it happened, then it can happen today. And so we came up with this idea and we identified partners and I'm proud that he has stayed with the program and has stayed engaged, not only engaged, but has helped us grow the program. So I'm proud to call Howie my friend and I'm proud that he was part of the co-founding, co-creation of this very important program. So thank you, Howie, and Howie will be coming to the podium and making closing remarks, of course, at the end of the program. I would also, like any great program, and I think this is a very important program that the San Antonio Public Library offers to the community, again in partnership with the Holocaust Memorial Museum and others. It's an important program to offer, especially in these times where, from my perspective, there's still a lot of intolerance and hate and so we need to talk about the dangers of hate. So people work behind the scenes to make it happen. Howie and I take credit and we should take some of the credit but also there are people behind it. So I want to recognize the committee members to work behind it from the Library Foundation, Lacey Fisher, Christine Fernandez, Hailey Holmes from our staff, Candelaria Mendoza also from our staff and from the Memorial Holocaust Museum is Juana Rovacalva and of course Alan, who will be speaking shortly. We also had the support of the San Antonio Public Library Foundation and members of that foundation make generous donations to this program here in Iraq. And one of those individuals or couples rather is Stephen and Carmen Goldberg. I don't see them here but I wanted to thank him. There's also, I wanted to acknowledge that this program is being streamed live by Nowcast led by Charlotte Ann Lucas, who's over there, I guess, focusing the camera. So this is a way of sharing this program to the entire community. Many folks cannot come downtown. Alan and I were talking about how difficult right now it is to navigate because of the construction. So this is being streamed live and it will also be archived so those individuals that are interested in the program cannot see it right now, they can see it later. So I'm happy for Charlotte Ann and her team doing this for us. I don't see any members of the board at this time that I would like to recognize but again I want to extend a very warm welcome to all of you and at this time I would like to hold on just a minute to cover my notes. I'll invite Ellen, she can tell you more about the background and more about the program this year's theme. Ellen. Thank you. Again, I'm Ellen Olavides. I have the privilege of serving as the director of the Holocaust Memorial Museum of San Antonio. And before I begin my remarks I want to express my gratitude in having some tremendous guests with us this evening. Three members of our survivor community, Rose Williams, Anna Rado, and Suzanne Jolmes. Thank you so much for being here this evening. On January 27th, 1945 the Russians liberated the largest Nazi killing center, Auschwitz-Birkenau. As such, January 27th was designated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day by the United Nations. Today and at events throughout this month we've gathered together in partnership with others who believe the importance of remembering Holocaust history. Not only to honor the memory of those murdered but to derive lessons from that history such as the role of citizens, institutions, and governments in securing and protecting civil liberties of all citizens. Today and every day we can reflect and harness the history, the power of study, voice, action, and deeds so that we may mitigate and even eliminate the chance of anything like the Holocaust ever happening again. We honor and remember 73 years and four days after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau we once again pledge our emphatic devotion to education and to improving the human condition. Thank you for joining us this evening and for supporting us in our efforts. At this time, I would like to introduce Dr. Ed Westerman. We are so fortunate to have in our community this distinguished educator and researcher. He has a deep commitment to sensitizing people to Holocaust history and bringing forward important observations and conversations about human behavior. Dr. Westerman is a professor of history at Texas A&M San Antonio. He is the recipient of numerous research grants and fellowships. He has been a Fulbright Fellow, a German Academic Exchange Service Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. He is also the Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Holocaust Memorial Museum of San Antonio. And we are very proud to announce that May 29th through June 1st, he will be presenting at the Holocaust Museum in Guatemala City his research, the police and the Holocaust, the role of police forces and the genocides of Jews and Roma. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Ed Westerman. Thank you so much, Ellen, for those nice words. I would also like to say it's great to see Rose, Anna, and Susie here. They've been at our university on several occasions and they are powerful people with a powerful message and we are so delighted that you share that message with all of us in the community. I'd also like to say hello to some of my students. I guess the extra credit brought them in if not my lecturing style. I am not an art historian, but I have studied the Holocaust for almost 30 years now as a historian. So what I'd like to do tonight is talk about, from a historian's perspective, how we can use art as we think about the Holocaust and as we think about testimony in the Holocaust. And I start with a quote from Primo Levi, survivor of Auschwitz, most famous for his book, If This is Man, sometimes translated as survival in Auschwitz, and in another book, The Drowned and the Saved, a Levi asked a very important question. Reason art and poetry do not help to decipher the place from which they have been banished, talking about the camps and the killing centers. And the question, one of the questions we want to ask tonight is what can art tell us about the Holocaust and the events of the show up? And certainly in the academic community, there are those who have argued that the Holocaust is beyond representation. And the quote that I have from Dora Appel here is from a compendium on Holocaust studies where she discusses, in fact, the academic community look at art in his portrayal of the Holocaust. And as you see in the quote, she writes the Holocaust was generally regarded as indescribable, incomprehensible, and unrepresentable. This conviction corresponds to Adorno's after Auschwitz ethic of representation, which not only made aesthetic pleasure taboo, but also refused all positive or direct representation of disaster. And the quote at the top is actually from the German philosopher, Theodor Adorno, who said famously to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric. And that's been interpreted in many ways, that there can be no art after Auschwitz. It's also been interpreted as the idea that the enlightenment paradigm of progress that had pretty much shaped European history into the 20th century had been rejected by the fact, had been literally subsumed by the death camps themselves. And so the questions that I would ask as a historian are several as we look at art. Number one, can art be used as a medium for expressing the Holocaust? In what ways and what types of artistic depictions allow us to gain insights? The second question that I think is important as we look at tonight's presentation is what are the, in fact, the limits of artistic representation of atrocity and mass murder? What can be portrayed? What can't be portrayed in works of art? Certainly I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, but I didn't visit it and I didn't smell what Auschwitz smelled like for the survivors. I did not visit it with the hunger that they visited. I did not visit it with fear of a beating or with a broken arm or with bruises from having been beaten up. So as I walk through Auschwitz, there's much I can tell about the land. There's much I can see, but there's much I can never know because I didn't experience it. And so the question with art is how much, how can it potentially bridge some of those divides? And finally, as we talk about art in this sense, do the aesthetics of art minimize or conceal the reality of the Holocaust? And I think this is where, up to the 1980s, many artists and those art historians who looked at the Holocaust were concerned that aesthetics of art itself might in fact conceal the brutality, if you will, the reality of the Holocaust. And this last question gets to why I chose the artwork that I chose for my presentation tonight. And I write who owns artistic depictions of the Holocaust. And when I say owns, I mean, who is it that should be privileged? Who can be privileged to provide artistic depictions of the Shoah? And if I were to ask that question, I'm sure I might get some answers. Professional artists, some of you might say, Jewish survivors, certainly those who survived. Well, did they survive the camp? Did they survive? Did they experience the Holocaust in Europe? Did they have to flee? Is it Germans, for example, after the Holocaust? We talked about memorialization and that's an artistic expression. For me, the answer to this in my mind as a historian is I wanted to look at survivors who themselves created artworks and to try to decipher what it is they were trying to tell us. And so if we look at a piece of art, I think these are at least the questions that we need to think about in looking at any specific piece of art. Who is the artist? We've talked a little bit about the identity. When was the artwork created? In what time was it created? Before the events of the final solution was it created after the Holocaust, after the Shoah? Was it a decade after? Was it a year after? Does that matter, is a question we might ask. Where was the artwork created? Tonight, I'll show you artwork that was created in the Warsaw Ghetto. We'll also see artwork that was created by survivors shortly after leaving camps. And then we'll see artwork that was created many decades later, either in Israel or in the United States. What is depicted? And for the historian, this is an extremely important question because when I look at artwork, one of the things we have to remember about places like Auschwitz, we do have photographs. We have some photographs. We even have photographs of the selection ramp that SS men talk, right? But of many, of many things in Auschwitz, we don't have photographic evidence for it. So our next best, our next best source is the memories of those who experienced those events and then themselves tried to portray those events. And finally, why did the artist choose this subject, right? We try to understand why the artists themselves were involved. So these are some of the questions that I'd like to address tonight. And I'm going to start with an artist. She and her family were in the Warsaw Ghetto. And Gala Sexton was in the Warsaw Ghetto and perished as you see in 1943. In fact, she died in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising along with her daughter and along with her husband. However, because there were people in the Warsaw Ghetto who were creating archives not only of history, but of artistic artifacts, many of her drawings survived. And so as we interrogate this artwork, the first one you see at the left is her self-portrait that she created in 1942, almost a year before her passing. And luckily, we have a picture of Gala in this case as well. And what's fascinating is a beautiful young woman that we see there. But when we look at her expression, when we look at her portrait from 1942, we already can see, right, the artist in themselves looking and thinking about what it is that they're facing. We do not see the young happy artist in this case. We see a woman who obviously appears deeply troubled, and maybe somewhat angry. One of the major things that she drew and painted in the ghetto was children. And that's explained partly because she herself had a child, Margoliet. And we have actually testimony that was preserved in some of the Warsaw Ghetto archives. And one of the quotes that I've drawn here is, she writes, I ask not of praises, all I want is to preserve the memory of me and my talented daughter, Margoliet. The artist's desire, like the historian's desire, is to keep a record and to keep an artifact that proves what their existence. This was the existence and this was the reality. And if we look at the picture of the young woman, the young girl here, it's a classic picture that you would find in the ghetto. Last time when we had this event a couple weeks ago, we looked at footage from the Warsaw Ghetto. And in fact, some of that footage showed people like that young girl who were destitute, orphaned, standing on sidewalks, standing around, asking for food, begging for food, because they were literally starving to death. And another quote that I found interesting, and this gets to why did the artist create what the artist chose to create? I am possibly the only painter left from all the Jewish painters and generally from all the Jewish creators. There are no artists left. I think that the Jewish nation of the future shouldn't be composed only of craftsmen. The Jewish artist ought to be saved so that Jewish life can later be recreated by means of the paintbrush and the pen. So again, her rationale, right? The idea of creating these works is to create perhaps that transitional record of Jewish life, a Jewish life that's interrupted in the ghettos and the camps, but a Jewish life that will continue in the future. Roman Kramstijk was also in the Warsaw ghetto. And as you see, he dies in 1942. He perishes as a result of a gunshot in the ghetto. He's killed there. And if you look at the drawing on the left, a family portrait in the Warsaw ghetto that he does in 1942. So what we're seeing here, right, are representations of artwork created at that time and place. And they're intended to be evidence, right, to serve as evidence of those conditions. So as we look at the picture on the left, what are some of the things that we notice? Certainly, right? Certainly the clothing, right? If we look at the children, what immediately strikes you about the children? No issues. Okay, lack of clothing. Thin, right? You can tell these are children in distress, right? And he's trying to capture, right? He's trying to capture the reality of the everyday. But what we also see, right, is that he does portraits of fellow artists in the ghetto, right? And so one of the things that we learn by looking at art in this period is that the tradition of art and the tradition of music, I might add, that those traditions even continue under ghetto conditions, that there are those who try to keep those traditions alive. And I don't have a direct testimony from Roman Kramstich, but I do have a survivor's testimony talking about him in the ghetto. And Halina Rothau writes, Roman had always liked sitting in cafes, and so he did in the ghetto. With his artistic eyes, he observed smugglers gathering there, and the fruit of these observations was a series of drawings presenting smugglers. He was also interested in the types of Jewish poppers. He would draw whole groups of poppers, hugging to warm themselves up and dead bodies that were a common sight in the ghetto. He believed that preserving this was his mission, doing his best to keep record of what he saw. So as a historian, when I look at that quote, there are many things that I can see about the reality of the ghetto. Smuggling, in fact, in organizing was a lifeblood of the ghetto in some cases. The ability to bring in extra food to trade outside the ghetto, it was also extremely dangerous. Children were largely involved. Many are killed at the ghetto fence line as a result of trying to get in and get out of the ghetto. If you read the ghetto diaries, you can literally, every day, it's recorded those smugglers trying to get in and get out and who has killed his result of that. The Jewish poppers that we see on the left, in fact, this is a reflection of one of those ideas. The idea of cold, right? That's another thing that we can't really experience, because the ghetto was not heated. Electricity was rationed. For example, if we looked at sewage systems broke down, we're unavailable. So to get an insight into why people are bundled up the way they are, what it meant to be in that ghetto space. And I think the last line here is important as well, because we have an artist who is serving as a witness. His artwork is his witness to the events of the Holocaust. Just like we have survivors who tell their stories today, he did not survive. Moshe Reinecke was also in the Warsaw Ghetto. And as you notice, he dies in 1943. He actually dies in Maidanik, the killing center and concentration camp of Maidanik. He's actually a relatively famous Jewish artist, because he's very famous for his scenes of the shtetl, of Jewish life in Poland before the First World War. And so many of his works, he brings over 800 works with him when he goes in voluntarily into the Warsaw Ghetto. And he breaks up those 800 works, and he hides them literally throughout the ghetto. Only about 200 have survived, and most of those are his work prior to the Holocaust. But he also focuses on life in the ghetto. And I've given you, you can see the pictures, some of them may be a little bit more difficult to see, the watercolors here. But what are they called? Well, forced labor from 1939. As a historian, Germany invades Poland on 1 September 1939. There's the establishment then of the ghettos in Poland in this period. Forced labor is a key component of what the national socialists impose upon the ghetto populations, but also the camp populations. In the refugees picture here from 1939, again, what we see is a difficult maybe from further back, but we, if you look at those pictures, I think one of the things you see is the bend in the individuals. They're carrying a burden, and that burden might be the work itself. It's the psychological burden that has been imposed upon them. And then we also see, and this is, you'll see this in other works here that we look at, we'll also see children, right? Children, and one of the things that I think is really fascinating in looking at survivor artwork is the focus on including children in this artwork. And I think that has a deep psychological meaning. And one of the meanings is about the one and a half million Jewish children who perish in the Holocaust. But I think another part of the meaning is about the importance of children as a generation, right? As something that's going to, as people who are going to hopefully survive. David Olea passed away in 1985, and this is a very interesting individual because one piece of information that I can give you about Olea, which will put him into kind of a context, he was a member of the Zonda Commando. So he was one of those who was tasked when the trains arrived for selection with literally collecting the artifacts from those who were arriving, helping as they moved into the undressing rooms and then being part of the commando, the detachment that stood at the gas chambers and after the mass murder, the gassings were complete to take the bodies out of the gas chambers and take them to the crematoria and to burn the bodies. And so if we look at, if we look at some of his work, and obviously he's one of the very few survivors of the Zonda Commando, Philippe Muller is another name you might know. So this was what happened with the Zonda Commando is about every three to six months, they were themselves selected very secretly by the SS, very secretly for their own annihilation. And a new group were brought in and it was supposed to erase the evidence because these are the individuals that saw the inside, right? When I say we don't have pictures, and maybe it's a good thing, a gassing-staking place, we don't have pictures of crematoria operations. But we do have witnesses, right? And so if we look at this piece of artwork, this is actually a self-portrait and I have his picture there and it's the food of the dead for the living. And if you look at that portrait, which was actually painted much later after the war, what you see is you have the gas chambers in the back. We actually have crematoria in the back, the SS there. And we have O'Lear himself as a prisoner and you see bread, you see a fruit. And what that represents is those transports that had come into Auschwitz, that those people who had come there being told you're going to go to a working job, you're going to, this is the place you're going to be settled in. And so the Zonderkommando, they had the opportunity to literally take some of those, this was the advantage, if you will, of being in the Zonderkommando, to take some of those foodstuffs, right? And to use that. But again, what he chooses also to include in the lower left portion of that painting is a dog, right? And as we see in the back, right, we see again, right, his almost, his face, right, he's trying to portray the way he saw himself in that time and in that place. This is another one of his works. It was done very shortly after liberation in 1945. And it's called The Oven Room. This is the crematorium. So this is literally his memory of being part of those groups who burn those bodies, right? This is not a photograph, but this is a historical artifact, I would argue nonetheless. A work from 1949, my first dialogue, and that's an interesting question because what we see here is we see the groups of those who are being led to their death. And what a lot of people, when we think of Auschwitz, we think of the crematorium, the gas chambers. But by 1944, Auschwitz had so many, especially with the Hungarian Jewish transports coming, that they could no longer literally burn all the bodies in the crematorium. So they had ditches, and they created these ditches where they would create huge piers and they would burn literally, murder and burn those individuals in those ditches. A horrendous, if you read accounts, a horrendous place making Dante's Inferno literally come to reality. Here we have a drawing from 1947. And again, it's interesting to me because it's called Selection for Gas Chambers. And what we see here is we see the SS, right? Those who are responsible. We again see the crematorium, which figures in obviously his artistic work because it's the center part of where he works. And we see again women and children, those who are going to perish, right? And you get the idea, even a mother nursing her baby. So once again, absent photos of the Ram, right? We see, in fact, the reality, if you will, of the Holocaust. This is again a later work called Gassing in a very, again, a very difficult picture. But one I think that's important because one of the questions we ask is can art depict the Holocaust? And I say there are artists who, in fact, can depict the Holocaust in my mind because they saw it, they witnessed it, and they're able to transfer it to their work. Another picture by Olea here. Again, in the museum, one of the most powerful pictures that we have from my perspective, if you go to the JCC and to our museum, is there's a picture of an old woman from behind. And in each hand, she has toddlers who are walking with her in the museum. And for me, the power of that image is that woman and those children, because we don't see their faces, they can represent every woman and every child from the Holocaust. And as I talked about earlier, here again, the depiction of the artist is on the community, literally the innocent who are being led to their death. And he also gets to the nature of punishment. Many of the themes that we'll look at again revolve around the idea of punishment itself. And still he adds, if you look down at the lower left, the infant who probably would not have been in a punishment bunker, but is added to this picture because that is something he wants people to remember. Not only the reality of the punishment of those who survived, potentially in this case, but those who perished as well. I'm going to go forward because I've got several other issues and I know we may be getting closer on time. Fraterna himself was a survivor. It was in Theresienstadt, we talked about Therazin last time, and Auschwitz and survived the forced marches, the death march to Dachau. And he starts to paint afterwards. And this is a painting on the left, and if I were to just show you that painting, I'm not sure you would identify it at all with the Holocaust. It's the name on fire. And I wonder, I don't know, I tried to read a name in there, and I don't know if there's a Hebrew symbol in there, or if it just represents the loss. And again, go ahead. The name is God. It means God, so it is the name on fire. Thank you, Susie. You've got the experts here. It represents God. In Therna writing about why he went and looked at art, as early as 1943 while still in Theresienstadt, I decided that I wanted to become a painter. In 1945, after liberation, then still hospitalized, a friendly soul gave me watercolors, and I painted scenes remembering Auschwitz and other places. I quickly realized that part of me was still in the camps, and I changed the painting landscapes. Much later, looking at some of my landscapes, I noticed that there were walls and fences in many of them. It taught me that the memory of the Shoah was part of me, and that it would not go away, and that I would have to live with it. Now, in my class, I used two of Fred Turner's works. And if you look at these, and you don't know the context of the Holocaust, you might be puzzled as to what they represent, right? And again, from a technical sophistication point, these are not overly technically sophisticated, but if I give you the name, for example, Ramp to the Ovens, then again, what you'd probably immediately see, walking to the crematorium to the gas queues. And if you look in the background again, one of the iconic symbols that many survivors use in their artwork is of the crematorium staffs, right? And the smoke that represents those individuals who have been killed. Now, the second one, again, if I were just to put that on the context of it, this is a piece of art, what is it? You might not recognize it. It's called the Ovens. If you look at this one closely again, you'll see the gas chamber, and you'll see the crematorium represented here. But we also see people, individuals, who are represented as part of this. There are those we talk about, certainly in the case of young children who've undergone trauma. We often see the therapy of artwork being used by counselors for them to try to express trauma in terms of what they draw. And the reason I bring that up is because Fernand Van Horland actually used the same process himself. He was an illustrator, kind of a cartoon illustrator in Belgium before the war. He's part of the Belgian army that is defeated by the Nazis. And he himself goes underground, actually becomes part of an underground group. He's taken the Flossenburg, where he is in turn an excavator. These pictures are drawn within two weeks of his liberation. And the reason I bring that up is because he talked about that the only way he could get rid of the images that were in his head was to draw the images. And so he sits down over a course of two weeks, and he creates these images. This is known as the barracks. And you can see, again, the wooden barracks, the bunks themselves. Normal life in Flossenburg. And what was normal life like? It was the fear of beating from a cop or an SS man at any given time. The commando, these are the work detachments that are sent out. And in the background, we have an SS guard with his dog. But in the foreground, what we have are the capos, literally those fellow prisoners, normally either criminals who are in the camps or political prisoners who are in the camp, who get their position by enforcing work on those who are in the camp. Too much corpse as we see on the left. And by the end of the war, the camps had gotten so overcrowded through the death marches that literally the pictures you see, for example, of Buchenwald or Dachau, those bodies, it's because there's mass death going on. And the one on the right, the hangings, again, hangings as a form of punishment, our standard, especially during rural calls at many of the camps. Yehuda Bakon is still alive. He's an Israeli historian. And the reason I was drawn to this drawing, the drawing itself is in memory of the Czech transport to the gas chambers. And Bakon later writes, After the war, I dedicated my life to being an artist, at first to describe what I saw on a childish way. He was 13 when he got to the camps. My drawings were used in trials and books about the Holocaust. I thought I had to draw. I had to say what I had experienced in the hope that someone would learn from it. The picture on the left is him as a young boy. This is about three months after liberation. The picture on the right is of him as an older man. Can anybody tell me what the picture on the left is depicting? Okay, you might say what he envisioned for himself. This is actually, his father was part of it. He and his father came from the Rezin. His father was killed in 1944. And what's surprising about this is he draws this in 1945. But look at his own photograph. And that's his father that is being represented in the smoke. And to think, and when we think about right, when we think about reality, I can see him and his father, right? You can see the father and the son, right, in that picture, which is an amazing thing in my mind to think about. As far as Auschwitz itself, we also have documents done by political prisoners, not just Jewish prisoners. And there's an album. It's called the Auschwitz album of political prisoners. It's actually written in Ukrainian with English subtitles. And Ossinka in this case is the author. And he writes in the introduction, therefore the author of this first part of the album of political prisoner Auschwitz tried with some exceptions to settle the problem more from the humorous side than from the tragic one. Although such a settlement gives just a true picture of the tragedy of German concentration camps prisoners. The sketches of this life drawn in the form of cartoons by the bedfellows of the author may serve as a reward for those who survived this in front in the earth. So this is published in 1946. So these are drawings that were done by fellow Ukrainian prisoners in Auschwitz. And they are intended right after the liberation to show the reality. And in this case, we see the reality of a beating on the pommel or on the horse, right? The lashes that the SS inflicted on those prisoners for transgressions. And you can see in the background, it says elichkai, meaning honesty, and gohozankai, meaning obedience, right? The mottoes, for example, that you would see in the camp, like abitmachai, work will set you free. We see also in the depictions here an unfinished drawing on the left from this book that shows the gas chambers themselves at least through the eyes of a prisoner. And again here, you see the types of punishments literally being hung up with your arms drawn behind your back where it would dislocate your shoulder. And the abitmachai, the very cynical work, will set you free expression used by the Germans in the camps. We see the nature of prisoner punishment and humiliation that takes place. Again a picture of a beating. Again a picture now of a punishment of a prisoner who was trying to organize extra food and is made to do, literally with the pell that he has on his head, is made to do now these squats, right, until exhaustion. So as we're looking at this, right, as a historian as I'm looking at this, I know this is done shortly after liberation, but it also shows me what prisoners remember and what they wanted others to see from their experience. And the last artist that I'll finish with is Heim Goldberg. And he's also known as Shalom Goldberg, actually. And he was a member of the Polish military. And after he's taken POW, he's actually, his family is sent into the ghetto. And Mr. Goldberg decides that there is no survival in Poland. So he tries to talk to his family, his family to come with him to try to leave. And in 1939, it's still possible, although difficult, if you can make it to the Soviet zone. And so what he does is he leaves with his sister, a friend of his sister who becomes his wife and his wife's family. And they actually make it into the Soviet Union. They actually are able to survive in the Soviet Union during the war. And in 1946, he returns to Poland and eventually immigrates to the United States. But here in 1952, so now he's remembering back on the Warsaw Ghetto. And what you see is how we also know this is a remembrance back, is if you look at the ghetto, one of the things you'll see is the yellow stars that were required for Jews to wear in the ghetto to display. But what we see there also is this is a market scene. Which gets us to the idea we have a number of different items that are on display here. And what's taking place here is barter. Barter for food, barter for goods, barters to be able to stay alive for another day. Again, we also see in looking at the individuals, he is trying to again show those individuals as they are experiencing, as they are experiencing life in the way again, we even see the children. We can see not the definition, but the posture, right? If you will, that's displayed. And this is the last image that I have for this evening that I'll look at. Because he also later on, in talking about the Holocaust, looks at events that are iconic of the Holocaust. In Baviar, grandmother were redeemed in Ukraine, was an area, literally a ravine outside of Kiev. And in two days in September of 1941, over 33,000 Jews from the Kiev Jewish community, men, women and children are murdered in Baviar by SS and police. And over the course of the German occupation, up to 80,000 individuals will find their final resting place in Baviar. And when I look at Baviar's historian, I see it with somewhat different eyes, but I think the artist in this case, certainly gives me another perspective. So, we started off with a number of questions. And I guess it's up to you now to answer the questions that we've had. But I hope, if nothing else, that you've gained an insight into some of the art, and especially as I said, the art of survivors, which strikes me as particularly appropriate for thinking about depicting Meshowa. Thank you. Good evening and welcome to the sixth annual, The Holocaust Learning Remember. Dr. Westman, thank you so much for sharing that. It's an incredible perspective. I work in advertising and I brought somebody from my office and we'll be sharing this with our team because, you know, sometimes we don't think about the, what the art is actually depicting and how it's going to be interpreted and for how long people are going to view it and what they're going to take from it. So it makes us really think about the importance of both commemorating and also archiving memories through artwork. And it's a fascinating perspective on the Holocaust and it really added a tremendously important dynamic to now our sixth annual Holocaust Learning Remember because we hadn't really captured this side of the Holocaust and remembrance through art. So thank you very much for sharing. I'm completely fascinated. As Ramito mentioned, what started off as a breakfast conversation has now turned into a series of free city-wide educational events about the Holocaust over the last six years. We've had firsthand account and stories told by survivors. We've heard from liberators. We've seen movies. We've seen, we've had art exhibits and thousands of youngsters or parents and grandparents have been able to learn more about the Holocaust and about this history that, you know, we hope, as Ellen mentioned, we will never forget. You know, I'm inspired by what Anne Frank said. It's incredible that we don't have to wait a single moment to begin to repair the world. And I feel that the committee, the San Antonio Public Library Foundation, the Holocaust Memorial Museum San Antonio, the Public Library all are contributing to improving the world through education and definitely through remembering. So thank you all for participating tonight for going back in time and learning and remembering. We also want you not only to learn and remember, but also to think and to act. And you're all advocates of moving education forward to the next generation. So for those of you who brought your youngsters, I commend you for doing that. And we have a reception in the exhibit hall next door. You are all invited to stay and talk to Dr. Westerman, speak with Ellen, Ramiro, myself, anybody else who's involved. Thank you all very much. Before we leave, though, I would encourage you to go to the website learnandremember.org. We still have a few events for this year, for this year's Holocaust Learn and Remember, and I encourage you to go to them. They are all free and open to the public. Everybody is invited. And as long as we can continue to do it and have the generous support of our underwriters, they will always be free educational programs. So thank you again for coming out tonight. And Dr. Westerman, thank you again for sharing.