Alice Lok Cahana, Holocaust Survivor, Channeled her Experiences and Spirit through her Art

" None of us can hear six million voices at the same time. None of us can imagine the landscape of Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen and the many other concentration and death camps. None of us can describe the odor of Auschwitz or the pain of a parent whose child was torn away. No words are adequate for this task. The art cannot express it. And still, all of us who survived took a silent oath, made a promise to tell a glimpse of the story.

Not to let the world forget. My art and my writing are my Kaddish for those who did not survive."   ALICE LOK CAHANA

Alice Lok Cahana, Whirlwind, 54 × 62 inches, acrylic and watercolor on canvas, ca 1980. Courtesy Cahana family archives #WomenArtusts, thanks to Peter Stebbins and the Lily and Earle M. Pilgrim Foundation. Peter has introduced me to so many forgotten and wonderful artists.

Alice Lok Cahana (1929-2017) was a Hungarian Jew from Sarvar, Hungary, who survived four different concentration camps in the last year of WWII, losing every member of her extended family except for her father and beloved older sister, Edith, who survived only to perish from illness immediately after liberation. She entered a hospital, and Alice never saw her again. Loss is an enduring pain that informed Alice's life and her art.  How could it not be?

Concert in Auschwitz, 1979. Cahana painted this amazing and well-known piece a year after she had decided to return to Hungary, only to discover that the once-vibrant Jewish community in which she was born and raised no longer existed. I remember that entry gate into Auschwitz, an indelible trip into evil. 

Alice was just a teenager, in the formative years of her life. Just think of all she suffered, all she saw, all she lost. Alice swore an oath to herself while in the camps, that if she survived she would become an artist and "draw rainbows out of the ashes" of her experience. That experience included the horrors,  starvation and death, and the unbearable struggle for survival, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Guben, and Bergen-Belsen camps. It is impossible to imagine.  

Her first artwork emerged at the Guben concentration camp. She remembers.

"At Guben, the Nazis challenged the children to decorate the barracks for Christmas. "Can you imagine what it was like?" Cahana said in an interview with art historian Barbara Rose. "There were no paper or pencils to make decorations; we practically had nothing except one broom to sweep the floor with. We were about 24 children in our barrack. I decided we should choreograph ourselves into a living candelabra and hold the pieces of the broom as a part of this sculpture. We won a prize - each of us a little can of snails."   https://cla.purdue.edu/Ressler/artists/cahanabio.

She was liberated from Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945. Her memories of that camp, documented in testimony preserved at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, DC, is heartbreaking.

"Bergen-Belsen was hell on earth. Nothing ever in literature could compare to anything what Bergen-Belsen was. When we arrived, the dead were not carried away any more, you stepped over them, you fell over them if you couldn't walk. There were agonizing...people begging for water. They were felling...falling into planks that they were not pulled together in the barracks. They were crying, they were begging. It was, it was hell. It was hell. Day and night. You couldn't escape the crying, you couldn't have escaped the praying, you couldn't escape the [cries of] "Mercy," the, it was a chant, the chant of the dead. It was hell."

The Cahana transcript at the Holocaust Museum also records one of the most harrowing tales any one could have, a horror survival story. At one point, Alice was selected for the gas chamber. Yes, "selected for the gas chamber." This was at Auschwitz. I shudder to even try to imagine it. Crowded into a small, dark, cold "shower" room with a group of naked, terrorized, horrified, traumatized women. Nothing but terror. Sheer terror. Moans of anquish. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting for the end. The women are dazed, but nothing happens. Nothing happens. The women are let out, into the light of day, and marched back to their barracks. The terror is indescribable. Saved, they later learn, because of a malfunction. A malfunction! A malfunction in a Nazi death "shower" saved Alice and the women she was with.  

The war was ending, Allied forces were approaching the camps, Nazis were fleeing. Things were falling apart. Things were being destroyed, evidence of evil. Things were malfunctioning. As Allied forces came closer, in shock at what they were seeing, witnesses to the death camps, Alice and her other inmates were evacuated to the Guben labor camp.  Alice, her sister, and another girl escaped during a forced march from the camp but were found and sent on to Bergen-Belsen, the hell on earth.

Alice's courage is almost beyond understanding. Here she was, a teenager defying Hitler's evil, with her sister Edith, trying to run away. And this after suffering the most haunting experiences any human can endure, the same teenager whose art project at the Guban concentration camp was a human menorah, a Jewish symbol of light and hope. 

That Alice Lok lived to tell her story is a miracle. It's a miracle she channeled with care, so that the world would never forget.  

Arrival, at Auschwitz

After the war, wounded emotionally, exhausted from work, hunger, fear, but determined to make a life, she lived in Sweden for a while, the home of Raoul Wallenberg, an ambasador who had saved many Jews on their way to the camps, including Lok Cahana's father. 

A few years later, in 1959, she emigrated to the US, where she settled in Houston, Texas, with her husband Moshe Cahana, a Rabbi she had met in Israel right after liberation, and their first-born son. 

Her years in  Houston were filled with family life and with art classes and painting. This is when her art studies, which had begun in Sarvar at her Jewish high school (Jews were not allowed in public schools), took off in earnest. At the University of Houston and at Rice University she was introduced to the art of Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland and the "color field painters," a dominant style at the time. She painted colorful American canvases, honing her skills and voice. 

In 1978 she decided to return to Hungary and visit her birthplace. That visit shifted the content and direction of her art.  Nothing remained of the Jewish community she had known. There were no memorials to the vast number of Jews who had once played such a dominate social and cultural role in Hungarian society, who had been dragged from their homes and sent to Nazi death camps. It was as if Jewish religion and culture had been erased. 

"The same railroad tracks that took me to Auschwitz took me back. It seemed like nothing had changed - the town was still mute and silent - no memorial, no remembrance, no one missed us or cared. It was one of the most shocking events I experienced after the Holocaust."  It's a shock that many Holocaust survivors experienced.* (See story of artist Edith Hoffman Birkin, another Holocaust survivor, below). 

Fascinating figures embedded in
this incredible painting, in the artist's collection.

After this traumatic visit, Cahana's artwork changed.  

"The lyrical abstractions she had made in Houston became the ground for a new kind of mark-making, employing collage, along with an abstract visual language, that could more directly express her memorial to the dead." Moreover, she created a series of works dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who handed out fake Swedish passports to Jews targeted for the death camps. These schutzpassen, some of which are pasted as collage elements in Raoul Wallenberg - Schutz Pass,  were passes to life. Wallenberg's daring efforts saved more than 20,000 people, including Cahana's father."   https://cla.purdue.edu/Ressler/artists/cahanabio.   

 

As she told art historian Barbara Rose in an interview for the catalog of her exhibit From Ashes to the Rainbow, "I started to paint only about the Holocaust as a tribute and memorial to those who did not return, and I am still not finished." 

She believed that her work had to be about 'the transcendence of the human spirit, the triumph of human spirituality over inhuman evil.' Her art was a record and a witness to persistance, survival, the power of the human spirit to survive the most unbearable horrors, the killing fields of the Holocaust. 

Alice Cahana painted until her death a few years ago, in 2017. I didn't know about her then, but I'm glad I've discovered her work, her art, her passion. There are many ways to remember. Cahana's art is one of them. We can never forget. 

"No Names." So sad, foreboding, entering the furnaces of death. In 2006, this piece was added to the Vatican Museum's Collection of Modern Religious Art, and since then is on permanent display at the museum in Rome. It was the Vatican Museum's first piece of art by a Holocaust survivor.

  

Cahana in front of a collage/painting that included
portraits of Holocaust victims, In Memorium. 

"In an effort to make certain that no one could explain her imagery as simply fantasies of an artistic imagination she used literal photographs and documents: factual evidence that could not be disputed. It was during this period that she created a series dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who handed out fake passports to Jews targeted for the death camps....Some of these faded passports were incorporated into the series as collage elements. Additional works include newspaper clippings, photographs, pages from her mother's prayer book, and  yellow stars. The "surface of her carefully structured compositions are subject to various processes: burned, scratched, stained with blood red pigment; the images are grafted, buried, partially eaten away." Wikipedia and www.RaoulWallenberg

 Remembering, a collage/painting including photographs.

Just as her "living candelabra" at Guben defied the Nazis by honoring a Jewish symbol, the Chanukka  menorah, her later artwork celebrated Judaism and those who perished in the Holocaust.  She transformed the horror of their deaths into a testament to their lives. 

Sabbath in Auschwitz 

 Lok Cahaha's work appears in multiple prestigious museum collections around the world including Yad Vashem, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Skirball Museum at Los Angeles: Hebrew Union College, and the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota. (Wikipedia)

Some sources:

https://www.en.wikipedia. org/Alice Lok Cahana

https://www.raoulwallenberg.net/news/holocaust-survivor-makes-art/

Baigell, Matthew, Jewish-American Artists and the Holocaust, Rutgers University Press, 1997.

https://cla.purdue.edu/academic/rueffschool/waaw/Ressler/artists/cahanabio.html About an exhibition of her work and a brief biography. Informative.

https://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/personal-history/media_oi.php?MediaId=1081&th=camps The US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Cahana transcript. Like other testimonies of survivors, Cahana's memories are tragic, beyond sadness, the stench of evil pervading, the horror staggering, sickening. And she was just a teenager. A child.

"Several days later we arrived to Bergen-Belsen. And Bergen-Belsen was hell on earth. Nothing ever in literature could compare to anything what Bergen-Belsen was. When we arrived, the dead were not carried away a'ny more, you stepped over them, you fell over them if you couldn't walk. There were agonizing...people begging for water. They were felling...falling into planks that they were not pulled together in the barracks. They were crying, they were begging. It was, it was hell. It was hell. Day and night. You couldn't escape the crying, you couldn't have escaped the praying, you couldn't escape the [cries of] "Mercy," the, it was a chant, the chant of the dead. It was hell."

The Museum notes: Alice was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, the year Hitler invaded Hungary. At one time she was selected for the gas chamber, but survived because of a malfunction. Imagine.  As Allied forces approached the camp, Alice and other inmates were evacuated to the Guben labor camp. Alice, her sister, and another girl escaped during a forced march from the camp but were found and sent on to Bergen-Belsen. Alice's sister was taken to a Red Cross hospital, but Alice never saw her again. 

https://fritzaschersociety.org/flight-or-fight-stories-of-artists-under-repression/ An interesting site.

Thirty years ago, I was introduced to the artwork of Fritz Ascher. I had never heard about him before and not many other people had at that time./The more I saw of his work, the more I realized that he was an extraordinaire artist, who was not alone, but suffered a fate that befell a rather large group of artists, whose careers were interrupted or destroyed by the Nazi terror regime.Many of these artist, like Fritz Ascher, never received the recognition and acknowledgement which they deserved, after 1945.The strength and artistic integrity of Fritz Ascher’s work, has driven me to try changing that./ In 2014, I founded the Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art, Inc., which re-discovers such forgotten artists and introduces their unique artistic voices to a larger public.We present these artists in their historical context, the context of European and Modern art, through international research initiatives and collaborations with institutions on exhibitions and publications.We hope to initiate interest and dialogue in contemporary society about these artists, and the inherent questions their life poses about individuality, artistic and human integrity in the face of conditions of extreme duress and tyranny. . . ./ We celebrate those who withstood these powers and believe that by showing their work, we can inspire reflection about authenticity, creativity and resilience in the face of adversity, today./We believe that, by exhibiting the work of artists, who, under great personal danger, refused to give up their integrity, we can provide today’s audience and society at large with valuable examples of how humanity can overcome the powers of darkness. . . .Rachel Stern, Founding Director/CEO

https://www.yadvashem.org/education/educational-materials/film-reviews/last-days.html About Steven Spielburg's movie The Last Days, which features the lives of five Holocaust survivors from Hungary. One of the five is Alice Lok Cahana. "The film is not just another documentary about the Holocaust; it is a documentary about a specific period and a specific place during the Holocaust – a period of less than four months beginning in March, 1944 when the Nazis' genocidal fury was unleashed against the Jews of Hungary. Through the testimonies of five survivors of that last, intense period of the “Final Solution,” the uniqueness of the plight of the Hungarian Jews is brought into sharp focus. Additional testimonies add depth to the stories shared by these survivors. The movie presents an excellent synopsis of the Shoah in Hungary."

https://www.chron.com/news/houston-deaths/article/Alice-Lok-Cahana-artist-and-Holocaust-survivor-12417040.php Houston Chronicle obituary

I noted another artist who was a Holocaust survivor, Edith Hoffman Birkin, who also painted scenes of her Holocaust experiences, sad, tragic, in https://francurrocaryblog.blogspot.com/2020/01/visual-storytellers-women-artist.html

 

In honor of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, 
a haunting painting by Edith Hoffman Birkin, a Holocaust surviver.

Edith Hoffman Birkin, 1927-2018,  "The Last Goodbye."
How she ever survived the concentration camps is unimaginable.  

Like Alice Lok Cahana, Birkin tells about discovering some harsh truths after "liberation." No one cared. There were no memorials. Everyone was gone. No one was coming back.

"It was really I think the worst time of the war. Although we were free and liberated, it was the very worst time because we realised, or I realised that nobody was going to come back, and that life is never going to be the same, and what I hoped for would happen after the war is never going to happen. The hope was gone."