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June 29, 2012 Art depicts scenes of survivalMalka Pishanitskaya hopes her project will have a positive impact.
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 Malka Pishanitskaya is working towards documenting her Holocaust experience in a series of collages. |
The series is a tribute to her family, she said, barely able to contain her excitement at being able to share the paintings.
“I have very good photographic and logical memories, the best. I remember with closed eyes my shtetl, all the passages, because it was a shtetl like a ghetto, one was on top of the other, everyone wanted to live nearby because [there was] no transportation in those times.... [We had] nothing in our hands when we survived, nothing. So, after the war, my mother met some people she knew, and relatives, and they gave to my mother a few pictures I will show you,” she said, indicating images of her great-grandmother, her great-aunt and their cousin.
“I cry almost every day,” she continued. “I’m looking. I won’t find them alive, but I want to find the faces. I can’t, and it’s so painful, I can’t tell you.” This is why, she said, “it’s so important to have them here with me in my home, my relatives.”
Malka was born in Romanov, which is near Kiev, on Jan. 31, 1931. Her father had left the family before her birth, so Malka was raised by her mother, Brindl (Bronya), as well as her grandmother and great-aunt. She expressed her gratitude at having survived often and this sentiment is clearly indicated in the piece of art that could be said to have started it all.
Malka pointed to a framed collage on the wall, the first work she had made to commemorate her family who were lost in the Holocaust. A combination of photographs, painting and text, the story begins, “I think that I was a very lucky girl at the very sad times of the destruction of our Jewish nation....” It goes on to tell how she and her mother survived in hiding, in great measure, because of Malka’s ability to find them food and shelter, and ends with, “It is a miracle that people helped a little Jewish girl. My whole survival is a miracle.”
The collage was created with Linda Dayan Frimer, said Malka, for the Gesher Project, which had survivor, child-survivor and second-generation participants, and took place over a six-month period in 1998. According the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre website, participants examined “the impact of the Holocaust on their lives. They explored these experiences through painting, writing and discussion assisted by facilitators Dr. Alina Wydra, Linda Dayan Frimer, Dale Adams-Segal and Reisa Schneider. The project culminated with the mounting of the Gesher exhibit [in summer 1999]. Gesher, the Hebrew word for bridge, reflects the project’s goal of working together to bridge the generations and to use creative approaches as a means of healing Holocaust trauma.”
As she showed us a few photos, Malka said that, at some point, she came to the understanding “that I to have to work on everything I went through because I am going to heaven. What am I going to leave? I have to leave something. My children know a lot about the Holocaust because they were in touch with those that helped us at the time of the war ... but my grandchildren don’t know. Then, this is such a story. You know, I have many people coming here, seeing and hearing what I’m telling and they said this is something really special.”
When she was a young girl, explained Malka, she was taught and learned everything in Yiddish. She credits the decision to place her in a Ukrainian, rather than Jewish, school when she was six years old as one of the main factors that saved her life. Being fluent in the language allowed her to fend for her mother and herself as they went from village to village, house to house, seeking food and shelter, she said.
Malka was one of a small number of survivors from her shtetl and her family. One painting portrays 36 members of Malka’s family who did not survive, another depicts a mass execution, yet another the experience of begging for food and help. At the time of Basya’s and my visit, 15 works in the series had been completed, with a 16th nearing completion; others were in progress. Each painting tells multiple stories, and Malka shared a few with Basya and me.
On Aug. 25, 1941, she began, there was a bang on her family’s door. “Get out to the centre strip [of the shtetl], no words ... no time even to think to take something. So, we rushed to the centre. You see, 5,000 people, everyone, everyone. And people still were puzzling, where we were going to be taken.” She described her memories of the mass execution that took place, while indicating on a painting the scenes being depicted within it.
“To go through life and to do this now in my old age,” said Malka of the paintings, “is not really easy ... but this is going to be the tribute to my family, my community and to the six million perished people, my people.”
Malka described some of the images and texts she plans to incorporate into future collages. “I need money to complete [the works], I don’t have, and I took so much ... this is why I worry that I might go to heaven not finishing [the project] and not giving back [loans] from family, from friends. It’s a tough situation, believe me, it’s not easy.”
In addition to an artist, Malka also has hired a writer to help her document the stories of the images portrayed in each painting.
The sight of people being murdered, the sounds of their screams, the feelings of fear and the endurance of starvation, Malka recounted all of these memories, and others, as she continued her account of survival, as well as her experiences directly after the war, when antisemitism still flourished.
Malka was 14 when the war ended, and remained in Ukraine until 1975. There, she finished high school in 1950 and went on to obtain a university degree in education, specializing in Russian literature. She married in 1953 and had two daughters, working as a high school teacher until she emigrated to Canada with her daughters. For the last few years, she has been working on the collage series.
“We live at a time when the Holocaust does not stop. It doesn’t, and it won’t. It won’t,” lamented Malka, now 81 years old. “But, maybe, maybe my collages, maybe my project could do something for people, could give something.”