Esther Nisenthal Krinitz at the Columbus Museum of Art

Black and white are the colors of the Holocaust. O black and white rigidity of Documentary images are simply the result of technology available in the 1940s.respectful soft tones follow suit as if adding color would pile unbearable sensations onto already overwhelming images and memories in shades of gray drained of color.

Esther Nisenthal Krinitz, Swimming in the river, 1978. Embroidery on linen. Art and Memory.

So I was surprised when I entered the gallery where Fabric of Survival: The Art of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz is showing at the Colombo Art Museum until June 14th. Filled with fabrics that detail the memories of a Holocaust survivor, the room is alive with bucolic scenes of nature stitched with multi-colored fabrics, trim and embroidery threads. by Krinitz hand-stitched pictures present Polish village life and landscape – backgrounds durable enough in memory to have survived everything the Nazis perpetrated; scenes in which the Nazis actually appear to be dwarfed by the fields and forests around them.


These scenes of rivers, grain and gardens remained vivid so much so that when Krinitz began to record her childhood at the age of fifty, the horrors were contained in images of a world much larger than the certainty of death from which only she and her sister, of the entire family, escaped.


The tapestry above was the first she made, in 1978. It recalls her childhood home before the war. She and her brother swim in the river while her sisters watch. Villagers come and go on their errands, and benign nature dominates. His house is large and solid, the size of a castle. It doesn't matter that Krinitz was fifty when she did this, as it is an image of what the still-living child in her left behind.


This is the image of home that is fundamental to personality and character, the image that each of us harbors on some level. The upper part is linear and structured; the bottom is curvilinear and fluid. The whole is stable and relaxed. The naïve image has little artifice and an abundance of joyful, unfiltered expression.


During the 1970s, Krinitz originally made several plays with themes like this, drawn from pre-war memories of life in Polish villages, where Jews and Gentiles lived side by side. She records memories of making matzoh, of walking to holiday ceremonies on stilts her brother made: The pleasure of simple, pre-industrial, pre-electric, agricultural life ordered by the community's combination of seasonal and religious observations.

Esther Nisenthal Krinitz, Bees save me, 1996. Art and Memory.

After a long hiatus, Krinitz returned to his project in the 1990s, finally delving into the dark story of his adolescence and the arrival of the Nazis. Several of Krinitz's fabrics show the indignities of Nazi sadism. She depicts soldiers cutting her grandfather's beard; awakening the family in their nightclothes at gunpoint as the neighbors looked on open-mouthed; taking Jewish boys to forced labor, where they were shot when exhausted; and finally, rounding up Jews among their neighbors to be transported to extermination camps.

Esther and her thirteen-year-old sister fled (the rest of the family was killed). They survived by speaking only Polish and pretending they didn't know German (closely related to their native Yiddish). They went undercover to find work for an elderly couple in a nearby village. In the scene above, Esther works in the garden that the old man allowed her to plant. One day the Nazis came and tried to interrogate her. She explains in the embroidered caption:


“June 1943 in Grabowka. While I was tending to the garden I had planted, two Nazi soldiers appeared and started talking to me. I couldn't let them know I understood them, so I just nodded as they spoke. Dziadek, the old farmer who took me in as his housekeeper, came to stand guard nearby, but the bees rescued me first, suddenly swarming around the soldiers. ran out of the garden.”


Take away the rifles, take away the subtitles, and what distinguishes these two scenes, made almost twenty years apart, first when the artist was 50 years old and then approaching 70?


The first, pre-war memory, is quite specific – each of the five brothers is located, the house is remembered in detail — but it is also mythical. It is an indelible memory of golden childhood. Esther's memory could be of a lifetime at age four or fourteen. It is a memory of well-being, innocence, stability, and love—a memory of place as feeling. Many adults remember such an idyll from childhood. But few remember the interruption of the idyll by a trauma as sudden and complete as Krinitz would experience.


The pre-war scene is actually a tapestry. Every piece of linen is covered with crewel embroidery so that the surface is entirely worked with stitches. Every inch of the surface has been touched and transformed by the artist's hand. The ideas of stroking and shaping come with this. It's not just a scene she remembers, but one she also invented - one she made it appear, and appear exactly as she wants to remember. She is its author.


The image of her as a teenager – no longer a girl, thrust into premature adulthood – is not a tapestry. The sky, the “earth” of the garden and some other areas are simple fabric supports. The garden plants were sewn with embroidery or applique; the bees, the flowers, the details of the figures, but the surface was not so carefully caressed. In contrast to the first photo, it is completely aligned. The importance of order at this stage of the girl's life was paramount. Even the bees in their hives rest in rows. Krinitz also invented this scene. She wrote this scene not to cool off, but as a way to diffuse the trauma.


More of the artist's time and attention was directed to a substantial narrative beneath the image, which explains what might otherwise elude the viewer. She interprets the image to make sure we know what she felt and how Nature continued to help her.


The second image is notable for the way a survivor of major trauma imagines herself dealing with it. The human figures—both good and bad—remain small in the largely natural scene. It is located next door. She seems to mediate her own feelings of fear by spreading all possible feelings across the natural landscape, like healing wounds using the earth. Even the bees, swarming around the hives and buzzing around the soldiers, seem insignificant in the grand scheme of the picture. Krinitz controls his panic and fear by telling the story, controlling the context and perspective, and placing himself within a large framework.

Esther Nisehnthal Krinitz, Ordered to leave our homes, 1993. Collage of embroidery and fabrics. Art and Memory.

“This was my family on the morning of October 15, 1942. We were ordered by the Gestapo to leave our homes at 10 am to join all the other Jews on the road to the Crasnik railway station and then to our deaths.”


This mural, in a narrative sequence prior to the previous one, portrays Esther's memory of the day her family had to face their imminent deportation to the camps. This is a family portrait, undiluted by the presence of their killers. This was the day that Esther and her sister, in red, would run away.


Of the thirty-six pieces Krinitz made, this is one of the least dense in terms of stitching. The fabric background is largely plain cloth with some large bands of appliqué. Huge ravens crouch on the roof, symbols of imminent death for the black-clad quintet. Two huge sunflowers bloom for the girls who escape in their red capes.


Dark colors signify the painful content of this image, but its important content is signaled by the size and direct placement of the family and house. Nature does not soften or disguise emotion; If anything, it underscores the tragedy. Krinitz does not caress or decorate this image with thousands of strokes of his needle. In terms of presenting the most traumatic event of her life – a moment in which she could be emotionally frozen forever – it is brief but still heroically direct. In naive art, placing the figures near the bottom of the picture is placing them in the most important place. It's to ground them, like children do with crayon drawings. This is the drawing that will forever remain on the parents' wall, the precious portrait of the family, made by the daughter with a heart full of love. From this moment on, Esther would be her own mother and her sister's. In her seventies, mother and son, she tells the story of how it happened.

Esther Nisenthal Krinitz, Grand daugther, 1999. Embroidery and fabric collage. Art and Memory.

The final image of the series and this show shows a little girl raising her arm to examine the trunk of a sturdy tree in a beautiful garden. The grass, the bark, the flowers, the girl's hair—everything is elaborately embroidered. They are touched throughout with a loving, lingering hand. Krinitz brought his story sequentially through the war years and his visit to the camp where his family was killed, a harrowing scene even in naive stitching. She details and names the piles of ash, the gas chambers, the camp director's burned-out house. Other than the girl's braids and dress, there's nothing brilliant about the meticulously cataloged scene.

In this final scene, she has lived a long life in Brooklyn with the husband she met in a refugee camp, with her daughters, and now celebrates her granddaughter, joyful by nature. There is an attempt at an observational representation of it; it has moved beyond the clutches of memory and the burden of interpretation into a real and secure present. The girl is small and the tree next to her is true huge; there is real scale and it feels comforting. The border is green, the text is white: “When you were three years old, dear Mami Sheine, Grandma came to visit you. We went to a park where you discovered a huge tree. I never forgot the look on your face as you stood there admiring the tree. Grandma loves you so much.”


Grandma is free and guarantees that she will be part of another little girl's strength, no matter what.