"We Were Here": the power of the arts

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to see Broadway's Roundabout Theater production of "The People in the Picture."   This multigenerational musical takes place in pre-war Warsaw with a Yiddish theater troupe, mid-war Warsaw in the ghetto, and then in the 1970s with a surviving mother and daughter and the next generation granddaughter wanting to record her Bubbie's story.   The musical met with mixed reviews because of its wild treatment of an immensely serious topic, but it hit me in the gut so strongly that I had to see it more than once.

Initially, the musical struck a chord with me because of the grandmother-granddaughter relationship. Knowing family stories was always so important to me and I cherished Sunday afternoons looking through the photo albums trying to remember names and make sense of a world long gone. I'm sure that nothing was ever really as I imagined it or  even as it was narrated to me,  but these stories formed a part of my cultural identity.  I knew that holding onto the tales of soapboxes and victrola music was important as my gaining piano and language skills.   And as the grandmother in the show lost her memory and her grip on reality, I relived my own anticipatory grief of losing my grandparents and the lasting knowledge that I am an amalgam of all of my ancestors and so much more!

The second act of "The People in the Picture" begins with an extravagant scene about the secret art world of the Warsaw Ghetto.  Iris Rainer Dart's lyrics scream out "We were here!"  and speak of the need to write stories, paint, draw, film and record a lifestyle "before we lose the light".  Before I went deeper into my Holocaust studies,  I saw this as a commemoration of all humans as ephemeral beings, and it spoke to me of my own mortality and desire to create something that will endure beyond my days. Back then, I was also moved by the phrase "loving life was our way to fight";  I try to handle struggles by finding strength from my many passions.   

I guess that holiday time is a time for nostalgia and windows to eternity, so I decided to listen to the album again on the drive to my parents' house for Thanksgiving.  This time, I listened with a different focus.  I will be in Warsaw in two months's time.  I will be learning about Jewish life in Poland before the war; I will be learning about people such as the Warsaw Theatre Gang.  The story left me with so many questions that I hadn't researched before.  Today,  I set out to learn about the truth behind The People in the Picture.

It turns out that there was a huge movement in the Warsaw Ghetto to preserve the arts and to use the arts to serve as a record for threatened lifetimes.  Warsaw had been the center for intellectual Jewry, and so the ghetto was filled with people who had all sorts of degrees and skills.  Although the arts were forbidden, this only led to a huge underground arts scene.  Think about a secret symphony orchestra, clandestine newspapers, and literary evenings held in basements.  The food rations were for 189 calories a day (no, I'm not missing a zero), and yet people needed these outlets to survive.  

© Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, Museum Number 962.

This morning, I looked through as much artwork as I could find by one painter who survived the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz, thanks to her skill and several Nazis' desire to have their own faces recorded for posterity, too. Halina Olomucki is a completely new name to me, and one which I will surely want to know more about.   A Holocaust arts site quoted her as saying the following about her artwork:  "My observation, my need to observe what was going on, was stronger than my body. It was a need, a driving need. It was the most important. I never thought rationally what I am doing, but I had this incredible need to draw, to write down what was happening. I was in the same condition as every other person all around me, I saw them close to death but I never thought of myself close to death. I was in the air. I was outside my existence."   This goes beyond Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi's description of Flow; her artwork didn't just put her "in the zone" but created a zone of survival for her. It's like the lyrics in "The People in the Picture": "Because we live for bread and theater; body and spirit must be fed. Without our bread, we would be hungry, but without theater we'd be dead!"

Of course, it was clear that the arts weren't enough to save ever too many people. This is where my new knowledge of Emmanuel Ringelblum and his immense project "Oyneg Shabbes" comes in. Before the war, he was a scholar and historian. He knew the adage that "history goes to the victors" and he feared the loss of not just thousands (oy, millions) of lives, but also of a whole culture and many microcosms. He didn't want to have others tell the story of the ever-threatened Jewish people. Instead, he gathered the whole community to find ways to tell their own story. Everyone who could became a diarist, a journalist, a saver of food-stamps, ephemera, memorabilia. However his group of researchers could do it, they aimed to gather photos, videos and written statements, and to do whatever could be done to record ghetto life. Once gathered, they were stored in milk cans and hidden. After the war, only three members of Oyneg Shabbes survived. But thousands of documents remained and two of the milk cans were dug up. (One is still missing.)


I wonder what the very process of creating these records did for the people creating them. Was it therapeutic? Did it make the trauma more real? Did it make them feel less alone? Did the idea of claiming "I was here" make up for the knowledge that "I won't be here for very much longer"? Did the act of recording history make the people living it have to notice and keep their eyes open more? Or did it make them step back a bit, dissociate from the trauma and look at it more academically? I cannot know; I can only imagine and honor lives lived and risks taken.



This much I know. My life is so much richer for the music, the art and the poetry. My friendships are so much richer for theater and duets. I have weathered depression and grief and the arts have sometimes made those feelings more overwhelming, but sometimes they have soothed me in a way that nothing else could. My most alive moments are spent by the piano with someone singing by my side. I know that I am ephemeral and that most of my art is. But I am here. And I am very, very fortunate.

I miss my grandparents and my younger sister (who would be turning 31 tomorrow.) I miss the chaotic excitement of Thanksgiving. I miss being young and able to somersault without worrying about breaking my back. (Yes, I tried to do so, in order to impress my niece today!). But I appreciate the calm of today's Thanksgiving with my parents and my younger sister's family (and four dogs and two cats). I am thankful for the memories and the music, and for my mind and my powers of appreciation.

Happy Thanksgiving!