Fourteen Stations/ Hey Yud Dalet

"FOURTEEN STATIONS" / "HEY YUD DALET"

(A suite of fifteen charcoal drawings)




ARIE A. GALLES


Drawings by Arie Galles
Poems by Jerome Rothenberg

Under no condition can art express the Holocaust. To withdraw art from confronting this horror, however, is to assign victory to its perpetrators. Each survivor must individually affirm his or her humanity and existence.

I was born before the end of the War in October 1944 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. My parents had been refugees from Poland, and in 1946, after the war, they returned there. Finding their home in Sanok destroyed and the Jewish community annihilated, they moved with me, their youngest and sole surviving child, to Lubawka, a small town in Lower Silesia. In 1951 we moved to Legnica. I grew up among the ruins of World War II, listening to adults who survived the war. I heard accounts of what went on during the war from both Jews and Christians.

Although their tales evoked imagery of a distant monstrous land, survivors' stories of barbed wire crowned concentration camps were local history. I remember my mother speaking of neighbors' and friends' assistance after the Nazi horde overran Poland in 1939: A Ukrainian neighbor in Sanok hung crucifixes in our apartment to deceive the Germans. My parents' friend, Mr. Lachowicz, who lived outside town, risked his family by coming to hide us. And, finally, a Wehrmacht officer helped my mother by bringing food and wood. I also remember hearing of the cruelty, hatred and inhumanity that transpired during the war. The land on which such suffering took place, where my uncle, aunt and cousins became ashes in the slaughterhouse of Belzec, was also the flowered field where my friends and I ran and played.

The genesis for my undertaking the "Fourteen Stations" / "Hey Yud Dalet" project was a chance event. On January 19, 1993, I entered the Holocaust Memorial Room at the local Whippany, NJ, Jewish Community Center. The octagonal space was empty. In the dim light I noticed that the seven bare walls were divided into fourteen sections. In an instant this project crystallized in my mind. I recalled Elie Wiesel's poignant references to the countless Calvaries that took place in the camps. The infamous names swirled in my mind. And, on the spot I sketched the concept for the suite. I returned home and telephoned my friend, a poet, Jerome Rothenberg in San Diego, to suggest a collaborative effort. He accepted at once, proposing Gematria poems based on the Hebrew and Yiddish spellings of the camps.

That night I dreamed I was handed a glass jar labeled “Soil from Auschwitz.” I turned the jar to read the label. The ingredients were listed in mundane order as on a can of soup: Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Russians, Czechs, and on. The list was long. Jews were the first, therefore the main ingredient.

In my subsequent research, over the years, I spent weeks at a time at the Cartographic and Architectural section of the National Archives in College Park, MD. I discovered the negatives which would serve as source images for my drawings, amid countless rolls of Luftwaffe and Allied aerial reconnaissance film. I am grateful to Waclaw Godziemba-Maliszewski, president of The Society for Aero-Historical Research for his help. Thanks are also due to Mrs. Marylyn Beech of the Air Photo Library at Keele University and Cprl. Dean Wilkinson & Sgt. Steven Gregson at JARIC, RAF Brampton in England for helping me locate additional negatives. The suite consists of fifteen 47½" by 75" drawings in charcoal and white Conté. The 15 drawings are accompanied by Jerome Rothenberg's poems hand-lettered on the same paper, 47½" by 15". The drawings and poem/drawing are all framed in hand-forged wrought iron frames.

The images are based on aerial photographs of the camps, taken by Luftwaffe and Allied reconnaissance during the War. Within each drawing is embedded one fourteenth of the Kaddish divided into the natural breaks that occur in its recitation. These Aramaic and Hebrew phrases are interwoven into the pattern and texture of each drawing and become invisible.

13 stations: death camps, built on or near railroad lines; the final stations for six million Jews as well as multitudes of others from across Europe. The 14th station, Babi Yar: a ravine outside Kiev, the final stop for tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews. The 15th drawing, Khurbn Prologue, is a view of Belzec taken by the Luftwaffe on May 26,1940. It is a record of the area before the camp was carved out from the forest. At the onset of the occupation the area which later housed the extermination camp was virgin woods. A damning piece of evidence photographed by the Nazis themselves.

The drawings are to be mounted and numbered from right to left according to the Hebrew Alphabet: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Babi Yar, Buchenwald, Belzec, Bergen-Belsen, Gross-Rosen, Dachau, Chelmno, Treblinka, Mauthausen, Maidanek, Sobibor, Ravensbrück and Stutthof. The full suite completes the Kaddish.

This suite has been the most intense endeavor I have ever undertaken. The act of drawing demands that I concentrate on what things look like, rather than on what they represent. I chose a distancing view from which to contemplate the dichotomy of the intrinsically fascinating aerial views and the horrifying truth. However, the two are not easily separated. When my mind becomes conscious of what these black and white shapes represent, crematoria, freight trains, pits, barracks, barbed wire fences, I am emotionally overwhelmed. The most painful drawing thus far has been that of the death camp at Belzec. The photograph from which I worked was taken by a Luftwaffe plane on a reconnaissance flight, subsequent to the Nazis' eradication of the camp. It shows the camp as a nearly empty lot amid patterned fields along a railway line in eastern Poland.

The title of my project corresponds to both the "Fourteen Stations of the Cross" and to each of the concentration camps being a railroad station. In addition, "Hey Yud Dalet," the acronym of "Hashem Yinkom Damam" (May God avenge their blood) has been carved into the gravestones of Jewish martyrs throughout the centuries.

By using topography, train tracks and stations, references to both Christian nomenclature and Hebrew acronyms, date of completion of each drawing along side the date of the original source photographs, I codify with documentation what are only marks on paper produced by a stick of charcoal in my hand. I literally draw with ashes. And in these drawings I seek to show that which the universe did not notice, or refused to see.

When I consider the vacuum of malevolent lethargy which expands all around us, I feel the need to create just to keep the rate of its expansion in check. I spend uncounted days looking into a geographic Hades, and through my perception of shapes and tonalities I draw a map for exploration of humanity's darkest undertaking. Among mundane views of occupied Europe are embedded cancers which not only eat up the glorious landscape, but beneath their rational and geometric physical layout they conceal evidence of their rapacious appetite for devouring the lives of my people. These photo images were known to many intelligence analyzers, yet little was done to inform the rest of the world of their meaning.

It is a fact that these death camps were out in plain sight to be photographed by the Luftwaffe, the RAF and the USAAC. The photons that bounced off these camps were seen by the camera lenses and fixed forever in little crystals of photographic emulsion, but somehow their reality went unnoticed by the silent sky and the omnipresent causality of all things and thoughts.

The abstraction of these images and the mechanical competence of the photographic process locks the horror into a calm banality. By the physical act of drawing, by changing the technical reproduction into the product of a human hand, I allow the silent paper to scream with the voices of those turned to ashes.


I am alive to say this Kaddish for them, and I say the Kaddish through my work. It is a prayer for all those who perished who have no one of their families left to say it for them. It is also a Kaddish for those to whom the prayer was a totally foreign expression, but whose lives were extinguished in the same braid of horror and smoke that devoured us. I return to honoring the memory of those who were butchered. I return to presenting these documents and these marks of white and black ashes as a memorial and a warning against the vacuum of forgetting.


The death camps the Nazis maintained, of which these are but a portion, are historical reality. Through visual evidence recorded by their own aerial reconnaissance cameras, the perpetrators of the Holocaust have provided irrefutable confirmation of the extermination camps. This truth is reinforced by the reconnaissance photographs of the Allies. Here is evidence of the massive industrial scale of the Nazis' "Final Solution to the Jewish Problem." Humanity must remain aware that the Holocaust was a calculated, systematic commitment to the eradication of an entire people.

I offer the "Fourteen Stations"/"Hey Yud Dalet" suite of drawings as icons for compassion and remembrance.



Arie A. Galles