Here to Tell: Faces of Holocaust Survivors

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Marnie Jazwicki, “Portrait of Beate Anson (1918-2008) with the hands of granddaughter Gillian Galante,” 2021

digital photograph (courtesy of Here to Tell: Faces of Holocaust Survivors)

We will soon be in a world without Holocaust survivors.

As defined by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, the Holocaust was an unprecedented genocide, total and systematic, perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, with the aim of annihilating the Jewish people. Here to Tell: Faces of Holocaust Survivors provides an opportunity to be present to the magnitude of the lived experiences of Holocaust survivors, specifically of those with a connection to Alberta. In fact, a number of the Holocaust survivors featured in Here to Tell chose Edmonton as their home in the years following the Holocaust.

Here to Tell: Faces of Holocaust Survivors is comprised of 65 portraits of living survivors and deceased survivors (held up in the hands of their descendants). Each photograph is accompanied by a brief personal account of the survivor’s Holocaust experience and life after the war.

The dramatic black-and-white portraits of the living show close-up images focusing sharply upon the eyes of men and women who are here to tell what they personally saw and experienced during the Shoah. The photos are realistic, capturing the survivors as they appear now, more than 77 years after the end of World War II. Each image reflects wisdom, experience and the fullness of a life that has known both despair and hope.

Curators Marnie Bondar and Dahlia Libin also decided to pay tribute to the living legacy of deceased survivors by placing their images in the loving hands of descendants and creating new photographs. Second-, third- and even fourth-generation survivors held up their loved ones both literally and figuratively so they could be seen and heard by a new generation.

These “hand photos” became all the more poignant as some descendants personalized them by wearing jewellery or other items that had belonged to—or had been gifted to them by—the survivors.

As the number of living Holocaust survivors dwindles, second- and third-generation Holocaust survivors are stepping up to bear witness. We believe that all those who make themselves fully present to the survivors depicted in Here to Tell will feel similarly compelled to share survivor testimonies and speak out wherever they encounter racial slurs, ethnic "jokes" and bullying. After all, genocide does not begin with a death camp - it begins with incremental erosions of civility and human rights.

Left unchecked, such hatefulness grows like a cancer.