arts&life

art/on the cover

Sifting Through

SUZANNE CHESSLER CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Photographer

and artist

Bruce Gendelman

captures the horrors

of the Holocaust —

and hopes to engage

the post-witness

generations.

B

ruce Gendelman grew up with stories of the Holocaust.
His father, Max, was an American sniper in the Battle of
the Bulge who survived by escaping from three German
POW camps. His great-grandparents, great-aunts and countless
other relatives perished in the Holocaust.
Despite this, he has written, he “found it tempting to turn away
from the details of this blinding nightmare.”
Until two years ago. Gendelman’s brother-in-law, Milwaukee art-
ist Richard Edelman, had created a sculpture to be dedicated in
Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter of Krakow. Gendelman and his
sister, Nina Edelman, decided to accompany the artist on his trip
to Poland and Ukraine.
Word got out to the Edelmans’ Milwaukee Jewish Federation
and members of the community, and Rabbi Hannah Rosenthal,
the former U.S. State Department special envoy to monitor and
combat anti-Semitism, decided to make a mission trip out of it.
About 35 people traveled to sites where slave labor and death

camps had decimated their families. During part of the trip, they
were joined by Father Patrick Desbois, a Catholic priest who has
devoted his life to investigating the mass murder of Jews.
Prior to the trip, Gendelman had researched his maternal
grandfather’s family, who originated from a small Ukraine town
called Bolechow — his grandfather, the only member of the fam-
ily to survive the war, never knew what had become of the others.
Eventually, Gendelman and his family came to believe that their
ancestors were paraded through the city naked and walked to
their death across town into a forest. Throughout his trip, which
included visits to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Gendelman met Holocaust
survivors, witnesses — and deniers — and wrestled with how to
describe what he saw.
Gendelman, 63, who grew up in Milwaukee and now lives in
Palm Beach County, has been a hobbyist artist since the third
grade. He had a special passion for photography and painting and
turned to art as an important means of expression.

continued on page 38

TOP: Aerial View of Auschwitz II-Birkenau, oil paint, wood and string on canvas, 12 x 8 feet. A Van Gogh-esque sunset competes with the fire and ash of the crematorium.

jn

January 18 • 2018

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