Stuff That Counts

A few years ago, I was in an art show, my first, at the college where I’d me my wife nearly forty years before. An alumni, who was a supporter of the arts, liked what I had done with our family items and artifacts so asked me to do something with some items of importance to her. These had belonged to her late grandfather, whom she didn’t know much about except that he had survived the Holocaust. My wife Linda (our friends know her as Melitta a school nickname), was quick to do some fruitful online searching. She found a middle school project from years earlier where students had interviewed and taped his responses. It turned out that after reading the interview we temporarily knew more than the granddaughter did about those years. Here is what we learned, and what I did on the commissioned piece.

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CAUGHT IN A VICE

“They were deprived of their occupations, robbed of their property, forbidden to inherit or bequeath, forbidden to sit on park benches or keep canaries, forbidden to use public transportation, forbidden to frequent restaurants, concerts, theaters, and movie houses. They were subject to specific racial laws, stripped of all their civil rights, denied freedom of movement.” Robert Kempner, assistant U.S. chief counsel during post-war Nuremberg trials. Kempner referred to the individuals who were labeled as Geltungsjudin (officially Jewish) or as Mischling (“half-breed”) children of a privileged marriage – half Jewish (because of having two Jewish grandparents) and half Aryan who had been stripped of their rights by The Nuremburg Laws adopted by the German authorities and citizens in the mid-1930s.

“Half Jewish is as good as Jewish” states a Gestapo officer in Ingeborg Hecht’s memoir about her wartime experiences as a Mischling.

“The whole of our compulsory service was harassment, pure and simple, and we were powerless to resist our supervisors’ oft-reiterated intention to put us where we belonged’. What I found worst of all was the constant mental strain and uncertainty,” states Wolgang Hecht in his sister’s memoir. “We shared the fears of those who failed to survive persecution.”

Rolf Cahn was caught in the same vise. In 1944, he was placed into a labor camp at Farge, a sub-camp of the concentration camp Neuengamme, a camp in which half of the German prisoners died. Forced labor was one extermination strategy of the Nazis. The exact number of prisoner deaths at Farge is unknown. Rolf survived.

This sculpture uses a part of a blacksmith’s vise as the foundation. A shoe last, one belonging to Rolf and mounted in the horizontal position for shoe making, represents Rolf’s role as a shoemaker before, during and after the war. It was a known, a constant.

The wood and wire structure, including a decal of his identity card, represent the day-to-day restrictions placed upon Rolf, even before he was arrested and placed in in a labor camp. The smokestack like shape of the wood piece represents the threatening darkness of the time.

The shovel represents Rolf’s time as a prisoner in Farge. It also represents one form of resistance, the occasional breaking of one’s shovel and having to stop working long enough to get another. If used as resistance too frequently, breaking a shovel could have been a dangerous form of resistance.

A second shoe last, mounted vertically, guides like a compass needle, pointing the way.

A woman named Semmy Riekerk, a Dutch Rescuer responsible saving many during the war, wrote afterward that “Every human being is like a piano. In every man and woman lives the whole scale from very bad to very good. It’s the circumstances that bring out the tone.” The single white and black key here stands for Frieda’s constancy and bravery. It was dangerous for non-Jews to befriend Jews.  She stood by Rolf. Frieda played the good scale.

The bicycle crank represents the audacity of Rolf’s hope and belief in a future when he commandeered a German military bicycle and rode for five days, home and to Frieda, marrying less than ten days later.

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