The CJM Blog

Along with stories of illicit sex and human derangement, Stanley Kubrick and Vladimir Nabokov both dreamed of making art about the Holocaust. Nabokov, a three-time refugee from totalitarian governments, famously rejected literature bearing social messages. Yet at the end of his seventh decade, he vowed to his first biographer that he would one day tackle Nazi terror. “I will go to those German camps and look at those places and write a terrible indictment.” 1 Decades later Kubrick made real progress toward his goal: he drafted a script, cast lead actors, and scouted a location in the Czech Republic for a film with the working title Aryan Papers . Yet neither man would complete his project. Lolita , their only collaboration, somehow survived the censors, despite a plot centered on a professor’s cross-country travel and multi-year sexual abuse of his stepdaughter. While the subject of the movie stands at some distance from genocide, Nabokov’s 1955 novel and Kubrick’s 1962 film e...

Faced with the Nazi invasion of Poland, my grandparents made a heart-wrenching decision in 1943 to hand over my father to relative strangers in the hope that he might live. He was only six years old, suddenly parentless, and he faced physical danger day and night. His survival had been no sure bet. My grandparents must have understood that their end was coming and that my father’s life was the only slim hope of extension. Such risks, to me, were not only acts of protection, but also acts of defiance and survival—ways that Jews could passively continue on. I can imagine my grandparents thinking like Charlotte Salomon, “Keep this safe. It is my whole life.” Our births, our children, are a testament to our existence. We were there, in beauty and in struggle, and that is not something, no matter how many millions gone, can be denied.

By Dan Schifrin, Director of Public Programs and Writer in Residence When Brenda Way, Artistic Director of the ODC Dance Company , spoke at the Museum in March about her new work “In the Memory of the Forest,” she was careful to note that the dance, based on an oral history of her Polish mother-in-law, was not created as a work “on the Holocaust.” Instead, the multi-media production, which explores Iza Ehrlich’s hiding in the forests outside of Warsaw during Word War II, was designed to explore the unique character of one brave and complex person, who was neither defined nor destroyed by the Holocaust. The individuality of Iza Erlich’s narrative, along with Brenda Way’s unique ability to listen to it, suggest that the transmission of one person’s story to another is perhaps the most powerful and humane way of keeping alive not just the memory of one person, but a context to mourn those whose memories and stories were forever silenced in Auschwitz and Treblinka. On Thursday, April...