Susan Erony

American, born 1949

BiographyArtist's Statement: Although I grew up in a Jewish family, with a Russian father who lost four siblings in pogroms and was arrested twice barely making it out of the country, the history of the Jews was not discussed in my home. I learned about the Holocaust while working in the civil rights movement. Almost thirty years later, I still wake up not knowing how I can be alive, comfortable and unafraid, when fifty years ago being Jewish was a death sentence for so many of my tribe. I spent three and a half years, from 1989 to 1993, focusing my artwork on the Holocaust and trying to answer my question: How can extreme discrepancies in the quality of existence be such a reality of the human condition? I went to Eastern Europe three times, photographing concentration camps, Jewish cemeteries and German steel plants. I collected remnants from Jewish synagogues in Poland. I talked to Jewish survivors, children of survivors, Polish Resistance fighters, Germans born after the war. The Holocaust is a touchstone in my life, a place to which I cannot avoid returning because there is no understanding it and I am not capable of abandoning the quest. (SOURCE: University of Minnesota, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, http://chgs.umn.edu/museum/exhibitions/witnessLeg/empathizers/erony/ )

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