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ESSAY BY INNA ROGATCHI

A tale of Nazis, Solzenitsyn, Gulag, the unspeakable horror of China’s Laogai camp, and the needed redemption of humanity.

Essay by Inna Rogatchi (C). 

The Times of Israel

February 10, 2019. 

The full text of the essay can be read here. 

Unique Painting for Unique Museum

It was a cold and windy February day in a downtown Washington, DC a few years back. Only we did not feel it that way. On our way to the place of the event, we were stunned to see an impressive image of Michael’s painting on a big banner facing the street. It was too much, we thought, but we knew that the hosts of the event meant well.

The event was a special ceremony on unveiling a painting, a single painting that my husband decided to donate to a special museum in the USA’s capital, the unique museum in the world. The painting was unique too, with a story of its conceiving and its life. “An unique painting for an unique painting,” I thought to myself. What wind matters when life brings you to the combination like that?

Those Winds

On the painting, there also was a wind, a lot of it. The wind occupied the most of the art work. It was a very complex wind bearing in itself the whole lives of the people who were also painted on that canvas, in a smaller proportion: their various past, very much of their crushed present, and their future, which was practically none. The wind on my husband’s painting had a face.

The face melted into heavy, stone-like clouds, which one can see on the far east of our planet primarily. Or was the face coming out of those clouds as the best part of it? Probably that was the case. Was the face referring to the Michael’s father Henrich, who had paid with his health, and ultimately with his life, at quite early age, being the one among those people in another corner of the painting? Or was it a general image of a person, the one of the millions, like every one of those millions who had become helpless victims of huge and ruthless machine? Or was it an Angel of Compassion coming out from those low steel-like clouds to bring a bit of that almost white sun over those poor people? The pale frozen sun was on the painting, as well. I have decided for myself that it was the Angel.

Michael and I did not talk about this work. Not many words were needed. The work had been in his studio all the years after he had created it in 1993, hung there in the place just in front of the Michael’s main easel, in the way that his eyes were always coming to the painting first, during his breaks and thinking.

Painting Memory

In the early 1990s, Michael painted this work, his single narrative on the Gulag. He was 40 at the time. The work has very simple title, Year 1953. Michael was very lucky to be born just two months prior to the death of Stalin. Otherwise, nobody knows what might have happened to him and his family, and if they ever would have been able to get out of that “Valley of Death,” bordering Japan from the Soviet side, where my husband was born.

After some time, my husband’s father, who was arrested, being 19, on completely false pretext that he was a member of a “bourgeois conspiracy group” consisting of his few co-students in the first year of university. He was sent to Gulag, was released, and the family exiled to Kazakhstan. Alexander Solzenitsyn was released from his Gulag camp and was also sent to exile at the same time and to the same place. Henrich Rogatchi, Michael’s father, died shortly thereafter from the tuberculosis he had contracted at the Valley of Death. He was just 39. 

The Valley of Death in the country where Gulag constituted its huge mindeset, was not only a geographical term, but metaphorical too. Or rather, it was the existence in which a metaphor was a reality, and visa versa.

The cold winds reached people mercilessly — from the Valley of Death to Kazakhstan, and prevail there still. In mid-1950 ( and yet before) and until end of 1970s, Kazakhstan was a vast Gulag empire. The camps there were endless.

Being released from the Gulag camps in the Far East, millions of people who were exiled to Kazakhstan, my husband’s family included, were still living under extreme and constant pressure: no passports, meaning no possibility to move anywhere; and weekly check-ups at the special penitentiary offices called “Kommendatura.” The clouds of fear and ongoing pressure were real in that life of the millions of people who were guilty of nothing.

Michael waited 40 years to express the quintessence of life under the steel-like clouds.

At the time, in the early 1990s, we were friendly with outstanding people, former Soviet dissidents, like Vladimir Bukovsky, and heroic couple, Arina and late Alexander Ginsbourg, who was a custodian of the Solzenitsyn archive and his closest colleague, and who paid for it dearly, with many years of imprisonment in Gulag. Via them, we got to know Solzenitsyn who was quite appreciative of both our works — my writings and Michael’s art — and published some of it in his almanacs, as well. The author of GULAG Archipelago was thrilled and moved by this very painting of Michael’s, Year 1953, and he was interested in obtaining the work.

It was at the time of Solzenitsyn’s return to Russia in May 1994, a critical event for many people in Russia and all those abroad for whom Gulag mattered. Although Michael did create his only depiction of Gulag’s impact on a human being for himself, he did not mind presenting it to Solzenitsyn, especially as he, who was such a special figure, did like it so much. We tried to arrange the transfer and learned soon enough that it was practically mission impossible, due to the quite stiff regulations of Russian customs, with regard to the import of oil paintings. The situation has hardly changed today.

Everybody felt disappointed, but then we opted for a very close-to-the-original copy of the work to be sent to Solzenitsyn in Moscow, which we managed without problem, and that is how the situation was resolved.

First, Michael was disappointed that the author of GULAG Archipelago had to do with a copy of his work, but then it was just as well, as soon after his return, Solzenitsyn went public with clearly anti-Semitic overtones. It was then that we cut relations with him. I criticised him publicly for that.

For the next 19 years, the painting was in its special place in the Michael’s studio. Until the day in early summer  of 2012 when I had quite a shocking excursion to the small museum in Washington, DC.

“But They Have Killed Me Already”

The excursion was personal. My dear friend Harry Wu, a quiet man with a lion’s heart and a steel will, a tireless fighter against the Chinese GULAG called Laogai, was showing me his museum just before it was to be opened to the public. Harry conducted the detailed tour with pride in being able to achieve it: a building, funding, all kinds of permissions, the rest of the giant effort required to set up, open, and run the museum, not to mention the museum’s location, which did figure in the Harry’s tireless effort to make the suffering of the people in Laogai heard by those at the top of the world’s power. I saw and felt his pride, I knew all the details of the incredible story behind the museum, I was very happy for my friend, the tireless, selfless, real human rights fighter. And I was terrified of what I saw.

I know the Soviet camps; we lived with the knowledge of it in our blood. My grandfather Abram Elovitch, an advanced engineer and very brave man, was a prisoner there in the early 1950s. He did not tell us much about it, to put it mildly, but we knew, anyway. My husband’s entire family was in exile in the Gulag-spread Kazakhstan, and he was born inside Gulag in a place designed not for survival, but for the opposite. He lost his father to Gulag and the regime that had been built on it. Many of our close friends had a full portion of Gulag, too, and I had processed this horrific knowledge, inside myself, some of it as recent as the mid-1980s, in all its chilling detail.

I know enough about the Nazi camps, I saw many and films of them too. I study it still, non-stop and without break, feeling it my duty to many, but first of all to my aunt, whose name I had to bear, Mina Chirginsky, who was murdered by the Ukrainian enthusiastic Nazi-collaborators in Ukraine in October 1941. Mina was 18 at the time. She was murdered with the family of my grandma’s aunt, all of them. I know the Nazi camps and the cursed places of all their collaborators activities in Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czech Republic, Austria, and Germany.

I know the Japanese camps in Singapore. I have examined them in detail too. They are exceedingly awful, both in intention and practice.

I have heard, in first-hand detail, about the totally inhuman prisons and camps in Cuba. With the Latin-American power of imagination and intensity of character, the cruelty there goes beyond bearable.

I know well, and filmed and researched the sadism-at-large applied in the DDR penitentiary  system. Those were faithful pupils, and sometimes colleagues of the Nazis, as well as animalistic in their sadistic Romanian colleagues from Securitate.  

With all this knowledge and personal experience, I might have thought I would be ready for Laogai, the Chinese Gulag. I would have been mistaken. The degree of cruelty in Laogai is absolute. The negation of humanity is mechanically total. The depth of abyss of inhumanity is bottomless.

The point of talking about it today is that it all happened after Gulag, after Holocaust, after all the major tragedies of the 20th century, excepting Cuba and North Korea. Despite the precedent of all these atrocities, and also the precedent of the international legal condemnation of it. It just should not be happening, should not be repeated. But it was happening and it is still going on.

Jewish Connection

Released from Laogai, Wu Hongda, who had to Westernise his name to “Harry Wu,” felt a dire need to understand it: why? What for? How? He was thinking about that non-stop. He spoke about it for long hours with the best of the Soviet dissidents, like the great Vladimir Bukovsky. He read everything he could on the Nazi camps.

And then he read Sunflower, by Simon Wiesenthal, our dear friend and mentor. Harry was a very special man, extremely focused. The next thing he did after reading Sunflower was to buy a ticket to Vienna, to meet Wiesenthal in person. Simon, who with his shrewd eye and his vast experience, saw through people in a second, spoke with Harry for hours, explaining the Nazi system, the psychology of the applied Nazism, and how and for what it all worked.

Another great survival, late Senator Tom Lantos was instrumental in Harry’s establishing himself in the US and telling his first-hand details of the huge and merciless totalitarian system of China, making his voice heard at the highest level of the American power. Harry also spoke for long hours with Michael about my husband’s personal experience and knowledge of Gulag and Kazakhstan. They could never stop. In his effort to document the atrocities of Laogai, Harry went to Kazakhstan a couple of times, and operated from there.

The connection of the great human rights fighter of Chinese origin to the Jewish people is unique. It has provided him with a great knowledge, first-hand experience, special understanding, and experience with that paramount Jewish character and sense of humanity that is our winning force under any circumstances.

That is why Harry Wu decided to have in his small museum on Laogai the special sections dedicated to the Nazi camps and to Gulag. He was examining and showing in detail the very origins of the evil.

Twins in Tragedy

So, back in early June 2012, I was following Harry who was showing me his soon-would-be-open museum in the heart of the world power, with no more than a few, occasional fact-checking questions on some exhibits. As for him, Harry went back in his thoughts to his 19 years of imprisonment there for no crime at all, except for belonging to “the wrong” family of a bourgeois class — he was put in the Chinese GULAG for the same fictional reason as Michael’s father, and was exactly the same age at the time, 19.

He was also telling me, laughing, about his four returns to the area of Laogai. He is the only dissident in the world history who did come back to the place of his tortures when it was still dangerous, to document the reality there, to expose it to the world. He was arrested all four times, and each time, a high-level US intervention and very loud international campaign was needed to release the then-US citizen, that incurable Harry Wu, from yet another arrest and imprisonment in the system of sheer horror that he knew so well and about which he was telling the world in his books, films, and appeals, so bravely and so persistently.

“And then” — my friend was laughing again telling about his third arrest by the Chinese security in the proximity of another huge Laogai camp — “they who knew me very well, they were wondering: “Wu, are you out of your mind? Weren’t you afraid?” — ‘”Afraid of what?” I have asked them in turn,” Harry said to me. I noted: “Harry, but they could have easily killed you and cited any accident as the reason.” — “But they have killed me already,” said my dear friend quietly, his smile waning. I could not breathe.

We were walking through the exposition when I had to stop. In front of me, above, was an enlarged photograph of prisoners in Laogai taken in 1991. I held my breath. It was so very similar to the picture of that human column of prisoners that Michael painted on his Year 1953 painting, 20 years back.

Harry dear, sorry to interrupt you” — I had to intervene in the course of the Harry’s calm explanations of the one of the most screaming-out exhibits of the museum, the exact copy of his own cell, of the size intentionally made as suitable for a small animal, not for a human being. “ This photo is so much like the painting of Michael, the one that shows the events there in 1950s, not in 1990s, as here on the photo, and in China. Would you like to have that painting in your museum?” I asked. After a pause, Harry replied: “Would I like? This is the wrong question. Of course, I would love to. But the right question is: would Michael be willing to give it to the museum? Would he be able to part with the work like that?” Harry knew precisely what he was talking about. He and Michael were like brothers. They understood each other without words.

Let’s ask him,” I suggested, and called my husband, who was in Finland, on the spot, under the photograph that mesmerised me. “Absolutely.” Michael’s reaction was instantaneous. “Perfect idea. We’ll do it. We’ll donate it to the Laogai Museum.” Harry was shaking his head in disbelief. He took my phone: “Michael,” he said. “Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure? How could you part with something like that?” I do not know what Michael told our friend, but Harry gave me the phone smiling with his child-like, fantastic, broader-than-life smile.

On the Ground

A bit more than half a year later, we were in Washington, DC, heading for the ceremony of unveiling Year 1953, the painting donated to the Laogai Museum and The Laogai Foundation. The weather was nasty, and we wondered whether it might prevent the guests from attending the ceremony. It did not. We were warmed to see so many in the audience, everyone is a legend of its own: one of the special advisers to President Reagan, Professor John Lenczowski; Rear Admiral, former commander of the US Naval Forces Central Command David Rogers; long-time Times bureau chief in Japan and many other countries and the veteran of the top level of the Carter administration, Jerrold Schecter and his wife, writer Leona; a legend of the US Army, its real brave-heart hero Brigadier General and Deputy Chaplain of the US Army James  Hutchens, and his now late wife, artist Pat; the representatives of the Finnish Embassy in Washington; our dear friend and colleague, the member of the International Advisory Board of our Foundation, MEP Sari Essayah, currently the leader of the Finnish Christian-Democratic party, who did come specifically to participate in the ceremony.

We were surrounded by students, media, experts, intellectuals, freedom fighters, and many people who all came to participate in the event. Speeches by each of our friends were acts of devotion, understanding and compassion, not only towards the victims of Laogai, but also towards the victims of Gulag, as was implied by the art work, and also the victims of the Nazis’ camps, following that incredible link that connected the Chinese human rights fighter and the artist who was born in Gulag, as well as both of their friends, mentors, and the families, including the leading Nazi hunter and the former brave Jewish partisan who had become a leading US senator. That incredible human thread demonstrated to all of us the core of our existence, the humanity, without any extra word.

From DC to LA, Six Years On

Six years later to the day, the story re-emerged in my memory — as if of its own accord, although there is nothing in this world that appears of its own — when I was discussing with a good friend and understanding colleague the ways for an artist to depict the horror of methodic dehumanization, and how my husband had covered both Gulag and the Nazi camps.

I promised my colleague that I would write an essay on the subject, and started to write down this story. Then I glanced at the calendar — for another reason — and saw that it was February 7th. Exactly the day of our ceremony of the donating the Michael’s Year 1953 to Harry Wu’s Laogai Museum and The Laogai Foundation, in downtown Washington, DC, six years ago. Six is a lucky number in the Chinese culture. I am glad that this wave of memories rolled over me on the sixth anniversary of our donation to Harry. Perhaps, it means something positive to his soul, for in April, it will be three years since Harry has not been among us. But we both, Michael and I, do feel that he is. Such people just cannot disappear.  

From that day on, February 7th, and in anticipation of the decision of the 61st Grammy Awards this year, which were to be announced on the evening of February 10th, in Los Angeles, Michael and I have been listening the Yiddish Glory records and concerts non-stop. Yiddish Glory is the second case in the entire history of the Grammys when a complete Yiddish-language recording was nominated for an award. This time, it is for the Best World Music Album, one among just five. We are immersed in everything about Yiddish Glory these days, keeping our fingers crossed very tightly for it. And we are listening, listening, and listening — especially and in particular, to both versions of the unique, unbelievable, Kazakhstan song, breathing as if from inside the souls of all the people exiled there during the era of Gulag. Michael said: “It (the song) is exactly how we lived there and then.”

I listen to the Yiddish Glory’s Kazakhstan, I see in my memory the only painting my husband ever painted of Gulag, I remember our dear bravest friend Harry Wu, who was elated to receive this painting as the centrepiece of his so special and so important museum. Six years on. Not a big time for memory. Just a sigh.

COLLECTION OF REFLECTIONS ON MICHAEL ROGATCHI’S YEAR 1953 PAINTING

“The work is truly rare and special as it deals with historical phenomena of utter importance, one of the most important in the XX century, and the artist’s input here is his personal experience. This is a rare occurrence in the contemporary arts. The work also evokes the atmosphere of the massive repressions, and both psychological and physical terror that has been executed cruelly on a horrendous scale. Michael has succeeded here to create the art work which is as if ‘breathing’ the terror that had been instrumental in the formation of both the regime, and millions of lives of the people who were living under it. The fact that Michael is one of those people, adds to the special characteristics of the art work, indeed” – leading international art expert Sam Chatterton-Dickson, London, the UK, November 2009.

“When a few years back, we flew to Kazakhstan as I was filming a documentary on Michael’s life and work, I noticed that even for the camera men who were locals and for whom existing in the Karaganda landscapes was routine, even for them it was difficult to film what we did. You have a neat small house where Michael’s family lived, and just a hundred meters in front of it, not more, there is a vast concentration camp, abandoned now, but which was functioning at the time. On the left, there is a huge cemetery, so to say, but in fact, it is a giant pitch in which the remnants of thousands of prisoners were just ditched away for years on. In this landscape a human being is raised; Michael spent there about 18 years, after his family had been exiled to that part of the Gulag, known as the Valley of Death, one of the most terrible parts of the Gulag in the Russian Far East where Michael was actually born. Michael does not talk much, if at all, about his and his family’s experience in the Gulag; neither does he paint a lot concerning it. Apart from this painting, there are only two of Michael’s works exists that were inspired by his personal experiences in the Gulag. And one just cannot help but think – how crystallised must be the artistic message coming out of one’s actual experience of such total horror. And how special this kind of work of art is” – Inna Rogatchi, excerpt from presentation at the special ceremony at the Laogai Museum, Washington D.C., February 2013.

“Look at Michael – he well could say after leaving those terrible realities of the Gulag behind him, ‘OK, I am out of it, and don’t want to have anymore to do with that life with human skulls on the way to a kids’ walks. Enough. Forget it.’ But instead, he has been and is devoted to creating a testimony; and done by the means of art, this testimony is speaking just straight to our minds and hearts.

Michael is a phenomenal artist. His works which I have seen are those of an extremely powerful, fantastic imagination. The power of his imagination is overwhelming, it is simply tremendous, unbelievable. And the fact that the artist as himself, if turning to such matters as the reality of the Gulag, is doubly remarkable as he has thrown his immense talent to support his human, civic stand.

Talented artists with a strong moral stand and convictions are talking not to minds only, but to the hearts of people, very importantly. Anyone who could have a look at this painting of Michael’s, would see that a creative image can express things much more powerfully than many words would do” – prof. John Lenczowski, founder and president, The Institute of the World’s Policies, Washington D.C., former long-term senior foreign policy adviser to the President Reagan and President Bush.

“Look at this painting – even without knowing Michael’s biography and his life, one can feel and understand that this painting is first-hand testimony. Michael’s father was a prisoner of the Gulag; Michael was born in the Gulag, just shortly before Stalin’s death. Otherwise, we don’t know how Michael’s and his family’s life would have developed, and what could come out of it. And then, his family was sent to many years of exile in Kazakhstan, another big place of the Gulag. There is certainly a big sum that this painting has been valuated at. I have to say to you: I do not care how much this painting costs in figures, I am not interested in sums. This painting is valuable; it is very, very valuable – because this is a real person’s memories, his testimony, in which there is the story of his family, but also of very many people and their families, millions of those, both of the Gulag and Laogai. Thank you, Michael” – late Harry Wu, famous public figure, nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. 

The ART WORKS OF PAINED MEMORY – Essay by Inna Rogatchi

IN THE MIRROR OF SHOAH: ART REFLECTIONS TO HOLOCAUST

By INNA ROGATCHI (C)

January 28, 2019

The  Times of Israel 

The full text of the essay published in The Times of Israel can be read here. 

For many decades, there was an artistic silence on the abyss of the Shoah, understandably. The shock of the generation that had to witness the Shoah did paralyse the creativity, expectedly.

Of course, there were people who were drawing in the camps, and in some of the camps which were in France, for example, there were even art exhibitions organised of the doomed people who were so incredibly brave to try to be above their and their brethren’ sentence. Not to speak on all sort of culture activities in the ghettos.

My dear friend great Simon Wiesenthal did show me his drawings which he made in Mauthausen, on the spot. Some of them were collected and published just after the end of the WWII, as a small booklet in 1945, and then, fifty years later, in 1995 the more posh version of the album has been reprinted in Austria in commemoration of the 50th anniversary ending of the WWII. That is all. Wiesenthal’s on-spot made drawings expressing his feelings at the time are virtually unknown. I am working on filling the gap at the moment.

I saw many things about the Holocaust, camp huts, ‘Dusche’ rooms, ovens for people. I saw shoes, rings, books, spectacles, human hair. I saw everything that is preserved as a material culture of the Holocaust for us to see and to learn. To try to understand, and to get it into our psycho in order to build a barrier against non-humanity. I saw it all, and I had mandate myself to get it without scream, and mostly without cry. I believe that our cries are an extra-joy to the barbarians who conceived, planned  and executed the Shoah, to all and every of their collaborators. And to all of the multitude of their faithful successors today. So I do not cry on these matters. 

But there is one thing that I cannot force myself to see. Nothing has changed in my perception of it since I saw it for the first time in 1993, over a quarter of a century ago by now. It is the children’s drawings made during the Shoah, would it be in Theresienstadt, or anywhere else, from the similar collections at Yad Vashem or at the other great institutions of memory. We all have our limits, and to see the children’s drawings made by the most vulnerable victims of the Shoah is beyond my capacity.  I does not know more powerful anti-Nazi statement than those hapless pictures, but it truly is very hard to be able to see it for many.

 The Works of Pained Memory

There are some great contemporary masters who grew up as the children Holocaust survivors, and who were still living inside the capsule of it for many decades after, in their art, as well.

Samuel Bak is painting the Holocaust all the time producing a vast amount of artistic evidence and statement on it. His works are comparable with Goya’s art depicting war, in its message of screaming protest. And naturally, his work is perceived largely as a personal statement of the artist who is survivor himself.

Alfred Skondovich, the other artist whose art on the Holocaust I am bringing out in my writings and  presentations, demonstrates the other tendency, which is the opposite one to the Samuel Bak’s attitude: Skondovich was so affected by what he was seeing as a youth in Bergen-Belsen that he kept everything that he ever painted on Holocaust secret. His wife has founded it by chance just a few years before the artist’s passing in 2011, and his Holocaust collection of over 70 important works is still virtually unknown even to the specialists.

David Labkovsky who also was a survivor did paint his beloved Vilna in ruins with such force of tormented soul, immediately after the end of the WWII, that his works as if brings the time and its atmosphere back to us intact. The same can be said about the works of Raphael Chwoles, also  survivor. In every work of Chwoles one can see the drama caused by the tragedy of Shoah even if there no Holocaust or war depicted in his great works.

But largely, the art was numbed after the Holocaust. And it was natural reaction. Elie Wiesel did not utter a word about anything Holocaust or war-connected during full ten years after the war’s end. I understand every minute of his silence. I feel the necessity of it. Although the Wiesel’s Night is the one of the most cinematographical prose ever written on any subject, Elie  was categorically against any of many efforts of making a film on his greatest book. He was sure that ‘the Holocaust is impossible to picture’.

In the Mirror of Shoah

We know that up until mid-1980s, there was no such thing, such phenomenon, such tendency, school, direction in the contemporary art as the art on Holocaust. The artists whom I have mentioned and any others were rather exception from the rule.

The logic and the essence of the process of creativity would explain it. Additionally to captivating the moment, documenting something, registering one’s emotions and thoughts, art is essentially about creation. Creation – in a normal world – is a positive activity. It brings joy to those who are busy with it. What joy could Shoah bring? What impulse for creation the abyss can produce?

But as we know, there are the artists today who are painting their reflections on the Shoah. What make them to do it? I can speak with some degree of authority of the artist whom I know well as a person, too. He is my husband, Michael Rogatchi. Michael’s many family members perished in the Shoah. He knew the other camps and its system personally as well, as he was born in the Gulag, and the family lived in exile many years after. He went to school via the emptied camp, he saw there strained animals, and met strained people who had nowhere to go. His family apartment was just 200 metres from the camp. I saw it in person, and even decades later, it chills one inside profoundly.

Michael’s first big international exhibition was organised in Poland, he wanted it this way. It was in Krakow, Oswienciem and Warsaw, in all places where the Shoah has left its deepest scars. It was important for Michael to bring his art there, and to start his big international tour from those very places. Why? Because it is where our memory still pulsates, all the years after the Shoah. Because the small bones which he did find on the ground in Auschwitz were similar to the small bones which he and his friends did find in the step in Kazakhstan in the 1950s and 1960s. But in the case of Auschwitz, it were the part of the bones of our Jewish brethren who were exterminated day and night, methodically, systematically, with a clear purpose, barbarically. 

I was impressed to see that my husband who is always self-controlled and has experienced many terrible things in his life, found it difficult to speak on camera while in Auschwitz. Nothing in one’s life, in no one’s life can prepare one to what a human being is seeing at any of the Nazi concentration camps.

By the time we were filming him in Auschwitz, Michael did create his series on Holocaust. He did it throughout the 1990s, and it was almost completed  by the beginning of 2000s. He did only a couple of more works on Holocaust in mid 2000s, and some recently, but they also were based on his sketches and thoughts back to mid-1990s. The name of the series is In the Mirror of Shoah. Thus, it is a self-examination, too. And one should not be surprised on the pattern, I think – if anything, the essential lesson of Shoah is self-examination of every person who ever thought about it. 

I would always remember my conversation with the Holocaust survivor, Polish Jewish woman living in New York, at the Great Synagogue in Jerusalem, my favourite place of prayer, except the Kotel. She came just for Yitzkor, and was very nervous not to miss it. We spoke afterwards. When we came to speak about the Michael’s art works and that ones on the Shoah, I mentioned quietly: “one does not produce many of those’. It was a long, long pause. And then the elderly lady with a number on her hand told me like not from this world: “No, one certainly does not”. I knew where she was at the moment. And I felt weird to be next to her but without that experience.

***

In Michael’s works on the Shoah, the main thing for him is to content the emotions. His works are marked by special, elaborated laconism. He believes that it is the most appropriate way to deal with pain which does not leave – because this pain would never diminish for a bit, neither would it leave. Many special stories can be told about practically each of those works. On the people who were staying a night long in front of the Final Solution work in Krakow, on the scores of people who had become as if frozen in front of the Faces of Holocaust in museum in Ukraine, on the perception of Shoah by the non-Jewish people who believe that it tells not only on the past, but on the present, too, on the Simon Wiesenthal’s reaction when Michael has presented his The Way to him, on how The Train, The Western Wall and the other paintings has become the tissue and ‘the characters’ of the film in The Lessons of Survival, and on the special and rare sensation of entire enlightening around him that Michael have had in Krakow when walking through completely empty and extremely sad former Jewish Ghetto area, and extraordinary Echo of Kazimierz painting that had been created  out of that rare happening.

From the experience of first-hand witness, I can say that an artist paints the Shoah only when he or she cannot do otherwise. And just because of this principal fact, it is a very special direction of art that includes a great deal of philosophy and psychology, as well.

A Time-Call for Contemporary Arts on Holocaust Forum

The Holocaust museums are largely following the tradition of Yad Vashem that focuses on the Holocaust-period everything, art including. It is fair in many cases, certainly it is fair with regard to Yad Vashem as it goes with its principal concept. But it is also sets the condition of the serious gap in public perception of the contemporary art that reflects Holocaust. Many of my distinguished colleagues, both art historians, psychologists, and historians are looking and speaking about it more and more loudly nowadays. We all feel that we has come to the stage when public and society would only benefit from more detailed exposure and more serious discussion about such special theme as art and the Shoah. And that art categories should certainly include additionally to paintings and drawings, sculpture, music, literature, cinematography, photography, videography, and everything else. We feel that it is a time call for that, if you wish.

For the Time and The Place

In the video present, there are also fine art photography and fine art photography collage works. They are mine. They are referring to the places of the utmost atrocities during the Holocaust, Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania. Later on, the collection was added with the works from Hungary. I have a strong feeling that the less Holocaust survivors we are having around us, the more motivated I am to do more and more art works which would help us to remember. It is as if my eyes are seeing the places and their scars from Shoah more tangibly every next year.

We have created this video as our artistic dialogue.  Working in different techniques and genres on the same theme is mutually supportive. When the genres are as close, as the paths of visual art, paintings and drawing, from one side, and fine art photography and collage from the other, the dimension of paintings provides depth for art photography, while art photography sets the context for paintings.As the result, the volume is synthesised and  the effort and the theme gets a deeper prospect.  

In our family, we do not need a certain, designated one day in a year to remember the Shoah. We both were brought with our both families’ sleepless crying nights over loved ones whom our families did not manage to save from the Nazis and their so very willing collaborators in Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Austria and France. We remember everyone  of the Six Millions every minute of our lives. But on this day, the world is set to bring the conversation about it out. And it is certainly sobering and much needed practice which we support by every mean we can.

For the Name and The Place short art film, musical video-essay, had been created in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of Yad Vashem.  Would it be 70, 80 or more years since the Shoah have had place, we always will be looking in its Mirror.

PROFILE OF ARTISTIC COUPLE BY LEADING FINANCIAL SERVICE COMPANY

Full text of the profile can be read here. 

Art and philanthropy

A personal profile: Michael and Inna Rogatchi.

By Nicholas Toubkin (C)

At Strabens Hall we frequently come across individuals who have a firm commitment to using their talents, influence and resources to make a real difference to others.

Philanthropy is a topic that we often discuss with our clients – and more specifically, how best to make a meaningful impact with charitable initiatives. A prime example of such people are Inna and Michael Rogatchi who have an unwavering dedication to using their remarkable artistic talents for the greater good.

If you looked in a pictorial dictionary for a definition of ‘polymath’, you might see a photograph of the Rogatchis.  Inna is a writer, scholar, lecturer, film maker and art photographer.  Michael is an artist, but with an MSC in Neuroscience.

In 2013 they received an award for ‘Outstanding contribution to the Arts and Culture’ – the first time that this award had been received by a couple of artists rather than an individual, and 2016 they exhibited their works together for the first time.  The exhibition was fittingly called ‘At the Same time’.

Whilst Inna and Michael are both renowned artists, their works manifest themselves in very different forms. Michael’s work follows a rare genre of ‘metaphorical expressionism’, and is the only living artist who has had a personal retrospective at the Tampere Hall, Scandinavia’s largest art museum. Inna’s art is an original form of photography, and has resulted in her being the first individual to win the Volo di Pegaso Italian National Art, Literature and Music award twice.

Michael and Inna’s work can be found in the premises of the European Union and European Parliament, fitting indeed for this couple who are truly European, as they split their time between Finland and Italy.

Whilst their artistic achievements are so notable, what really sets the Rogatchis apart is their commitment to charity. They were co-founders of ‘Arts Against Cancer’ where the Honorable Chairman was Rostropovich and subsequently established the Rogatchi Foundation to take a more targeted approach to their charitable activities.

They promote art and culture, support moral heritage, help young talents, and provide for the elderly and needy, specifically focussing on orphans. They passionately believe that art and culture can play an exceptionally powerful role in philanthropy and in making a difference to those in need. The Rogatchi’s life is a whirlwind of activity and as the couples’ artistic endeavours become more widely known, their schedule becomes busier. It is clear that as much as their artistic passion drives them to do more and more, it is the knowledge that much of what they do is ultimately for the greater good that gives them their drive to succeed and is the true inspiration behind their passion. Their latest initiative is to support children’s art education and to this end they are producing 65 limited edition prints of ‘Duetto in Rain’ which will support this ‘For the Artists of Tomorrow’ project.

As a private client adviser, there is little more fascinating than understanding what motivates clients. In the Rogatchi’s case, it is clear that their desire to leave a legacy and to demonstrably improve the lives of those less fortunate than themselves is the fuel of their many artistic achievements.

Nicholas Toubkin, Senior Client Director.