have chose to make my sculptures from papier-mâché and put them in stagelike environments.
In the past, I have worked with puppets in all facets of pupet theater. Supporting
my intention to go this route was the ironic symbolism I found in the film Shoah:
a
survivor of Sobibor tells that under threat of death, any inmates were forbidden
to refer to Jewish dead as "corpses" or "victims" or any term that suggested humanity.
The Germans forced the inmates to call the bodies figuren – "puppets."
This piece evolved after my extraordinary journey to Poland and Israel in 1992
with "March of the Living." Joining five thousand Jewish high school students,
adults and survivors of the death camps, we paid tribute to the memory of six
million European Jews who perished. Spiritual comfort is derived from saying the
Kaddish, the Jewish prayer to cherish the memory of a deceased person. Entire
families, however, were eradicated in the Holocaust. Who will say Kaddish for
them?
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