Patrizia Sonato
Photography
If this is a man
JERUSALEM, BERLIN, KAUNAS: the question immediately arises as to what could be the common thread that unites these three geographically distant, but in other ways very close, cities.
JERUSALEM, Holy City for the three monotheistic religions, yet the theater where the incurable Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been raging for decades.
In Jerusalem in 1953, with an act of the Israeli Parliament, Yad Vashem was established, the national Holocaust remembrance body to document and pass on the history of the Jewish people during the Nazi persecutions, so that the sacrifice of millions of innocent people would not be forgotten. It represents the main museum dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust within which there is an extraordinary historical archive. The site also has the task of remembering the Righteous Among the Nations, who risked their lives to help the Jews during the Shoah.
“And for them I will grant in my house and within my walls a monument and a name (a “Yad Vashem”) […] which will never be erased” (Isaiah 56.5).
BERLIN, where in the 1940s plans were drawn up for the "final solution to the Jewish question", aimed at the annihilation and mass destruction of the Jewish people.
In memory of these events, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, also known as the Holocaust Memorial (or Shoah Memorial), was built in Berlin in 2003. Furthermore, in 2001 the Jewish Museum Berlin (JĂĽdisches Museum Berlin) was inaugurated, the largest Jewish museum in Europe, designed by architect Daniel Libeskind. Two millennia of Jewish history in Germany retraced through such original architectural solutions that make the museum itself a work of art.
KAUNAS, Lithuania's second city, was invaded first by Soviet troops, then by German ones, in the Second World War. During the German occupation the Ninth Fort was the site of mass exterminations: around 200,000 German and Austrian Jews were massacred there. The Ninth Fort Museum houses a collection of historical artifacts related to both the Nazi genocide and Soviet atrocities. Near the Fort there is a 32 meter high monument designed by the sculptor A. Ambraziūnas, dedicated to the victims of Nazism.
Three cities crossed by the tragedies that shocked the 20th century, united by one word: JEWS.
Jerusalem, Berlin and Kaunas provide the backdrop to the dramatic story of the genocide of the Jews that took place in the heart of Europe.
The itinerary starts from the Jewish museum in Berlin and winds through suggestions that accompany you on a journey towards "absolute evil", where, in the name of an ideology, millions of men, women and children were first annihilated as people and then killed. It is a journey into memory, with the warning of memory: because only by remembering the atrocities of the past can man not repeat them in the future. Then it was the purity of the race, today it is Islam according to ISIS, tomorrow...
And suddenly the clang of the metal masks lying carefully on the museum floor transforms into the cries of the boys running to Jerusalem, the faces of steel in the animated faces of men and women on the streets of the ghetto which already presage the arrival of times sadder. The persecutions begin, the mad tormentor will soon tear them away from their city, from their home, from fathers, mothers, children, from everything to which they were linked in order to fulfill that demonic project of the mass elimination of the entire Jewish people. The children run between the walls of the memorial, the terror painted in their eyes is part of the game?
Time is up, the convoy has arrived, it will take them to Auschwitz or another of those camps with no way out where, as Primo Levi says, "for the first time we realized that our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of a man. […] Nothing is ours anymore: they took away our clothes, our shoes, and even our hair. […] They will also take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find within ourselves the strength to do so, to ensure that behind the name, something of us, of us as we were, still remains”.
The title of the work is inspired by the famous work by Primo Levi: IF THIS IS A MAN.
“If this is a man”, referable to the victim? Is someone who has been deprived of all his goods, material and spiritual, and of his name and yet committed to preserving his own identity by surviving an unspeakable tragedy, to be considered a man?
Does “if this be a man” refer to the executioner? Is someone considered a man who "has as his aim the annihilation of man, who before dying must be degraded so that when he dies it can be said that he was not a man?", quoting the words of the Nazi commander Franz Stangl.
“Meditate that this was,” writes Primo Levi, a verse that expresses all the value of memory, so that what has been is not repeated.
Jerusalem, Berlin, Kaunas, 2015
JERUSALEM, Holy City for the three monotheistic religions, yet the theater where the incurable Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been raging for decades.
In Jerusalem in 1953, with an act of the Israeli Parliament, Yad Vashem was established, the national Holocaust remembrance body to document and pass on the history of the Jewish people during the Nazi persecutions, so that the sacrifice of millions of innocent people would not be forgotten. It represents the main museum dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust within which there is an extraordinary historical archive. The site also has the task of remembering the Righteous Among the Nations, who risked their lives to help the Jews during the Shoah.
“And for them I will grant in my house and within my walls a monument and a name (a “Yad Vashem”) […] which will never be erased” (Isaiah 56.5).
BERLIN, where in the 1940s plans were drawn up for the "final solution to the Jewish question", aimed at the annihilation and mass destruction of the Jewish people.
In memory of these events, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, also known as the Holocaust Memorial (or Shoah Memorial), was built in Berlin in 2003. Furthermore, in 2001 the Jewish Museum Berlin (JĂĽdisches Museum Berlin) was inaugurated, the largest Jewish museum in Europe, designed by architect Daniel Libeskind. Two millennia of Jewish history in Germany retraced through such original architectural solutions that make the museum itself a work of art.
KAUNAS, Lithuania's second city, was invaded first by Soviet troops, then by German ones, in the Second World War. During the German occupation the Ninth Fort was the site of mass exterminations: around 200,000 German and Austrian Jews were massacred there. The Ninth Fort Museum houses a collection of historical artifacts related to both the Nazi genocide and Soviet atrocities. Near the Fort there is a 32 meter high monument designed by the sculptor A. Ambraziūnas, dedicated to the victims of Nazism.
Three cities crossed by the tragedies that shocked the 20th century, united by one word: JEWS.
Jerusalem, Berlin and Kaunas provide the backdrop to the dramatic story of the genocide of the Jews that took place in the heart of Europe.
The itinerary starts from the Jewish museum in Berlin and winds through suggestions that accompany you on a journey towards "absolute evil", where, in the name of an ideology, millions of men, women and children were first annihilated as people and then killed. It is a journey into memory, with the warning of memory: because only by remembering the atrocities of the past can man not repeat them in the future. Then it was the purity of the race, today it is Islam according to ISIS, tomorrow...
And suddenly the clang of the metal masks lying carefully on the museum floor transforms into the cries of the boys running to Jerusalem, the faces of steel in the animated faces of men and women on the streets of the ghetto which already presage the arrival of times sadder. The persecutions begin, the mad tormentor will soon tear them away from their city, from their home, from fathers, mothers, children, from everything to which they were linked in order to fulfill that demonic project of the mass elimination of the entire Jewish people. The children run between the walls of the memorial, the terror painted in their eyes is part of the game?
Time is up, the convoy has arrived, it will take them to Auschwitz or another of those camps with no way out where, as Primo Levi says, "for the first time we realized that our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of a man. […] Nothing is ours anymore: they took away our clothes, our shoes, and even our hair. […] They will also take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find within ourselves the strength to do so, to ensure that behind the name, something of us, of us as we were, still remains”.
The title of the work is inspired by the famous work by Primo Levi: IF THIS IS A MAN.
“If this is a man”, referable to the victim? Is someone who has been deprived of all his goods, material and spiritual, and of his name and yet committed to preserving his own identity by surviving an unspeakable tragedy, to be considered a man?
Does “if this be a man” refer to the executioner? Is someone considered a man who "has as his aim the annihilation of man, who before dying must be degraded so that when he dies it can be said that he was not a man?", quoting the words of the Nazi commander Franz Stangl.
“Meditate that this was,” writes Primo Levi, a verse that expresses all the value of memory, so that what has been is not repeated.
Jerusalem, Berlin, Kaunas, 2015
