At the beginning of the pandemic in March of 2020 my husband and I were in Berlin, Germany. We had gone there so that we could attend the opening of a show in which I had two pieces curated by Dorit Jordan Dotan. During our stay things worsened and we returned to the US on the last day before flights were halted into the US. When we got back to Hudson we found that things were rapidly changing and that it had become very difficult to find the things which we would need. This is a long winded way of getting to the important part which is that, because we couldn’t find masks to buy and ordering them online seemed to have six to twelve week, delivery times, I went out and bought a sewing machine and I set to making masks. I had never sewn anything that required following a pattern before, but with a little patience and a lot of time on my hands I churned out a bunch of them. After I had gotten the hang of mask making I decided that we might like to have matching hats so that despite the pandemic we could walk our dog Hirschl in style. In the end I discovered that sewing is something I enjoy. I’ve since made some clothing and now I have set out to incorporate my new found love of sewing into more serious work. I’m still just at the beginning of this venture but I wanted to show here what has emerged this far.

auschwitz quilt

The idea for the Auschwitz quilt came to me while I was working on my first quilt a month or so prior to my beginning work on it. I glanced at the bookshelf in my studio and my eyes fixed on the catalogue for David Wojnarowicz’s show at The Whitney Museum entitled, “History Keeps Me Awake at Night.” History does often keep me awake at night and I thought that the concept might be explored in the making of a quilt which would illustrate what history it is that keeps me awake most often. As a person whose family in Europe was almost completely wiped out by the perpetrators of the holocaust, I’ve struggled with not knowing exactly what happened to my relatives, all I’ve ever concretely known is that they were murdered by either Nazis or those who were complicit with them. I know about many of the various horrors that might have been perpetrated against them, but I will never know in which barbaric way their lives were taken from them and what suffering they were forced to endure before their deaths. A quilt is in many ways the last medium one would think to use to make artwork about the holocaust. Quilts represent comfort and safety and coziness to most of us. They may be an expression of love the maker of a quilt has for the recipient of that quilt. The perpetrators of the holocaust were motivated by hatred. They inflicted deprivation, fear, torture, and murder upon their targeted victims. One doesn’t normally seek out images of hate and violence, suffering, and death as one prepares for a restful night’s sleep and this quilt might cause history to keep awake whomsoever decides to sleep beneath it. I have tattooed, in embroidery, the arm of the figure on the quilt with the number A-12745. That number was assigned to a prisoner at Auschwitz and tattooed on their arm, but to me that specific number represents the date of the liberation of Auschwitz which was January 27, 1945. The figure in the Auschwitz Quilt is male due to a mistake which I made when I contacted the information department at Auschwitz to inquire about the identity of the bearer of the number which I used. I had transposed the digits 4 and 5 and thus was given the name of prisoner number A-12754 who was a Hungarian Jewish man named Lajos Lefkowitz. When I realized my mistake I contacted the information department again and was given the name of a Hungarian Jewish woman named Sara Sztark. They were likely on the same transport to Auschwitz given the sequence of the numbers. Perhaps they were crammed together with many others in the same cattle car that carried them from Hungary to Poland. I began work on the Sara Quilt once I realized my error. Both Lajos and Sara arrived at Auschwitz on June 7, 1944. They survived selection upon arrival which meant that they were destined for slave labor and starvation. I don’t know what became of either of them.