Yad Vashem Exhibits Holocaust Art as Seen by Survivors

Nearly 300 survivors of the Holocaust channeled their memories into the pieces on display since Monday at Yad Vashem’s Virtues of Memory: Six Decades of Holocaust Survivors' Creativity. The exhibit, curators say, is an opportunity to add a dimension to the thorough documentation of survivors’ memories, which up until now has been dominated by print and oral histories. "We have been used to listening to survivors, but we have neglected the visual memory," said Yehudit Shendar, the senior curator at Yad Vashem. The works focus on the themes of family, faith, and pain, bringing a new reality to depictions of the Holocaust. "We tend to think of the Holocaust as black-and-white," Shendar added, "but black-and-white is just the camera of the perpetrators. Colors don’t mean 'happy,' they just mean real."