MegilLA: The Thread of the Holocaust
April 8, 2021
Folks,
On Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, we stop to remember and mourn the Jewish lives lost to hatred. In the struggle to recapture some essence of their existence cut short, we look to the remaining survivors to show us the shadows, the roads to avoid, and perhaps a thread of hope.
Edmon J. Rodman
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GUIDE FOR THE JEWPLEXED
A stitch in time
Edmon J. Rodman
When we think about the Holocaust and concentration camps, what kind of picture comes to mind? Something dark, hopeless, and circumscribed by barbed wire? On Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, a look at the tapestries of artist and Holocaust survivor Trudie Strobel add new textures and a ray of light in our struggle to navigate the darkness of this day.
Through her meticulously sewn and thought-through creations, Strobel stitches together the pain, shock, and sometimes, the hopes of a child, who in the late 1930s, was forced along with her mother into the Lodz Ghetto in Poland and then to a labor camp.
Trudie, born in 1938 in Ukraine, was only 4 when she and her mother Masha were taken from their home by the Nazis and herded over 600 miles to Lodz in 1942. Before the war had even began, her father, who she never met, was taken to Siberia, as a result of Stalin’s Campaigns of Terror.
Wherever they were sent her mother, an expert seamstress, was put to work, and her sewing saved their lives.
"Russia 1942," Trudie Strobel
“This is my experience in the camp,” said Strobel, pointing to a nearby tapestry, when I interviewed her in 2019 during the opening of a show of her work at Harvard-Westlakes's Feldman Gallery. “In Lodz, as you can see, my doll was torn away from me. I stayed silent for so many years.”
"Trudie's Goose" Trudie Strobel
Close by was another image, her first, of a goose in flight done in beads, created after she and her mother were liberated.
“I started the goose when I was 7. I was in a displacement camp,” said Strobel, who is in her 80s. The Red Cross gave me a wooden box with beds. I see these beads and I’m so excited. That’s the first time my mama saw a spark of life in me.”
Trudie recalls her mother saying: “‘We’ll make something of this.’” “Could it be a goose, mama?” she remembers asking.
Her mother found a picture of a flying goose and copied its outline onto parchment paper. “She attached it to a piece of her skirt,” said Strobel.
She then taught her daughter how to attach the beads, adding: “Trudeleh, put the beads close together on the neck. Because the goose needs a stiff neck in order to fly.”
“This is where I began to come half a person again,” said Strobel. Yet it was also when her art stopped for many years. In a film “Stitching a Life: The Story of Trudie Strobel,” made through the Righteous Conversations Project by Harvard-Westlake’s Summer Film Program, Trudie tells the story of how after coming to the U.S. and marrying a Holocaust survivor—they never discussed their experiences— she began to study to become a nurse. “I had finished all my prerequisites, and I became deeply, deeply depressed. I had to go and see a psychiatrist. I mentioned my doll that was lost.”
To help her heal, the therapist suggested that Trudie make a doll and dress it as she had been dressed. “Suddenly, a spark came into my brain,” she said. In studying why Jews were forced to wear a Star of David on their clothes, she discovered that they had been forced to wear stars for 11 centuries. It took her a year, and she created a doll for each, eventually resulting in the “Badges of Shame” exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. “It was a year of tears and it actually saved my life,” she said.
Making the dolls gave her all the thread she needed to begin to put her Holocaust experiences down on fabric. “I have never had an art class in my life,” she said. “It’s in me.”
That’s not to say she works without a process. “I sketch first, and put in the shadows, and then go over it with a thick pen so it can be seen through the fabric.” Next, she embroiders a black outline around each figure.
“I use beads all the time in all my work,” she said. In a tapestry which tells the story of life and death in Lodz (See opening photo), from coming in on the train, to becoming spent, starved figures in their final hours, Strobel uses a steam of silverish beads, in the form of a hand to let light into the story. “Unter Danye Vayse Shtern,” “Under Your White Stars,” it says in Yiddish. “There is hope in the picture,” she said.
Trudie Strobel
In 2019, mass deaths based on hatred caught her attention as well. “It hurt me deeply,” she says in the film, when hearing the news about the mass killing of 51 Moslems in two mosques in New Zealand. “Hate comes out in different ways. Even in our country, we have to be very careful to judge it the right way.…this is right of every human being: that they can believe what they want to believe…we have to respect each other in our country.”
Since the show, a book of her work "Stitched & Sewn," by Jody Savin was published. During the Holocaust, “stitching had saved Trudie’s life,” wrote Savin, and later, “stitching would save it again.”
Renee Firestone Style
(B. 1924), a Holocaust Survivor, during her career, was a leading designer of mid-twentieth century California fashion. In pre-war Czechoslovakia, her father had owned a tailoring and textile business and her mother was a milliner. In the 1950s, after working on her own as a designer, and with others, including Rudi Gernreich, she started her own line in 1961. Bringing a new spirit to women’s wear, her line emphasized a functional style with, eye-catching details; a style which became associated with the California look. (See her Holocaust testimony HERE.)