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Jeffrey Wolin
Jadzia Strykowska, b. 1924, Tomaszow-Maz, Poland
[Written In Memory: Portraits of the Holocaust]
1992-1994
Gelatin silver print
Provided by the artist - Jeffrey Wolin
LL/96437
Jadzia Strykowska, b. 1924, Tomaszow-Maz, Poland
"Before I smuggled out from the ghetto to join the underground my mother gave me a little celluloid tube and I put there in a poison pill and my mother gave me some valuable stones to put in there... After my capture I was sitting in the cattle car cutting out my pictures, the faces of my mother and the faces of my father. I also cut out a little picture of myself because I wanted to remind myself how I really look. And I had a picture of my brother and me and we were in a summer place the year before the war started. Then I also cut out a picture of my Zionist platoon leader, Icek Rosenblatt and I cut around the picture of my platoon, Beit-Shan, that we made before we left and I rolled them up all tightly, I left the poison pill, I took out the stones and I put in the pictures…
We arrived on a very freezing January evening to Bergen-Belsen. So we went in to get a shower and right before we went in I took my tube and I put it in my rectum. They searched you again in your hair and you had to open the mouth and some of the people they even checked internally, whether they didn't hide any valuables. I was lucky-I passed... It was miserable there. They had us schlep stones from one place to the other just to wear us out so they wouldn't even have to use a bullet on us. And so every day the circumstances got harder and harder. My solace were my pictures. When I came in in the evening I used to unroll them and look at them and I said, 'My goodness, I am not from stone. I am from people. I am from a family.'…
We were in Skokie in 1977 when the situation came out with the Nazis that they wanted to march here. This was already too much. Before that we didn't talk for a few reasons. People did not want to listen. They told us to forget about it, to start a new life, to live here for today not for yesterday. It's not a question of forgetting; we never, ever forgot. But as I say we got involved in everyday life and when the Nazis wanted to come here under our windows, so to say, that was a little too much and it kind of woke us up and we decided not to let it happen because freedom of speech is not freedom to slander. They legally later on won that they can walk but they got afraid to walk here because they knew that we would never let them get out alive from here... When it was over we started speaking, we started telling our stories."
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