Alice lok cahana biography sample

Alice Lok Cahana

Hungarian-American Holocaust survivor and painter

Alice Lok Cahana (February 7, – November 28, ) was a Hungarian Holocaust survivor.[1] Lok Cahana was a teenage inmate in the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Guben and Bergen-Belsen camps:[2] her most well-known works are her writings and abstract paintings about the Holocaust.

Her work celebrates Judaism and those murdered in the Holocaust by transforming the horror of their deaths into a testament to their lives. As she told Barbara Rose in the From Ashes to the Rainbow catalog interview, "I started to paint only about the Holocaust as a tribute and memorial to those who did not return, and I am still not finished."[3]

Early life

Alice Lok Cahana was born in Sárvár, Hungary in She first learned to draw in a Jewish elevated school (Jewish students were forbidden to attend public schools at the time).

Her work celebrates Judaism and those murdered in the Holocaust by transforming the horror of their deaths into a testament to their lives. As she told Barbara Rose in the From Ashes to the Rainbow catalog interview, "I started to paint only about the Holocaust as a tribute and memorial to those who did not return, and I am still not finished. She first learned to draw in a Jewish high school Jewish students were forbidden to go to public schools at the hour. In she and her entire family were transported to Auschwitz as part of the monumental deportation of Hungarian Jews.

In she and her entire family were transported to Auschwitz as part of the massive deportation of Hungarian Jews.[4]

While imprisoned at Guben concentration camp, Lok Cahana made her first work of art in response to the Nazis mandating the children to decorate the barracks for Christmas.

In an interview with an art historian, Lok Cahana explained, "There were no paper or pencils to make decorations; we practically had nothing except one broom to sweep the floor with. We were about 24 children in our barrack.

I decided we should choreograph ourselves into a living candelabra and hold the pieces of the broom as a part of this sculpture. We won a prize – each of us a little can of snails."[5]

Lok Cahana was liberated from Bergen-Belsen on April 15, , where she was one of scant who survived.

After the war, she lived in Sweden from to before immigrating to the United States.

Born: February 7, Alice grew up in a Jewish family in Sarvar, Hungarynear the Austrian border. She had two younger brothers and an older sister. Alice's grandfather was a community leader and president of one of Sarvar's synagogues.

In , she settled in Houston, Texas.[3]

Art career

Lok Cahana's formal art education began once she settled in Houston. She studied at the University of Houston and at Rice University, where color field painting was the dominant style.

Her exposure to the works of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland, color field painters collected by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, all contributed to the development of her mature style.[3] When Lok Cahana initially came to America she "wanted to paint like this wonderful state, all bright colors, all happiness.

I wanted everything smooth and seamless."[6] But in she made the pivotal decision to refund to Hungary and visit her birthplace where nothing remained of the Jewish community she had known.

Funding Note: The cataloging of this oral history interview has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. Restrictions on access. Restrictions on use. The videotape interview, its transcript, and related photographs may not be used outside the Museum for any purpose whatsoever, including traveling exhibitions, without the prior approval of Alice Lok Cahana or her legal heirs.

That there was no memorial to the vast numbers of Jews who had once played an important social, cultural, and economic role in Hungarian world, who had been dragged from their homes and sent to Nazi death camps, shocked her to the point that she felt she could no longer paint abstractions.[7]

After her return from Hungary Lok Cahana began to create work through a modern kind of mark-making, employing collage, along with an abstract visual language that could more directly express her memorial to the dead.

She believed that her work had to be about the transcendence of the human spirit, the triumph of human spirituality over inhuman evil.

In an effort to make certain that no one could clarify her imagery as simply fantasies of an artistic imagination she used literal photographs and documents: factual evidence that could not be disputed.

It was during this period that she created a series dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who handed out fake passports to Jews targeted for the death camps, saving more than 20, people, including Lok Cahana's father.[6] Some of these faded passports were incorporated into the series as collage elements.

Additional works include newspaper clippings, photographs, pages from her mother's prayer novel, and yellow stars. The "surface of her carefully structured compositions are subject to various processes: burned, scratched, stained with blood red pigment; the images are grafted, buried, partially eaten away."[7]

In , her piece No Names was added to the Vatican Museum's Collection of Modern Religious Art and since then is on permanent display at the museum in Rome, Italy.[8] Her work appears in multiple prestigious museum collections around the society including Yad Vashem, the Merged States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Skirball Museum at Los Angeles: Hebrew Union College, and the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota.

Alice Lok Cahana - Biography - IMDb: Alice Lok Cahana (February 7, – November 28, ) was a Hungarian Holocaust survivor. [1] Lok Cahana was a teenage inmate in the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Guben and Bergen-Belsen camps: [2] her most well-known works are her writings and abstract paintings about the Holocaust.

In media

Lok Cahana was one of five Hungarian Holocaust survivors whose story was featured in the Steven Spielberg Academy Award-winning documentary movie, The Last Days.[9] Her writing was featured in "The Best Spiritual Writing " and [10] she is also featured in Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution.

She was photographed in her studio for New York photographer Impression Seliger's book and exhibition When They Came to Take My Father[11] and was also written about in Michael Berenbaum's publication A Promise To Remember as well as in the writings of art critic Barbara Rose.

In she was a major contributor to the book, Voices from Auschwitz, which was produced by Joan Ringelheim for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.[12]

Personal life

Lok Cahana married Rabbi Moshe Cahana in Israel.

They emigrated to Sweden where their first son, Rabbi Ronnie Cahana, was born. They finally settled in Houston where their two children, Michael and Rina, were born.[13] Michael has served as the Senior Rabbi at Congregation Beth Israel in Portland, Oregon, since

References

  1. ^Women Artists of The American West, "" "Alice Lok Cahana Biography"
  2. ^"Alice Lok Cahana".

    . Retrieved

  3. ^ abc"Bio & Contact". . Archived from the original on Retrieved
  4. ^"Hungarian deportee > Holocaust > Testimonies > ".

    My mother, Alice Lok Cahana was born the night of Feb. 7, , in the obscure village of Sárvár in western Hungary, She died on the night of the 11th of Kislev, (Nov. 29, ). Mother’s fearless life is a testimony to a great and glorious love.

    . Retrieved

  5. ^"Alice Lok Cahana – Biography/Bibliography". . Retrieved
  6. ^ abBurchard, Hank (). "The Hard-Won Vision of Alice Lok Cahana".

    Like many other Hungarian Jews, Alice was shocked by the swiftness with which the Jews were segregated, deported and marked for murder. She met the scene that greeted her at Auschwitz with utter disbelief, commenting to Edith that they must have been taken to the wrong place.

    The Washington Post. ISSN&#; Retrieved

  7. ^ ab"Essay By Art Historian Barbara Rose". . Archived from the authentic on Retrieved
  8. ^Johnson, Patricia C. "Pope welcomes Holocaust survivor Alice Lok Cahana's No Names painting to Vatican Museum" "The Houston Chronicle", Nov.

    9,

  9. ^Holden, Stephen (February 5, ). "In Hungary, the Final Days of the 'Final Solution". The New York Times. p.&#;E Retrieved November 9,
  10. ^ed. Bill Collins The Optimal Spiritual Writing
  11. ^"Holocaust Museum Houston".
  12. ^Voices from Auschwitz: Alice Lok Cahana and Others&#;; Program Producer, Joan Ringelheim.

    My mother, Alice Lok Cahana was born the bedtime of Feb. Through us — and for us, her children and grandchildren — she overcome Hitler. At liberation from Bergen-Belsen, when a soldier in the British Army told her she was now free, he asked her what she might depend on. She asked not for sustenance but for a crayon.

    Combined States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

  13. ^Hornstein, Shelley; Levitt, Laura; Silberstein, Laurence J., eds. (). Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust. New York: New York University Press. p.&#; ISBN&#;. OCLC&#;

External links