When I was younger, I always thought I might be an artist one day, until I abandoned that thought and chose the safe and easy way: Social Sciences. I told myself, I’ll always do Arts next to everything else. However, in my first year of Uni, I was so occupied with other things that I didn’t get around doing a lot of arts.

Now, I’ve even found a way of incorporating Arts into my academic curriculum. At UCG, we have the opportunity to do a free form assignment, which can be a project that can take any form from an artistic format to a research project or an internship. Few weeks ago, Ava, a friend of mine came up with the idea to do an Arts project. The project entails collecting stories of people who have experienced human conflict and displaying them with accompanied artwork in an exhibition. This arts project is a completely different challenge than anything else I’ve done so far in academia. Transforming words with a paintbrush is one thing, but the most difficult thing is to try  interpret and empathize with somebody’s subjective experience - That is something you don’t learn when writing essays and memorizing exam material.

So in order to get some inspiration, I went to an exhibition today, that in a few ways also resembles our project. It was called ‘Stories of Hope’ and was organized by a couple of honours students from the Art academy Minerva. The exhibition featured heroic stories of the holocaust which were presented through Art pieces from artists from the Netherlands. Alongside the exhibition was also a program that involved a series of guest speakers. The first guest speaker was the manager of the Synagogue here in Groningen and spoke about the history of the Synagogue and how it evolved to become what it is now: A centre for worship but also a jewish cultural corner. The talk that followed, has definitely had a lasting effect on me. A woman, who also happened to be one of the artists of some of the exhibited pieces, told the story of her parents, who have both survived several concentration camps. As cruel as the events in the story are, parts of it always prompt sparks of hope. What is powerful enough to create hope in such circumstances? Figures who did not close their eyes, but showed humanity. Figures who risked their positions and lives to save others. There is plenty of these stories, yet many of them remain untold.

The story of her parents sounds surreal. Her mother was already facing her own death in Auschwitz when suddenly she took charge of an opportunity and when all the guards were looking away, she quickly ran to the group of women that were deemed healthy and fit to work. She described another moment, in which she was about to board a train to a camp and a little boy gave her a piece of sausage, which had the worth of a piece of gold in those times. Meanwhile, her father also risked a brave move. He jumped out of the Truck that was taking them to the camp and walked for hours bearfoot in the snow until polish policemen picked him up and brought him to Schindler’s factory that allowed jews to work there, granting them protection.

Of course, the pieces of art that were created according to the stories, deserve just as much credit. One sentence I will surely remember, is when the guest speaker said: “In times of crisis, be an artist”. She herself has used art as a tool to tell the untold stories of the Holocaust. She has painted a series of portraits, which she has all printed on empty diaries - I think you can imagine why they are empty diaries.

Hopefully, we will be able to have our exhibition in a few weeks, so you will be hearing more of it soon.

Cheers,

Eva