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“I did what I had to
do; I couldn’t refrain from doing it. My heart commanded, my
conscience demanded, the hatred for fascism reigned.” In these
words, artist Private Zinovii Tolkatchev embodies the creative
essence of one who arrived at the gates of hell in Red Army
uniform.
Tolkatchev’s art was
charted on the wings of the Bolshevik Revolution, created in
conviction of its justness. Simultaneously with enlisting his art
for the revolution, Tolkatchev the artist began to search for an
additional expressive mode to manifest personal layers in his
works. Tolkatchev was drawn to printing techniques and created
several series of illustration to the works of many authors and
poets. These works embody an epic breadth and monumentalism of a
different kind. In 1941, shortly before the outbreak of Operation
Barbarossa, Tolkatchev completed a large-scale series titled “The
Shtetl” based on the stories of Sholem Aleichem. In this series he
depicts – with great power – the suffering of the Jewish people
under Czarist rule. These works reveal another important side of
Tolkatchev’s creative impetus – his bond with the Jewish people.
With the USSR entering
the war in June 1941, Tolkatchev volunteered to join the front.
However, only towards the end of the war, in Autumn 1944, did Army
officials respond to Tolkatchev’s request, and he was sent to
serve in the Political Department in the First Ukrainian Front,
which at the time was stationed in Lublin, adjacent to the
Majdanek extermination camp. “Hatred guided my brush, urged me
on, the brutal reality inflamed my imagination.” Horrified by the
scenes he witnessed, Tolkatchev, in a spiritual whirlwind,
immersed himself for thirty-five days with hardly any food or
sleep, in painting the Majdanek series. Tolkatchev showed his
initial works to a member of the Polish-Soviet
Nazi Crimes Investigation Commission, who urged him to finish the
series before November 27, 1944, the opening day of the Majdanek
camp commanders’ trial. The exhibition opened the day before the
trial, at the Lublin Art Museum and was reviewed extensively in
the Polish press. In Lublin alone, 128,000 tickets were sold, and
from there, it traveled to other cities. In the Majdanek series,
Tolkatchev’s was able to create, as if from nowhere, a set of
symbols that express the horrors of the Majdanek extermination
camp. The fact of the matter is that Tolkatchev enlisted those
same capacities already encountered in his earlier works, that is,
his ability to synopsize and focalize. However, now Tolkatchev
was painting neither in the service of the Revolution, nor of the
author-poet; rather, he bluntly presented his viewers with the
hard and brutal reality that he experienced and which had stricken
his people, Soviet and Jewish alike.
“A cold winter wind
howls over Auschwitz, surrounded by three rows of barbed-wire
fence. It seems that it is not the barbed-wire that trembles and
howls, but the tortured earth itself which moans with the voices
of the victims.” The barbed-wire fences of Majdanek did not
prepare Tolkatchev for his next mission. At the end of January
1945 he accompanies the Nazi Crimes Investigation Commission to
Auschwitz, literally hours after the entrance of the Red Army into
the camp. Again Tolkatchev is seized by the urge to capture the
scenes, the voices. In the absence of drawing paper he enters the
camp’s former headquarters and takes stationery with bold black
letters: Kommandantur Konzentrationslager Auschwitz;
I.G. Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft; Der Oberpräsident
der Provinz Oberschlesien. The typography becomes an integral
part of the composition and the image of the Nazi oppressor, who
Tolkatchev refrains from perpetuating, stands before us. As if
possessed by madness, he draws sketches of what he sees. Abutting
the sketches he adds densely written lines with the testimony of
the few survivors able to utter words. Adjacent, he jots
repeatedly – “to remember, not to forget”. By using meager
materials of pencil and paper, intimate in scale, Tolkatchev
succeeds in creating art of monumental scope. The understanding
that on these very same pieces of paper just a few days prior were
written orders of extermination endow them with a tragic power
that causes one to shudder.
As one who began his
artistic oeuvre as an enlisted artist and a monumentalist, much
like Käthe Kollwitz in Germany of the 1920s and 1930s, or the
Mexicans Diego Rivera and Jose Oroszco of the same period, he
depicts ultimate horror in the minor chord of pencil drawings.
The spare materials on the one hand and forcefulness of expression
that awakens emotions on the other, is reminiscent of the early 19th
century series of prints, “Disasters of War” by the Spanish artist
Francisco Goya.
“…I couldn’t tear
myself away from that same piece of cursed land that was left
behind, and from the terrible human abyss. My whole body was
wracked with dumb sobbing. I had left Auschwitz behind.” Auschwitz
was not left behind; it emerges with all of its horrors from the
scenes rising before us, drawn by a Red Army soldier, an artist
and a Jew.
Yehudit Shendar
Senior Curator, Yad Vashem Art Museum |
