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Execution in Snow
The composition of this painting is derived from several documentary photographs of executions by German police. The scantily clad woman is in marked contrast with her executioners in their heavy winter uniforms. She pleads for her life, a helpless and solitary figure facing her menacing executioners.
IntroductionSilent Voices Speak—Remembering the Holocaust represents one artist's effort to put a human face on a devastating event in the history of our times—the Holocaust. The mixed-media works in this exhibition are based on black-and-white documentary photographs taken in Europe between 1933 and 1945. The haunting, horrific scenes depicted cannot be disputed, even though deniers of the Holocaust have tried. The photographs were obtained from the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
The Nazi dictatorship of the 1930s plunged the world into war; over 35 million people, half of them civilians, were killed. Six million Jews were murdered during what Adolf Hitler called "The Final Solution." His plan was to annihilate an entire race and culture, to wipe out European Jewry's existence and every trace of its civilization. Soviet prisoners of war, European Gypsies and other ethnic minorities, and disenfranchised individuals also were killed, or died from starvation and brutal mistreatment at the hands of the German army and Nazi sympathizers.
The Nazis carried out the systematic destruction of the Jews in the most unimaginably cruel and violent manner. Jews were rounded up and deported, until almost the entire population of Eastern European Jewry was isolated in ghettos. They were then transported to concentration camps, where they were used as slave labor or sent to gas chambers and crematoria.