One of the most moving scenes in Steven Spielberg's 1993 movie Schindler's List occurs when Joseph Bau, played by the young Israeli actor Rami Heuberger, marries Rebecca Tennenbaum, played by an equally young actress from Poland, Beata Nowak, in a secret ceremony in the Plaszow concentration camp during the Second World War.
The real Joseph Bau, who was born in Krakow, Poland, was by training a graphic artist and illustrator. He was also a self-taught painter, poet and author. After the war, he became known as the "Israeli Walt Disney" for his pioneering work in film animation in Israel. Bau's work, including drawings and paintings, was the subject of a recent exhibition at the Marion and Ed Vickar Jewish Museum in Winnipeg's Asper Jewish Community Campus. The exhibit, which attracted several thousand visitors, is now en route to the Calgary Jewish Centre, where it will it will be on display for the month of September.
The Winnipeg and Calgary exhibitions mark the first time that Bau's work -- some of which has been listed by Sotheby's as a significant contribution to the art of the Holocaust -- has been presented in Canada. But his art has also been shown in galleries in New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Md., and Minneapolis, Minn., as well as in Israel. The current retrospective reveals works of great precision, pathos, humour and force -- what the 19th-century Polish Jewish scholar and religious leader Dov Baer of Mezeritch would certainly call "sparks amongst the ashes." Rami Kleinmann, an official with the Jewish National Fund of Canada, reveals that he saw the Bau exhibition for the first time in Winnipeg in June, and was so moved by it that he decided to involve the JNF in staging the exhibit in other Canadian cities. "To see a man who, after the Holocaust, went back to Poland to complete his studies and then chose to go live in Israel signifies the bonds that the Jewish people have with the Holy Land," Kleinmann says.
"His ability to deal with the trauma of the Holocaust through the humour in his art shows his spiritual and mental strength. We [the JNF]want as many people as possible to have the opportunity to experience Joseph Bau's art, because the story of Bau is the story of Israel."
Marim Daien Zipursky first heard about the artist after Bau's eldest daughter Hadasah showed her some samples of her father's art work a couple of years ago.
"We couldn't arrange a showing right away, so we asked them to wait until this year," explains Zipursky, director of Winnipeg's Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada. She notes that the paintings had to be shipped in from the Jewish Community Center in Minneapolis, where they were last displayed. (Some of Bau's art can be viewed on the University of Minnesota's Web site at http://www.chgs.umn.edu .)
University of Winnipeg art historian Claudine Majzels, herself the child of Holocaust survivors, used slides of Mr. Bau's work, as well as that of other artists, to illustrate a lecture titled Memory, Identity and the Art of the Holocaust, which she delivered at the Asper Centre during the Bau exhibit.
"The Holocaust can give us an understanding about art and vice-versa. Artists can make things that are tragic and disturbing," she says.
Majzels calls Bau's graphic drawings powerful and poignant -- particularly the nightmarish silhouette of faceless inmates being harangued and beaten by SS guards as they funnel into a gas chamber, while those who went before them exit overhead from a giant chimney; or the forsaken individual, number 69084 (Bau's own concentration-camp number), hanging Jesus-like from a cross with the Hebraicized word Jude emblazoned on his frayed, striped pajamas; or the emaciated, helpless prisoner being savagely whipped on his bare buttocks by Nazi guards.
"He's an illustrator, but he also uses images poetically. So, there are some images that can be translated into words," Majzels observes.
She points out that a series of linear brush-stroke slashes on the canvas of a colourful painting called The Cello Player could connote either a state of anxiety or simply the bowing action of the player.
Another painting Majzels admires is Bau's impressionistic rendering titled Yemenite Immigrants. A family of Sephardic Jews garbed in flowing caftans are seen making their way across a windswept desert.
"I'm interested in how much Bau experiments with the medium," she says. "His strength is definitely as a graphic artist. Even in the paintings, it's the drawing that is very strong. But all of his work is significant, because it represents a historical moment."
One of the works not on display, unfortunately, is a book of poems and drawings called Life, which Bau created for his wife during their internment in Plaszow. No larger than a cigarette pack, Bau presented Life to Rebecca at their serendipitous reunion in a hospital in Opawa, Czechoslovakia, on June 7, 1945 -- only a month after the end of the war. A footnote in Bau's memoir, Dear God, Have You Ever Gone Hungry? (Arcade, 1998), which was initially published in Hebrew and Polish, reveals that it was his wife who found a place for her husband on Schindler's list upon the breakup of the Plaszow camp. It was only decades later, after the release of the movie, that Rebecca Bau told a reporter: "My husband was more important to me than I was, and I wasn't afraid." Rebecca Bau, who died in 1997, was sent to Auschwitz, where she was marked for the gas chamber three times, but, according to the book, "talked her way out of certain death."
Joseph Bau, who was nominated for the prestigious Israel Prize in 1998, turned 80 on June 18. To mark the occasion, a party, at which a number of his animated films were screened, was held at the Cinematheque movie house in Tel Aviv. It was a fitting way to honour a humble man who, as he has written, merely "copies what I see from life." But he does it with passion and conviction.