This week, the House of Representatives in Berlin, marking the 80th anniversary of the Vanessa Conference, which was all about drafting the "Final Solution", presents the exhibition and the exhibit! WIR!
ARE (here! Anyway!).
This week will also mark the 48th anniversary of the suicide of historian Joseph Wolf, who survived Auschwitz and the death march, and was the one who proposed turning Villa Vanessa into a museum and Holocaust memorial site.
The exhibit features portraits of Holocaust survivors taken with a unique analog camera along with their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, shouting in the lobby of the Parliament building: "We are here!"
In front of the empty seats of the Reich representatives, which included, among others, Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, Gestapo commander Heinrich Miller, Commander of the secret police in occupied Poland Eberhard Schangart, head of the race office at SS Otto Hoffman and others.
The intergenerational continuum that was interrupted during the Holocaust and united against all odds, lost many significant links.
But the renewed chain not only establishes the national story but also renews the deep sense of responsibility for the historical mediation of the Jewish people before, during and after the Holocaust.
The performance! WIR!
ARE produces a rare product that emerges before our eyes, in which the geographical space outweighs the space of time, succeeding in reducing the distance between cutting off the intergenerational chain of life and weaving new links in it - to the boundaries of a room.
The fact that the performance is shown in the same room where the 15 murderers sat and enjoyed a festive breakfast, eliminates the need for a factor to mediate the transfer of the scenes from the place where they took place to the place where they were presented.
The room in which the "last details" were closed regarding the murder of 11 million Jews, does not present a partial or trending point of view, but unfolds before our eyes the whole picture.
Whereas the whole picture is the victory in its incarnation, for it allows us to fix our gaze on the visual pattern and not to look for further details.
Unlike many other victory images, which feature a partial image that shows only the "winning" side, the image here shows the arena as a whole.
Since the narrative of the exhibition is delineated into an authentic visual format, the images do not lose their validity, but rather the opposite.
The sight revealed in the arena where the plans for the atrocity were discussed also presents the missing in it.
Therefore, in contrast to familiar images of victory, which are derived from an overall picture, are trending in a trending manner and do not necessarily correspond with the reality on the ground, the performance! WIR!
ARE provides a visible visual infrastructure, related to place and time.
The following presentation should present the continued existence of the Jewish people in overlife.
The walls are better filled with pictures of the despicable murderers.
And the empty chairs are right to be filled from now on with grandparents, flesh and blood, of the perished.
As the place fills up and more chairs are added around the table that once had protocols laid down for "the extermination of the Jews," our victory will continue to expand.
Not as a performance.
But as a reality.
Were we wrong?
Fixed!
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