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#The Story

The Journey

From that moment on, the documentary monitors Renée embarking on a journey through time, and follows the painful path of the family members’ loss from Thessaloniki in 1943 to Auschwitz, seeking to give insight into what remains hidden in her family’s history, at the bottom of the Abyss.

With her camera, Renée follows her family’s tracks, looking for the reflection of their gaze on the dark wagon that took them to the camps, the grey landscape of Birkenau, the corridors, the stairs, the dormitories, and the walls of the gas chambers. But how long does a look survive? And how redemptive is it for one, eighty years later, to recall through this the fatigue, the terror, and the anguish that surrounded it? All the more so, when what Renée has to testify, what she can say with her photographs, flows from an intermediate memory, a distillation of images, which are shaped by the narratives of her family and the testimonies of those who returned alive.

In Renée’s mind spins a phrase uttered by Auschwitz survivor Eva Mozes Kor.

With every inch of my existence, I believe every man has the right to live without the grief of his past.

Renée will find the thread of her own narrative in a family heirloom from the 1940s, the period when Albert was preparing the return of his family. Very few things from that time were kept in an old chest for anyone who would like to see or take them. It contains clothes of the children –the little nephews- some baby blankets and pillowcases, curtains, sheets, and more.

Among them, Renée will find a tablecloth, a white transparent knitted fabric, which henceforth runs through her work, connecting the past of her family’s story with the urgent desire to confront the fear, the hope, and the agony of the annihilation that she experienced in the depths of the Abyss.

The knitwear becomes a carrie of the moment of the heartache, a tangible metonymy announcing the annihilation of the family, and thwarting the expectation that life could return and become as before. We first find it spread out inside the wagon that transported her family to Auschwitz, abandoned today in a train cemetery in Thessaloniki. The veil forms a roof, which as a ‘chuppah’ (a traditional Jewish symbol of home and divine shelter) represents “the spirit of the family”, which invites the ghosts to reveal themselves: first the portrait of her great-grandmother and then other faces, projected successively on the inner wall of the wagon.

I project your childhood figure on the wall and pray.
You are now in your mother’s arms, traveling together.

Renée writes to her grandfather:

“I am traveling in the carriages of death, accompanied by the commemorative photos of the family. A passing man opens the heavy iron door of the wagon with a crowbar and my feet sink into dust. I look fear in the eye and hang the fabrics on the windows, so that the wind can penetrate them and bring them to life. Angels and demons flutter in the wagon as a night storm breaks out and the light, which creeps through the few cracks, disappears. Only lightning illuminates the space fragmentarily, and iron doors thunder. Frightened insects get entangled in my hair, and the soil floods. I project your childhood figure on the wall and pray. You are now in your mother’s arms, traveling together.”

The documentary follows Renée to two consecutive trips to the Birkenau and Auschwitz camps. With the artist’s intuition, Renée sought a crack to pass into the Auschwitz campu where her family lived the last moments of their lives. As a meta-witness herself, she had to process an inherited past and transform it in order to fulfill the promise she made to her grandfather; to eventually lead him to the scene of the crime, which he never found the courage to visit. For this reason, she had to talk to the souls, find the trace of their extermination in the blue spots of Zyklon B, and then close her eyes to hear one last sound of life in nature, which to this day remains a witness to what happened there.

“I feel like a greyhound searching for traces of time. Myriad figures emerge from the walls of the gas chamber. Don’t be afraid. I used to play this game as a child. It’s called ‘The Game of Shadow.’ But don’t forget that shadow presupposes light. In this horrible place, the buildings have memory. Time has painted human stories. The impressions of Zyklon B form waves and seas.”

She often asks questions that remain unanswered until the end:
“Tell me… How can beauty and death have the same face?”

Renée speaks in the first person, addressing her grandfather to fulfill the promise she made to him, by having a constant dialogue with him, at every step of her journey. She sends him the photos of the wagons parked in Auschwitz, the trees, the lakes, the dormitories, the doors, the gas chambers, and shares with him her thoughts and feelings.

In the dormitories, a trapped bird catches her eye and watches it, as it tries to find its way to freedom…

I’m sorry I left you alone,
but yet the bird found a hidden passage on the roof and managed
to meet your from now on-free soul.

You hear me?
Do you want to go to the lake? Our girls may have been found there.

The testimonies of the survivors are shocking: the ashes of the bones were transported by truck to the banks of the Vistula River, where it was thrown into its waters. Human ashes were also scattered in the Sola River in holes and pits in the ground, near Auschwitz Camp I. Renée writes to her grandfather:

“You hear me? Do you want to go to the lake? Our girls may have been found there. The water reflects a female figure watching the passing clouds. The picture formed is shattered by the sudden blowing of the wind.”

The transparent fabric, the thread that visually connects the narrative, we watch it at the end sink with Renée into the darkness of a lake–a cenotaph of people murdered by the thousands daily in concentration camps…

At the bottom of the lake, the fabric intertwines, clutches, and sometimes lures a naked, white, equally transparent creature into the Abyss. With these images, Renée will complete a series of photographs that she will call, for the first time, –Tehom– a biblical Hebrew word meaning the primordial depth, the dark abyss that hides the heinous acts of Holocaust history.

She immerses herself in the water and photographs a woman (perhaps her own self) in a ceremony of purifying baptism, which leads to forgiveness and heals the trauma.

In note, Renée writes to her grandfather:
“My soul’s journey has completed a stage. Do you know what I understood? The only way to travel to the past is love.”