That Prince Harry, he's such a card. And of course, those
lamebrain students at Virginia Military Institute who thought
wearing those Nazi costumes were a scream at their Halloween
party. Am I missing something? Did it take 60 years to transform
the image of the Nazis to something as innocuous as the clowns
"Hogan's Heroes" dealt with in that 1960's sitcom? But
temporary amnesia about the 20th century's most horrific human
tragedy is not limited to the young and the foolish. It wasn't
until the memorials of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945 were
televised that I remembered Seymour Kaftan.
Although Seymour Kaftan was a resident of Brooklyn, he was a
member for a number of years of the Artists Federation, which is
based at Snug Harbor, Staten Island. I hadn't been president of
that group very long when I first met him, and one of my duties
was to preside over the monthly meetings and try to arrange
exhibitions for the membership. He was a small, quiet man, and it
was several months after I learned he was a Holocaust survivor
that I had the nerve to speak to him about his experiences.
Seymour's submissions to our art exhibits were bas-relief metal
sculptures depicting European village scenes. They were very
intricate and beautiful, but nothing in them gave a hint of his
experiences. I asked Seymour if he had ever tried to recreate his
experiences, and he told me that he had been painting them since
the '60s but would not exhibit them. I expressed interest in
viewing them, but many weeks passed before Seymour brought in a
binder with photographs of his oil paintings.
The binder was a mini-memoir of his life. He was born in Vilnius,
Lithuania, and was an adolescent when he and his family were
rounded up and sent to the ghetto. The most vivid painting is one
Seymour painted of his family entering the Warsaw Ghetto with
their suitcases and belongings. He had painted the sky a vivid
blue with swirling patches of white clouds. As morbid as the
subject of his paintings was, he had imbued them with startling
colors instead of dark hues. It was a way of celebrating his
escape from death, he told me, saying, "I am alive."
Another member of our group worked with me in trying get an
exhibition for Seymour, who was now ready to go public with his
work. Diana Gabay took the binder to the Jewish Museum in
Manhattan. We waited for more than a year for the response, which
was, "Thanks, but no thanks."
I contacted Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation, which the
director founded after completing "Schindler's List." I
was advised that the foundation was too overwhelmed to handle
Kaftan's situation.
I left the Artists Federation in 1996 and lost touch with
Seymour, but in our last conversation he told me he was having an
exhibition somewhere in Brooklyn. I was too busy to attend.
Last Friday, my memory jogged, I called the Federation treasurer,
Sal Giglia, to get Seymour's telephone number in Brooklyn. The
number was disconnected, which could mean anything, I thought.
Then I looked up the Social Security Death Index and saw the name
of a Seymour Kaftan of Brooklyn, who had died in 2004. Could it
be?
Time and tide wait for neither man nor columnist, and once again
I've put off renewing friendships that end up slipping away from
me into eternity. I never took the opportunity to see those oil
paintings up-close and personal. The hard fact of life is that
the generation of survivors and those who are witnesses to the
Holocaust are speaking to deaf ears.
In "Mein Kampf," Hitler wrote: "The receptive
ability of the masses is very limited, their understanding small;
on the other hand they have a great power of forgetting."
One girl at a local high school was overheard whispering to her
friend during a visit by a Holocaust survivor, "I'm
suffering more listening to this boring lecture than she did in
the Holocaust."
That the upcoming generation cannot fathom the horror of the
Holocaust is our fault. We shield their precious psyches from all
that we imagine may traumatize them. So let's not show the
workers holding hands as they leap to their deaths from the
burning Twin Towers. Let's not show Islamo-fascists as they
behead Daniel Pearl and other kidnap victims, but by all means
let's saturate the news with Gitmo prisoners being humiliated by
the American military.
If we continue to hide the reality of evil from our young, we
can't blame them if they fail to recognize its trademarks.