Frankfurt/Main (dpa/lhe) – An exhibition with pictures of Holocaust survivors entitled “Where I always travel” was opened in Frankfurt’s Römerhallen on Thursday. They were created in the studio of the meeting point for survivors, which was founded in 2002 as a pilot project in Frankfurt. With the exhibition, the “protected space” will be left for the first time and the works of the artists, some of whom are very old, will be shown, said Arno Schuster from the Central Welfare Office for Jews in Germany at the opening.
The studio is not an art therapy facility, said curator Aviva Kaminer about her work with people who develop artistic forms of expression “in the last phase of their lives”.
The meeting point is not a place for weeping and mourning, but rather for celebrating life and survival, according to Esti Petri-Adiel, the head of the meeting point. The project is to be understood as a “low-threshold offer”, as a place for exchange, but where psychosocial support is also offered. There are now more than 30 such meeting places for Shoah survivors across Germany.
The approximately 40 pictures shown in the exhibition, which is open until February 12, do not contain memories of a childhood in a ghetto or concentration pictures, but rather portraits, landscape pictures or still lifes, which were often based on well-known works of art or photographs. Two pictures showing the farewell scene of a Ukrainian family at the train station make it clear that current events such as the war in Ukraine are stirring up the past. “The war brought back a lot of memories,” said Petri-Adiel.
