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BROKEN: A Holocaust Memorial in Fused Glass by Frances Elson
As a Holocaust survivor growing up in a community that included many refugees from the horror in Europe, I heard very little of these stories, as our parents felt they should protect us for our own stories. Not until 1994, when Stephen Spielberg established the Shoah Foundation to gather oral histories from 50,000 survivors did I begin to gather details about the first 5 years of my life. These stories lodged themselves in my spirit for many years, although I rarely spoke of them, and certainly not in public.
All through my professional life as a social worker, educator and interior designer I was being pulled toward my emergence as a glass artist at the age of 61 and since that time I have dedicated myself to exploring this medium and honing my craft. Meanwhile my parents’ stories were incubating in my soul until I realized that I had the perfect medium in which to proceed. Glass is a very strong, yet very breakable material, and the image of “Broken” returned over and over as a structure in which to frame these stories and to express the lessons we should be learning from them. I had been gathering photos and documents for years, I had my Mother’s oral history, and a raft of documents gleaned after her death. I began to re-assemble the shards to create my own very personal memorial.
The project consists of several elements:
· 6 glass panels, about 16 x 20 each
· Images of each of the panels, printedon canvas, 24 x 36 each. The exhibition could include both the glass and canvas prints.
· Written annotations of each panel printed on plexiglass to accompany each panel
· A professionally edited film of Rose Horowitz (my Mother), done for the Shoah Foundation
· A book of poetry “The Holocaust and the Hope”, by Sylvia Solomon, written after her visits to the Holocaust “sites”, and our parents’ homes
· A compilation of Cantorial and Yiddish music that was my Father’s dream for his future and ultimately the key that unlocked our future in Canada
· A memorial to my great-uncle, Shlomo Gilbert, a well-known writer of novels and plays in pre-war Poland, and to his brother, Phillip Gilbert who made it possible for us to leave our Displaced Person’s camp and emigrate to Canada
· An essay by my grand-daughter Tari Kurman in which she describes her vision of a modern Holocaust Museum and an architect’s rendering of that vision.
· A power-point presentation on the entire project
It is my fervent hope that through sharing this project, I can share the legacy of my parents and express the fragility of our freedoms through the fragility and great strength of fused glass.
