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As Seen Through These Eyes
“I am only really alive when I am sitting at my desk creating.”
- Franz Kafka
As Seen Through These Eyes, a documentary by Hilary Helstein, is the story of art as witness to hell on earth. Using interviews, narration, historical footage, and images of art created by concentration-camp survivors of the Nazi regime, the film explores the question of why one would create art when the penalty for doing so is immediate execution.
The film begins with a montage of drawings and paintings depicting the tortured existence of life in the camps. Some of the images are realistic and brutal: seemingly weightless bodies piled high on the back of a transport vehicle, gaunt ghostlike people pushing massive stones on stubborn railway tracks, the faces of children revealing only fear and disbelief. Other images are surreal and powerfully symbolic – a massive skeleton face with a Nazi Cap, bitter black smoke wafting behind, swallowing transport after transport of human beings as they arrive at the death camp. Imposing Nazi guards, faces clean of flesh, with gun to the head of mother and child. Spirit-like faces, finally free from the horror, rising from crematorium smokestacks made from paper and paint. We hear voices, taken from extensive interviews, talking about experiences in the camps, and Maya Angelou, who narrates the film, reads a quote from her poem “Why the caged bird sings."
Helstein explores life in the Nazi death camps – Theresienstadt, which was designed to fool the Red Cross about the terrible reality that existed behind freshly painted walls (only 100 of the 15,000 children at the camp survived the war), Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and others. A common experience in the camps, which offered the only real hope of survival, was that the Nazis recognized talent and were always looking for ways that it could be used for their own purposes. As Seen Through These Eyes examines a number of moments when people, at the very end of their endurance as human beings, are thrust into situations that allow for at least a minimal chance for survival. Henry Rosmarin, a survivor, tells how the winter marches to work in the stone quarries left him on the brink of death. Known for his skill playing the harmonica, he was called in the middle of the night by a commandant who owned harmonicas but did not have the skill to play them. The Nazi demanded that Rosmarin play Shubert, and with chapped lips, beating heart, and the image of the woman whom he thought he would never see again in his mind, he played. Rosmarin was given a job in the kitchen (“the greatest job one could have in the camps”) and forced to play in the officer’s dinner hall.
The stories of the survivors who appear in As Seen Through These Eyes are heartbreaking and inspiring. Elsa Weissberger was a child with a beautiful voice – she sang in the children’s opera Brundibar in Theresienstadt – and lived to see the day that the musical was staged on Broadway by Tony Kushner. Simon Wiesenthal, who dedicated his life to bringing Nazis to justice, survived the camps because he had graphic-art skills, and risked his life creating powerful drawings at night of the cruelty in the camps. Dina Gottliebova Babbit’s painting skill was recognized by a commandan; she was taken to Joseph Mengele to document the faces of gypsies – because Mengele felt that the colors of photographs were not accurate enough. Karl Stojka, a lone gypsy survivor of Auschwitz, created colorful and bitter paintings of children in the camp, including himself and the young brother whom he watched die.
As Seen Through These Eyes concludes with exhibitions of work created by survivors while they were in the camps and of art that they have been inspired to continue making. Art, music, painting – the documentation of an experience beyond the ability to imagine – gave them the strength and opportunity to survive. Their work reminds us in the most direct way possible of something that should never be forgotten.
Thomas W. Campbell
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