71125, Fifty years of silence: Eva Kellner’s Story

Artist Tatana “Tana” Kellner created two books to record and interpret the ordeals of her parents, Eugene and Eva, in the Holocaust. Each volume reproduces one of her parents’ handwritten recollections on its pages, die-cut around a central handmade paper cast of that parent’s arm—each of which bears the serial number tattooed by the Nazis. The companion book memorializing the story of her father is numbered B-11226. Born in 1950 in Czechoslovakia, Kellner moved at age 19 to Ohio with her parents, who initially avoided telling their daughter that they had been imprisoned, first in the ghetto-labor camp Terezín, and then in Auschwitz. The huge Auschwitz complex included over 40 camps and subcamps throughout Poland where over 1.1 million people of different nationalities were murdered (including 960,000 Jews).