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

Narrator: Fifty years of silence by Tatana Kellner. 1992. Book made of paper and plaster. Displayed open in landscape orientation. 1 foot 1 inch high by 1 foot 10 inches wide.

This is a ring-bound album consisting of reproductions of text, both handwritten and typed, printed over a range of black-and-white images, including family photographs, and historical and contemporary images from concentration camps. The pages of the book have been die-cut around the papier-mâché cast of a forearm and hand, with the fingers splayed out—so the arm and hand appear to be embedded in the book, and the pages fall around it. The arm is colored to resemble the flesh tone of a white person and bears a serial number tattooed along it.

There are two versions of this work, one with a cast of the artist’s mother, the other of her father. They will alternate over the course of the exhibition.

Interpretive commentary follows.

Tatana Kellner: This is one of two volumes of my parents’ remembrance of their experience of surviving during World War II in the concentration camps.

Anna Deavere Smith: That’s Czech-born American artist Tatana Kellner. Her handmade book combines her parent’s recollections, written in Czech, with her own English translation, as well as family photos and historic images from the camps. At the center, a life-size cast of a forearm.

Tatana Kellner: What was important to me in trying to tell their story was that there is a human presence while the book is being read.

Growing up I remember being horrified by my parents’ tattoos on their arms. I just couldn't imagine having this kind of scarring on your flesh. And also having that tattoo identified them as Jews. And being a Jew in a communist country meant being discriminated against.

So that's why the arm became the central aspect of the book. I wanted the reader to be confronted by this tattooed arm as they are reading the account of those years in the camps.

Anna Deavere Smith: Kellner cast each parent’s forearm 50 times—for all 50 copies of each book—and reproduced their tattooed identification numbers from Auschwitz. It took her two years to complete the project.

Tatana Kellner: In those two years, when I finished the books, you know, they both died within nine months of each other. And it became sort of their legacy.

I just didn't want their story to be lost. Because so much is lost in terms of what we remember and what becomes part of history. And I just wanted to be part of the educational process for the future generations.