“Fragments of Memory”, Ruth Schreiber's Exhibit

Letters from my Grandparents (4 of 8) Postman

Ruth Schreiber's solo exhibition “Fragments of Memory” is featured at the Miklat Leomanut Gallery, 7 Yehudah Hamaccabi Street, Mekor Baruch, Jerusalem.

It runs from July 9th- July 30th, Sunday- Thursday 7.30-10pm.

It is part of Schreiber’s ongoing Holocaust Remembrance Project and includes eight screen prints created at the Jerusalem Print Workshop in 2012.

The artist: “The project is based on some 200 letters and postcards, written by my paternal grandparents between January 1939 and August 1942 to their 3 older children (Lotte, Erna and my father Nathan) whom they had managed to send out of Germany to safety in England. The 2 youngest children (Sophie and Jenny) stayed with the parents as they escaped Germany for Belgium and later France, where the mother, Minna Merel, perished at Rivesaltes internment camp in May 1941, and the father, Samuel Merel , was captured and shipped from Drancy to Auschwitz where he was gassed in August 1942. The letters were kept and are now archived at Yad Vashem.

These 8 screen prints tell the story of that period, from the time of the Kindertransport in January 1939, until the 2 younger sisters, saved by the French Underground, reunited with their siblings in London in 1945 after the War.”

Sophie & Jennie

Other aspects of this installation include drawings over copies of the letters (see e.g. ‘Sophie and Jenny drawing’) and some 200 paper masks created out of copies of the letters and based on the faces of Ruth’s son and daughter to represent her grandparents, and reversed to white on black (see ‘Letters from my Grandparents, detail’) and a ‘Book of Letters’ which Ruth produced in which all the letters are transposed and translated.

Letters from my Grandparents (5 of 8) Parcel