Title: Miriam Brysk
Course: Holocaust Art & Remembrance

Miriam Brysk Bio/Artist Statment

Holocaust Biography and Artist Statement

I was born in Warsaw, Poland in March of 1935 to parents Bronka and Chaim Miasnik. We escaped to Lida, in Soviet-occupied Belarus after Warsaw fell to the Nazis in September 1939. Lida fell in 1941, and its Jews were herded into a ghetto. In the great slaughter of March 8, 1942, a Nazi Einsatsgruppe shot most of the Lida Jews. My family was at first selected to die, but at the last moment the Nazis decided to spare us because they needed my father's surgical skills to operate on wounded German soldiers. That summer I was sent to live with a Christian woman because it was rumored that the Germans would kill all the Jewish children in the ghetto. I returned to the ghetto when the rumor proved false.

In December 1942, Russian partisans rescued us from the ghetto and brought us to the Lipiczanska forest. In early 1943, a partisan hospital was established in a remote part of the forest, staffed by Jewish doctors and nurses, with my father as chief of staff. My hair was shaved and I wore boy's clothing to protect me from rape. On my eighth birthday I was given my own pistol as a present.

We were liberated in the summer of 1944. In early 1945 we escaped Belarus and went to central Poland. Traveling as refugees, we traversed most of central Europe to flee the invading Soviets. Soldiers in the Jewish Brigade brought us to Italy, where we stayed for two years as DPs. We came to America in February of 1947 and settled in Brooklyn.

I received my Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from Columbia University in 1967 and spent my career as a scientist and professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch. After retiring, I became an artist and writer depicting the plight of my family and the Jews during the Holocaust. My life, like my art, has been strongly influenced by my childhood experiences in the Nazi Holocaust.

In 2002, I returned for the first time to the ghettos and camps of Eastern Europe. Throughout the trip, images of my lost family kept creeping back into my consciousness, while childhood fears reemerged as scary nightmares. My entire being was shaking in horror, as I sobbed for the six million of my people who had so inhumanly and painfully perished. I felt a deep inner need to portray their suffering. I wanted to restore to them their dignity as Jews. Most of all, I wanted to honor and remember them.

My memoir, Amidst the Shadows of Trees was published in 2007. I have created two major Holocaust art exhibits, In a Confined Silence in 2005 and Children of the Holocaust in 2008.

All the pieces in the series In a Confined Silence began as small black-and-white photographs. Some images were of my family, others were kindly donated by friends whose family members had died in the Shoah. Most were from archival photos in the public domain taken by Nazi or other photographers. Each image depicts a real Jew during the Holocaust. Much of the background imagery was also derived from Holocaust sources. Each photograph was enlarged during duplication on a Xerox copier. The toner from the Xeroxed copy was then transferred with solvents onto watercolor paper. The transfers were scanned into a computer and overlaid with multiple layers of color and texture; they were also combined and strengthened with elements of other Holocaust images. The finished pieces were printed with archival pigments on museum quality rag paper.

In the works comprising Children of the Holocaust, I use a representation of the tallis to frame each art piece. A rite of passage from childhood to adulthood is the Bar Mitzvah (confirmation) at age thirteen.  At that event, children traditionally receive a tallis (prayer shawl) from their parents.  Most of the Jewish children who died in the Holocaust, however, were too young to have ever had a Bar Mitzvah. In my artwork, however, the image of each child is contained within his own tallis, the one he never received nor ever wore, as a tallis of remembrance from me.

I have had some 25 solo exhibits and am a frequent lecturer and speaker on the Holocaust. I was funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to turn In a Confined Silence into a travelling exhibit. Three works from this exhibit are in the permanent Holocaust art collection of Yad Vashem. Some of my art can be seen on http://www.miriambrysk.com  I live with my husband Henry (a survivor from France) in Ann Arbor, MI; I have two daughters and five grandchildren.