Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies
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Genocide in Our Time

Arie A. Galles

Artist Exhibit

"Fourteen Stations: Hey Yud Dalet," was a work in progress when exhibited in "Absence/Presence." The series has now been finished and can been seen in finished form in the links below. Fourteen Stations suggests the "Stations of the Cross," as well as railroad stations which were points of origin for deportations of Jews to concentration and death camps.

Galles uses a technique in charcoal based on aerial photos of the German camps. Each is accompanied by a Gematria style poem written by Jerome Rothenberg. Each large image contains one line of the "Kaddish," the jewish prayer for the death, which evokes only the greatest of God and does not mention death. The images also suggest "God's view of Man's work."

Texts of the Kaddish in Hebrew and English:

http://www.jewfaq.org/prayer/kaddish.htm
http://www.ou.org/yerushalayim/kadish.htm

Also see Article about Arie Galles' 14 Stations (PDF) by
Geneviève Cohen-Cheminet
Associate Professor of American Literature and Poetry Université Paris
Sorbonne Paris IV 5, rue Victor Cousin
75 230 PARIS Cedex 05
France

Views of the room installation, "Fourteen Stations: Hey Yud Dalet":

Work in Progress:

Middle: Arie Galles (at right) and poet Jerome Rothenberg in Madison, NJ studio.

Fourteen Stations: Hey Yud Dalet

Installation at Morris Museum, Aug. 29 - Nov. 11, 2002

Fourteen Stations/ Hey Yud Dalet
Poem written by Jerome Rothenberg.

Read the poems

Auschwitz-Birkenau		Gross Rosen
Babi Yar		Bergen Belsen
Belzec		Chelmno
Treblinka		Maidanek
Sobibor		Mauthausen
Buchenwald		Dachau
Stutthof		Ravensbruck
Khurbn Prologue

Artist's Statements

Under no condition can art express the Holocaust. To withdraw art from confronting this horror, however, is to assign victory to its perpetrators. Each of us who has survived must individually affirm our humanity and existence.

As an artist and child of Shoah survivors, I have vivid memories of riding a train past the barbed wire fences of what had been the Gross-Rosen Concentration camp.

On January 19, 1993, the entire Fourteen Stations project crystallized in my mind in a single flash. I immediately sketched a concept for a suite of drawings. That very night I dreamed I was handed a glass jar labeled "Soil From Auschwitz." There were the ingredients in a listing, as on any mundane product: Jews, Poles, Russians, Gypsies, Czechs, etc. Jews were the firs, and therefore, the main ingredient. The Fourteen Stations is my Kaddish for all Shoah victims.

The suite consists of fourteen charcoal drawings, accompanied by Jerome Rothenberg's poems, all framed in Jim Wallace's hand-forged wrought iron frames.

Through images recorded by their aerial reconnaissance cameras, the nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust have provided irrefutable confirmation of the extermination camps. Here is evidence in massive, industrial scale of their "Final Solution to the Jewish problem."

Humanity must remain aware that the Holocaust was a calculated, systematic commitment to the eradication of an entire people.

I offer the Fourteen Stations as icons for compassion and remembrance.

- Arie A. Galles
E-mail: agalles@soka.edu

Arie A. Galles

Artist Exhibit

Fourteen Stations: Hey Yud Dalet

Artist's Statements

Related Links