Seth Kramer
Artist Exhibit
Untitled. Video. 14 minutes. Originally shown in Jewish Museum (New York) exhibition, Too Jewish? 1995. Permission of the artist.
Artist's Statement
I have been studying the Holocaust for many years now, but a couple of years back I got the opportunity to visit Poland with a couple of Holocaust survivors. I realized when I was there the great difference between reading about the Holocaust at home in America and actually being in Auschwitz with Holocaust survivors who were recounting stories about how their families were murdered. I guess you could say that I understood at that point that there was a great difference between knowing the facts about what happened and actually understanding what happened.
I think that my greatest barrier to understanding the Holocaust has always been the numbers of Jews murdered. Six million by the Nazi's own count. The number six million is often used in reference to the Holocaust, but it really is too large a number; it becomes abstracted. To illustrate this point I started to figure out how old I would be if I lived six million hours in a lifetime. People guessed I'd be eighty or ninety years old. Some said I would be over one hundred. In fact if I was to live six million hours in a life time I would live to be well over six hundred years old. So if we cannot comprehend the number six million, can we possibly understand the magnitude of what happened during the Holocaust?
- Seth Kramer