Realm of Silence

By Elvire Coriat de Baëre.

Forward

Ream of Silence: Redemption Through Art

Dream“It may seem an insurmountable task to see any beauty in the darkness of the Twentieth Century’s gravest hours — and indeed, when one reads the documentation of the devastation and squalor from the trenches at Verdun and other killing fields of the First World War to the ovens of Auschwitz in the Second World War, it is hard not to be sickened by the merciless momentum of death inflicted by man against man. Film has captured the visual realities of those and other periods of disaster with brutal and haunting directness. It has been the singular achievement of writers and visual artists who have lived amidst those hours of chaos to transform that horror, to provide it with a human perspective that can only be received as a testament to caring.”

“In our time, the purpose and meaning of Art have led artists everywhere to look deeper and more thoroughly into experience in the world, as the parameters of what Art can be are perpetually reinvented, in a very personal way, with a process that is as poetic in its pictures as it is painterly in its poems.

Elvire Coriat de Baëre has created a series of reflections that the eye and mind may engage with gently, reflections that honor life and condemn barbarity in the most tender and human of ways. One may find in these pages a recognition of the darkest realities of the Second World War, yet simultaneously an affirmation of spirit and compassion, an art dedicated to the redemption of human grace and dignity.”

Chester Arnold
Artist and Professor of Art
College of Marin, Kentfield, California

Hannah Senesh

There are stars whose radiance is
Visible on earth
Though they have
Long been extinct.

There are people whose brilliance
Continues to light the world
Though they are no
Longer among the living.

These lights are particularly
Bright when the night is dark.
They light the way for
Humankind.

- Hannah Senesh (1921-1944)

As reprinted in Hannah Senesh: Her Life and Diary, The First Complete Edition, 2004 by Eiten Senesh, David Senesh and Ginsora Senesh. Permission granted by Jewish Lights Publishing, P.O. Box 237, Woodstock, VT 05091 www.jewishlights.com.

Hannah Senesh was born in Budapest, Hungary, became a partisan resistance Fighter, and was arrested, tortured and executed in 1944.