Painter wants the world to remember Holocaust
Evil, rendered in oil
Painter wasn't directly affected by the Holocaust, but he wants the world to rememberBy BARBARA KARKABI
With a splat of his paintbrush, Saúl Balagura stroked violet onto the large mural at the entrance of his exhibit, Plowing Stones.
He was putting the finishing touches on the mural during the Thursday night opening of his show at the Holocaust Museum Houston. The show also includes 28 dramatic paintings, which staffers hope will tour museums in other cities.
But the powerful 7-by-11-foot mural, showing a long road, a field of stones and a concentration camp in the distance, will be painted over.
During the opening, people sipped wine and stopped to admire the paintings and read the accompanying poems.
Several middle-aged women gasped disapprovingly when a speaker mentioned that the mural was temporary. After Balagura stopped painting to answer the audience's questions, one of the women asked how he felt about its destruction.
The artist with a slight build nodded.
"Of course I don't like it, but there is a symbolism to it," he said. "Why should something as simple as a painting be more durable than the people who died?"
Unlike other artists who paint about the Holocaust, Balagura, 62, is neither a concentration-camp survivor or the child of one. In fact, he has never visited a concentration camp.
But he grew up in the Holocaust's shadow. Balagura's Jewish parents emigrated from Romania to Cali, Colombia, in the early 1930s. "Romania did not require Hitler," Balagura explained. "They were highly anti-Semitic to begin with."
His parents joined his mother's sister, who had already moved to Cali, then brought over the rest of their family safely.
One of his first playmates was a young girl who wore a brace to hold her head up straight. She died when they were both 5. Years later, he learned that members of the family were Holocaust survivors. His friend was born in Buchenwald concentration camp — probably the cause of her birth defects. The horrors of the Holocaust, he realized, continued years after the war ended.
Balagura also remembers being greatly influenced by Menachem Begin (later the prime minister of Israel), who made a fund-raising visit to Colombia. At the Balagura family's house, the young, energetic man talked with great empathy about the plight of survivors and refugees.
Balagura began painting when he was 3, and at 17, he had his first solo exhibit at the Museo la Tertulia in Cali. He loved art, but to please his family, he studied biology and went to medical school.
His new wife, Ursula, accompanied him to Princeton, where he earned a doctorate in psychology. He taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst before he decided to study neurosurgery.
But after years of practice, even his fascination with the brain was not enough to keep him in medicine.
"My artistic side was clamoring to get out of the closet, " he said. "I had continued painting, but people thought I was a hobby painter, and that was like putting a stake in my heart."
When he turned 50 in 1994, he decided to concentrate full-time on his art. He and Ursula moved to Tesuque, N.M., where he built a studio. (The couple recently bought an apartment in Houston and plan to divide their time between both places.)
He examined several subjects: Colombia's indigenous people, musicians and young women.
But he found himself drawn to Holocaust themes, in poetry and painting, although he had never visited a concentration camp
He still hasn't. "I try to avoid them, because they have been purified, sanitized and beautified," he said. "Of course, it's important for people to go, but they need to remember that when the camps were in use, there were no flower gardens."
An interview he read with an elderly Polish official inspired one of his more gripping paintings.
As the official was leaving a building across from the Warsaw ghetto, he recalled, he saw a Jewish man. The Jew, the official knew, would be killed if he was caught outside the ghetto. The official told the Jewish man to hide in a nearby church and promised that he would return and help.
A half-hour later, he arrived at the church. But it was already too late. The man from the ghetto was dead, most likely of starvation.
The story haunted Balagura. For four years, he dwelled on it in a painting called Death Posing for the Artist, a scroll-like circular piece, like the Torah, with six skeletal figures in slightly different poses. "It depicts how with the last breath, life escapes," Balagura said. "And how easy it is to die."
He began showing his works, both Holocaust-related and not, in 1992, in Victoria, Texas. Since then, he's had gallery shows in Germany and Spain, and in Holocaust museums in Florida, St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Houston, where his last exhibit was in 2000. He's particularly pleased that Plowing Stones will travel to other museums, including the Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish History in Tulsa, Okla.
For those who dismiss Holocaust art and refer to it as "relics," he encourages them to take another look.
"I would like people who come to the show to leave feeling that behind a person, there is an entire universe," Balagura said. "And that when you kill a person, you truly kill everything that would have followed. That's true in the streets of Houston or the camps in Poland."