Artist paints his grandfather’s Holocaust memoir back to life

‘It looks like I’m covering up his words. I’m actually revealing his story to the next generations.’”

If my grandfather could see it coming, why can’t we?”

What does it mean to be a second-generation Holocaust survivor? For Lior Marom, it’s being raised by a father haunted by his earliest childhood memory — digging in the snow for frozen potatoes left behind by a farmer deep in the Soviet Union. Because as early as he could remember, life meant simply fighting to stay alive.

As Jewish communities around the world mark the 88th anniversary of Kristallnacht on Nov. 9-10, Marom, an Israeli artist, is asking the same question he asks every year:

How much did his family and the other Jews of Pułtusk, their town north of Warsaw, know about what the Nazis and their collaborators did on that terrible night in 1938?

Some 1,400 synagogues and prayer rooms throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland were damaged or destroyed. About 7,500 Jewish businesses were vandalized and looted, their shattered windows giving the pogrom its name, the “Night of Broken Glass.” Some 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps, and at least 91 Jews were murdered.

And now, his father’s childhood on the run from the Nazis with his parents, sister and brother, along with a grandfather’s words whispered in his ear from the grave, are guiding Marom’s paintbrush and transforming his family’s nightmare into art that’s at once haunting and transcendent.

That art has been exhibited this year at Georgian Court University in Lakewood, NJ, and at the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum in the western Galilee, where it won this year’s Bella Zarchi Award for excellence in Holocaust remembrance.

“In Pułtusk, the Jews lived alongside their Christian Polish neighbors in relative peace,” says Marom, sitting in his studio in Pardes Hanna, Israel, surrounded by his portraits of family members still alive and those who are not. “It’s one of the most haunting questions of all: Could they have had any inkling of what awaited them if the Nazis invaded their country? Could they have guessed the catastrophe that was approaching?”

Because it was only 10 months later, on Sept. 7, 1939, that their town filled with Nazi soldiers on their murderous march across Poland — a date that ended the life Jews had lived there for generations.

For Marom, now 53, 1990 was the year the Holocaust came into sharp, deeply personal focus with a trip to the death camps. This rite of passage for Israeli high school students shook him awake to his family’s tragic past, especially since his father had come along as a chaperone.

“The first time I ever saw him cry was at Treblinka,” Marom says. “He told me that he and his parents and sister were supposed to be killed there, too, along with so many of his relatives and neighbors.”

The trip also opened a floodgate inside the teenager. “I came back and painted, painted and painted, everything I saw there, everything I felt. I literally couldn’t stop, like there was something inside of me that had to get out.”

When Marom entered his artworks in an exhibit at his school, the judge of that show — a survivor himself — came over and shouted at him: “You can’t stop here!”

“And I could see how proud my father was that I could find a way to express what he could not,” Marom says.

After his father’s death in 2018, Marom discovered in the basement every painting and every sketch from that time, which, unknown to him, his father had stashed away for safekeeping.

When it was Marom’s time to enlist in the army, “I had to go straight into a combat unit because, by then, I knew from my family what ‘Never Again’ means, and I wanted to be a part of making sure nothing like this ever happens again.”

He joined the paratroopers and later served on Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s security staff. Eight years of military service were followed by six in Paris studying architecture, where he met the woman he would marry: Hamutal, an Israeli cellist.

By 2007, the couple had returned to Israel. “We knew it was time to come home. We both had successful careers in Paris, but we wanted our children to be Israelis.”

‘So no one can forget’

Along with his early Holocaust art, something else surfaced as Marom cleaned out his father’s belongings: a pile of dust-covered copies of a memoir his paternal grandfather, Shlomo Aaron Blankitney, had written throughout the war, then in a displaced persons camp and, finally, in Israel, after he moved there in 1949. In the introduction, Blankitney shared what drove him to write the book: the determination that his community would not be forgotten.

“I think I also paint for the same basic reason — myself and my grandfather both expressing in our own way the sorrow for this world that was destroyed and for all the Jews who lost their lives, so no one can forget.”

Once the book was translated from Yiddish into Hebrew (by Eli Marom, his father’s younger brother), Marom says he was able to “hear” his grandfather’s voice, a voice that had long been silenced by Parkinson’s disease. “Reading his words, it’s like he came alive for me — everything he’d been thinking and feeling and experiencing.”

Through those pages, Marom was able to follow his grandfather from the fateful day — Sept. 7, 1939 — when the German army entered Pułtusk, beating many of the Jews and shooting others in the street. Two weeks later, the Nazis broke into the family’s home, taking everything of value and beating his grandfather’s pregnant wife. (The fetus, Marom’s future father, miraculously survived.)

His grandfather decided to run with his wife and 3-year-old daughter, Tova, passing bodies in the streets as they headed east toward the Soviet-occupied part of Poland. It was a decision that would mean the difference between life and death. Virtually all of Pułtusk’s Jews — several thousand — were forced across the Narew River into the Soviet zone during Sukkot 1939; others would eventually be shipped to the Warsaw Ghetto and then to their deaths in Treblinka. Two-thirds of the prewar community died in the Holocaust.

Marom’s father, Gershon, was born four months later, on Jan. 25, 1940, in Belarus, where his grandfather had been put to work after telling the Soviets that he was proficient at sewing boots. That skill saved their lives repeatedly over the next several years, even as they scrambled for food, shelter and heat and managed to dodge Nazi attacks. All the while, they continued to move east, as far as Kazakhstan, where his boot-making skills were also in demand.

Another son, Eli, was born in 1942 while the family was on the run.

It was during those years that Marom’s grandfather began to write. “You can tell that was his way to protect his sanity,” his grandson says.

His grandfather titled the book “Goral,” meaning “fate” or “destiny,” a Yiddish word of Hebrew origin. “I feel that my grandfather’s art and my own are bound by that destiny,” Marom says. More than 80 years later, “his writing and my art are also ways to know ourselves and our roots, to understand what kind of men we became and why.”

It was in 2020 that the idea struck Marom to take apart one of his grandfather’s books and use the pages as backdrops for his paintings, “like a conversation he and I are having so many years after his death.” His grandfather died in 1986, shortly after his grandson’s bar mitzvah.

‘Revealing his story to next generations’

Oddly, this series of portraits was an unexpected gift of the pandemic.

“When we were isolated during COVID, we let go of a lot of the things in life, like work and errands, that usually keep us distracted,” he says. “So we were free to deal with things inside that needed to be expressed but were too emotional to be able to pierce through normal day-to-day life.”

Soon, he was envisioning the faces of his family literally set against the backdrop of his grandfather’s story of strength, survival — and destiny.

Working his way through his grandfather’s life story also gave Marom new compassion for his own father, who had made aliyah at age 9 with his parents, brother and sister after four years in a displaced persons camp in Germany. Gershon went on to a 20-year military career, fighting in the 1967 Six-Day War, the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the First Lebanon War in 1982, before retiring and becoming a children’s photographer in the Tel Aviv area.

“A lot of survivors had problems with relationships, with showing affection and speaking of the terrible things they’d endured,” Marom says. “Learning what he’d been through, the childhood that was stolen from him, I began to better understand our family — my father’s hardness and my grandparents’ silence … ‘Shhh! The kinder.’”

In the end, it was in these pages that Marom discovered what had happened to his family when no one else could speak of it, and he, in turn, feels duty-bound to pass it on in his own way. “In my paintings,” he says, “it looks like I’m covering up his words. But I’m actually revealing his story to the next generations and to the world, instead of leaving his book unread on a dusty shelf.”

‘A reminder of the darkness’

These were the paintings that caught the eyes of the judges for an exhibit of Jewish artists dealing with the Holocaust at Georgian Court University, a Catholic university in Lakewood, as well as those at the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum. Every year, the museum — one of the world’s oldest Holocaust museums, established in 1949 by survivors, including veterans of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising — sponsors an award for the inspiring and innovative works that best convey the lessons of the Shoah.

Many of Marom’s works are created with a simple piece of charcoal. “Symbolically, since charcoal is born from fire, from what has been consumed and reduced to its darkest essence, it carries within it the memory of a tree that once lived and has reached its end,” the artist explains. “And yet, from this blackened remnant, I seek to breathe new life into the darkness.”

And the yellow detailing he employs in many of his works “is a subtle reminder — a beautiful, luminous color that was imposed upon the Jewish people during the Holocaust as a mark of persecution and humiliation. I’m using it deliberately as a quiet warning, a reminder of the darkness that must never be allowed to return.”

“Lior was an easy choice this year,” says museum curator Liat Margalit. “Painting portraits of generations of his family embedded in his grandfather’s memories is very emotional and provides a testimony for both the past and the future.”

And, she adds, “with so few survivors still alive, Lior’s work speaks for them, fully engaging us without words.”

Six years ago, as the portraits began to emerge from his paintbrush atop his grandfather’s words, Marom says, “the whole time, I’m thinking: ‘This is how I’m telling this story to my children, the third generation, so their children, the fourth generation, will also understand it.’”

Now, busy with his residential architecture practice and a family that includes three teenagers, Marom is exploring the question of home in his newest works.

“The Jewish people around the world say to themselves, ‘Where I’m living is my home.’ But home is not just shelter. After the Holocaust, with the same poison of antisemitism taking new forms, I ask myself: ‘If my grandfather could see it coming, why can’t we?’

“The only difference? They had no real home to go to, but now, we have our own country. … I hope that somehow my grandfather knows, after everything he went through, that he has grandchildren and great-grandchildren at home here in the land that he dreamed of.”

Marom’s website is liormarom-art.com.