My Visit to Yad Vashem

On the last day of my Birthright trip we went to Yad Vashem. I was dreading the visit and my stomach already felt in knots the night before. Though I am a historian and thoroughly enjoy studying Jewish history, I avoid studying the Holocaust. While the Holocaust history course is a popular course in the history department at my university, I knew that I could never handle a whole year of constantly reading and seeing the images week after week. I much prefer studying the high points in Jewish history: the rise of the Jewish immigrant in North America, Golden Ages, and Yom HaAtzmaut.

For this blog post I am going to write about the images and parts of the museum that are stuck in my memory as I write this post several weeks since I returned from Israel. As a person who hopes to work in a museum, I am most interested in the lasting images and feelings one takes away from a trip to a museum.

I arrived at Yad Vashem on a sunny Sunday in Jerusalem, which was a rarity during my time in Israel, where I experienced severe rain. Located on Mount Herzl, I was surprised by the complex’s size. The complex contains several buildings such as the Holocaust History Museum, Art Museum, Exhibition Pavilion, and Learning Center. It also has beautifully landscaped grounds with a variety of monuments and sculptures.

One of my group’s first stops on the tour was at the entrance to The Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations. I found it very important that our tour guide took my group to the Avenue before we entered into the depths of the triangular shaped building where the Holocaust Museum is. Though I was a good undergraduate student, and when my Professors asked me to list the causes of the Second World War and the Holocaust on an exam I would dutifully write the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the switch from Jew-hatred to anti-Semitism and so on, but these never felt like complete answers to me. I can’t comprehend how people kill innocent children, or even watch over them as there locked-up and starving.

Irena Sendler

I found it very beneficial hearing about the individuals commemorated at the Avenue before I entered the museum, because it gave me something positive to remember when I felt choked by the images. The Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations is a path that has a tree planted in honour of each of the brave Gentiles who risked their life, and their families lives, to save Jews. At the entrance to the Avenue is the tree for Irena Sendler. Sendler was a social worker employed by the Welfare Department of the Warsaw municipality. In September 1943, Sendler was appointed director of Zegata’s Department for the Care of Jewish Children, during which time she saved thousands of Jewish children, even keeping their locations secret when she was arrested. Though I may still be unable to fully comprehend the Holocaust and other genocides, even though I am an adult who has been hearing and learning about these events since a young child, I find the stories of individuals’ bravery and kindness one of the only ways of comprehending such atrocities.

Tree for Irena Sendler
http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/righteous/stories/sendler.asp

The part of the museum that I most enjoyed was the video reel of clips of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the war. The reel is the first image you see once you enter the museum.  The clips included images of singing school children, women waving in front of store shops, and musicians. The reel was to remind museum visitors about the full life Jews led prior to the Holocaust. My grandfather, who was a Holocaust survivor, had actually came to Canada prior to the war, but returned to Poland because he missed it. This has always been a point I have had issues fathoming as I see Canada as my home, and have the knowledge of the coming doom hindering my ability to picture Jewish daily life in pre-war Poland. But in the video images, I could see the full community life that my grandfather missed, and decided to return to.

 

 

One image that I keep thinking about is the painting The Refugee (1939) by Felix Nussbaum. In the painting a man is slumped over on a stool with his head in his hands. Beside him is a stick and a bundle of belongings, he is ready to travel. However, the door to the outside is blocked by a globe that is covered by shadows. The painting is near the beginning of the Holocaust museum, which is organized in a chronological narrative. The painting represented for me one of the most infuriating parts of Holocaust history, the anti-Semitic immigration policies of Allied countries prior to WWII.

The Refugee
http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/nussbaum/nussbaum_5.asp

At the end of the museum there is the Hall of Names. The Hall of Names is a memorial for every Jew that perished in the Holocaust. The ceiling of the Hall is cone shaped, displaying pictures and fragments of Pages of Testimony. Under the ceiling cone is an opposite floor cone, where the images are reflected in the water base. As I was walking around the cone, looking up at the images, one picture made me stop. It was a picture of two sisters in their bathing suits outside on a sunny day. The image captured my worst fears about the Holocaust –being small and powerless, and being taken away from the people I love the most without knowing what is happening to them. The photo stood out for me amongst the many images because my sister and I have many pictures like the one I saw in the Hall; were just fortunate to be born fifty years later. I have been trying to find (but haven’t yet) the picture in the Yad Vashem on-line archives so I can remember the two girls names.

After the Hall, my group exited the museum, and got to inhale the cool Jerusalem air, while having an amazing view of the city covered in snow. (This made everyone excited, but the group of Canadians.)

I don’t have any wise words; this post is just a collection of things stuck in my memory. On a side note, as I finish writing, my sister is ladling out matzo-ball soup for our dinner tonight. 

*Images and information taken from http://www.yadvashem.org/

*Also, if this happens to survive as a source in the future, I don’t want it to be used by a historian writing about the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. I am not very good at expressing my thoughts. Most of my thoughts in this post are incomplete.

History, a Reflection of the Historian Who Writes it.

I have heard it said that all historians do research that reflects their personal or familiar past. I would not want to over generalize about all, since I only know a few historians. But my project this semester definitely reflects my feelings (frustrations) with having been a TA this past year.

I have spent a vast amount of time telling my students to follow Rampolla, and demonstrating the differences between the style for a footnote and bibliography. I have corrected their formating meticulously on all there small assignments, in the hope that they would do it correctly for the large assignments –but this was to no avail.

When I read through their book reports and final essays I got Sparknotes referenced, I had only one page in a book sourced for the whole essay, I got work cited lists instead of bibliographies, and a whole bunch of other mistakes.

So after each assignment I would stand up in front of my tutorial and show where and how you footnote. I would ask them if they understood, and they would all shake their heads in agreement. STILL THERE WAS LITTLE IMPROVEMENT!

Though this picture book is designed for a younger audience, it’s really for all those TAs out there, smacking their head in frustration in their first year students' inability to follow a format. Sure, I know it can be hard if you are using a source that is unusual. But they all used internet or monographs, not some random artefact.

As the semester is almost over, I have a pending dread of marking their final exams.

Here is a link that will take you to the picture book I made. If this becomes supper popular on the web, I have a whole bunch of other villains for Ninja Historian to fight. He can become the Dora the Explorer of the history world.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2TH6TCNbUaidnpOYU9RNnF3b3M/edit

Making it into Book Form:

My picture book is supposed to be a fun (and interactive way if used on an I-pad) of informing people about the need to footnote.

I really enjoyed using the pen tablet, it was supper fun! The most frustrating thing for me was the constant changing of document format, and fitting everything into the same size picture. The reason I found the need to change the format annoying was because the final image had to be a pdf. And since I always make typos it was very time consuming to go back once I thought I was done and reformat an image back to Photoshop, then add a new layer, then rewrite, then condense it back into one layer, then save as pdf, then recreate the large pdf again. And of course, once I think I am done again, I catch another error and have to do the process over again. Thus I think pdfs need to be editable, WORK ON THAT COMPUTER PEOPLE!

The process I took to make all the images and words the same size, so it looks like an open picture book:

1. Make a new document in Photoshop that is 8 × 11 inches.
2. Open a completed picture and flatten the layers, then change name of file.
3. Copy image, and paste onto new document. When I pasted the image it was like 200 times too large since I drew the pictures on a large document since it was easier to do with the pen tablet.
4. Then go to edit , then transform, then scale. Next click on the chain.
5. Next you begin to shrink the size of the image. You can’t just go straight to the roughly 20% size that fits half the page because the image disappears. You have to shrink about 20% at a time so that you can drag the image back into the center of the screen, so you can always find it.
6. Once the image is about half the page you move it to one side of the page.
7. Next you add a layer and click on the text icon.
8. Then you make a text box, and type in the words.
9. Then you flatten the layers, and save the image with a new name.
10. Once all your images are done you go into acrobat pro and create a multi-page file.

Picture and words now one image.

Finito Pictures

So I have completed drawing and adding a background to the drawings. I really enjoyed the layer feature on Photoshop. Thanks to Sarah I was able to add my drawings and manipulate them on to the photos I took in Weldon.  

 What I did…

1. I opened both my drawing and the photo in Photoshop.
2. I used the “magic wand” tool, and then clicked on the empty space on the image that I drew.
3. Next, I went to select, and clicked inverse.
4. Then I copied my drawing and pasted it on the photo.
5. Then I used the “rectangle” tool and made it trace over my drawing that I pasted in the photo. I needed to do this because the image was always too small when I pasted.
6. Next, I did “command T” to “transform” the image in my rectangle. At this point I could enlarge and move my drawing all over the photo. Sometimes, depending on the image, once I was done transforming the whole drawing I would go back and rectangle off certain parts so that I could alter only a section of a drawing. This was very affective for creating distance in the image. I used it to create space between the Octopus and the Ninja.
7. Once I was done transforming the image I clicked on the “checkmark”. Then I went to select and clicked on deselect.

 For some images I would add more to the drawing. To do this, I would drag the image onto my tablet. The really nice thing about the layers is that when you want to erase something you have drawn, it does not erase the background.

See how I moved the ninja in the photo with the picture background to create distance.

You click on the layer you want to work on.

For my next step I am going to make a PDF with two pages side-by-side like a picture book, which people will be able to flip through. I think that the picture book format will better suit how I originally outlined my story, when I pictured it like a silent film with text and picture.

         

A few obstacles but back to progressing.

So I was originally planning on making my comic on Manga; however, it has decided not to open for me anymore. Now I am making my pictures on Photoshop which I am quite liking. Between the two programs I tried Adobe Illustrator but I found it VERY hard to draw with, it does not give the illustrator very much freedom with lines on the tablet.

After being frustrated with Illustrator because I had spent a few hours trying to draw a picture, but was not getting anywhere, I decided to switch to Photoshop. I was a tad panicked because I had never used it before, and my Professor was not on campus because it was a Thursday afternoon; so I could not bug him.  Probably the most important thing that I learned from this class is that you can google instructions and tutorials on line for pretty much everything. Thus, I decided to google how to use Photoshop and did a few tutorials.

Along with learning how to use new programs for this project I am also learning how to use a Mac. I am actually starting to like it; the only thing I tend to keep trying to do is Right click the mouse, which does not exist.

Another thing I keep doing because it’s hard to break natural reactions, is touching the button on the pen. The button is right where I naturally hold a pen, so I keep switching my grip without thinking. However, from this constant mistake, I learned that if you touch the pen button while having the tip to the screen a window pops up that allows you to manipulate the width of the pen line, which is very convenient.

 

To speed up the process of drawing, and to make things a tad more consistent from picture to picture,  I made an octopus outline that I saved, so I can use it for different screens.

Here are a few pictures that I drawn so far... However I have no clue how to combine the pictures with images on photoshop for the next phase.

The cover image

I drew the people in blue

The Historian Hunch

Sometimes when I observe professors at the university I notice that many hunch. I have developed a theory that I shall dub “The Historian Hunch”, though it probably relates to all academics.

To obtain the knowledge needed to achieve a PhD, one is forced to sit at a desk numerous hours of the day, hunched over a book reading. Consequently, as the academic’s mind begins to develop (one may argue to a ‘superior’ state if they are Sheldon Cooper) their body begins to regress into a pre-homo sapien state, to when humans were still hunched over.  

Story Board...

Story Board.
Some photos have arrows because I decided to change the order of image and words.