“Raizel and the Forest” is an illustration in diptych form of one of my grandmother’s stories from surviving the Holocaust. She was born in a small village in Poland and was put on a train by the Nazis when she was sixteen. She jumped out of the moving train, played dead by the tracks until it disappeared into the distance, and proceeded into the woods to find her way back home. She walked in the dark of night so that she couldn’t be seen, and to keep from being scared my grandmother sang a melody that her father had taught her and her brothers for when they walked back from synagogue late at night: “avinu malkeinu…” During the war, her brother was in a partisan group that camped in the Polish forest, and one night while he was standing guard he happened to hear an old melody: “avinu malkeinu.” My great-uncle and grandmother were reunited and fought together for the following months.
This work depicts my grandmother playing dead as the train continues behind her, containing other girls of her village, and then my grandmother wandering the woods. The trees in the second panel form the Hebrew letters that spell “avinu malkeinu,” the song that tied her to her family and that saved her from being alone.