Stations of the Holocaust
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by Jean Lamb
Jean Lamb is a professional artist and associate priest in the Church of England. For more than thirty years, she has made art for and with the Christian community. She graduated from Reading University in 1979, specializing in Fine Art (BA, honors). She then continued her studies in theology, obtaining an Oxford Certificate in Theology from St. Stephen’s House in 1984. The Stations of the Holocaust were carved with prayer and devotion to the Jewish people who perished at the hands of the Nazis. Her intention is to tour them around England, Germany, and Israel. The cast Stations are for sale; the set of 14 sell for £7,000. Individual stations can also be made to order at £500 each. The catalogue is £20 plus shipping at the current exchange rate. In order to enable them to be seen by a wider audience, she has been looking for charitable support. In order to book the exhibit or to offer financial support, contact the artist directly: http://www.jeanlamb.com. |
It has been twenty years since the work of Mietje Bontjes Van Beek was exhibited for the first time in Nottingham and Coventry. An old lady in 1995, she had by that stage spent half of her life in a state of deep depression, unable to be artistically inspired after the execution of her sister Cato in 1943. Cato had become involved, for a short period only, with a Widerstand (resistance) group, die Rote Kapelle, which was operating in the north of Germany by 1941. The family lived in the tiny hamlet of Fischerhude, not far from Bremen. The sisters Cato and Mietje, studying art in Berlin as enraged young women living under the oppressive Nazi regime, began to intercept political prisoners, bringing them food and delivering their letters. Cato was asked by the leadership of the group to write an article for a leaflet denouncing the Nazi regime. After she had done so, she was captured by the local German soldiers working under the orders of the SS. After months of detention, during which time petitions were forwarded to the authorities for a stay of execution, she was beheaded by guillotine on August 5, 1943.
I first saw Mietje’s powerful, brooding work in the Dresden Kreuzkirche in July 1993 during the second Art and Christianity Enquiry (ACE) conference, organized by the Reverend Tom Devonshire Jones. I picked up the last leaflet left during the exhibition and wrote to Mietje, inviting her to show her work at St. Mary’s Church Nottingham, where I was artist-in-residence at the time. I was responsible for showcasing twelve exhibitions per year. To my surprise, she accepted my invitation, and her work was installed in the church during June 1995. The exhibition, “Versöhnung (Reconciliation)—Shades of Darkness and Light,” then travelled to Coventry Cathedral under the care of Canon Paul Oestreicher, the director of the Peace and Reconciliation Centre at Coventry Cathedral. The exhibition was opened by the bishop of Warwick, Clive Handford, and a speech was given by the German ambassador to Britain. Mietje’s courageous act to paint her deep sorrow after the loss of her sister transformed her artistic ability in the very last years of her life. She went on to present many more exhibitions in Germany, fighting to speak the truth boldly through her art about the atrocities carried out by the German army which had arrested Cato. Despite the German army’s attempt to blame the SS for the atrocities committed, the army holds responsibility for carrying out their orders. Mietje died in November 2012 at the age of ninety.
Standing in the new Coventry Cathedral is an awesome experience. It is adjacent to the eastward facing medieval Cathedral which was bombed by the Nazis in 1940, and which is now a memorial site. Inside, the southern light is tempered through the entrance hall of screens designed by John Hutton and full of dancing angels and saints. The Cathedral is a historic masterpiece from the post-World War era, designed by Sir Basil Spence. The backdrop to the high altar is dominated by Graham Sutherland’s Christ in Glory. The shining stained glass of the baptistry, designed by John Piper and made by Patrick Reyntiens, fills the expanse between floor and ceiling.
Stations of the Holocaust
It was therefore appropriate that I should bring my completed Stations of the Holocaust to Coventry Cathedral for the inaugural exhibition during Lent 2015, not long after we had commemorated, with our Jewish friends, the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Russian army (January 27, 1945-January 27, 2015). My Stations of the Holocaust describe the historic narrative of the last hours of Jesus’ life alongside the last hours of the Jewish people who were caught up in the Nazi reign of terror in Germany between 1939 to 1945. In these Stations, Jesus’ life is portrayed from the time of his trial to the time of his burial. The Jewish people are also shown as they were forced into ghettos, humiliated, tortured, and executed in the most barbaric and calculated ways. The images make the point that Jesus, the man that Christians name as the Son of God, was born a Jew, raised a Jew, and taught as a rabbi from the Jewish Scriptures.
“Stations of the cross” are artistic representations of the last hours of Jesus’ life, as he carries the cross to his crucifixion. They originated in the medieval period, and are an historically established part of the Christian tradition, allowing believers to meditate on the reasons why Jesus died. Along the way of the cross, Jesus meets various people: his mother, families, and a stranger who is forced to carry his cross. These encounters help us to consider Jesus spiritually. Traditionally, the fourteen stations did not include a resurrection, as they were used for meditation only through the Christian season of Lent. During these six weeks, Christians remember Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness when he fasted and prayed. The forty days echo the forty years the Israelites spent in the wilderness after they left Egypt. The stations were used liturgically during the Middle Ages, as the penitent typically moved counter-clockwise within the sanctuary of churches contemplating each station.
My Family and World War II
Images appeared after the Second World War from 1945 of the appalling atrocities committed by the Nazis and their allies—photographs which continue to shock the world. The majority of people in Europe were not aware that thousands upon thousands of European Jews were systematically expelled from their homes and sent not only to labor camps, but to death in vast gas chambers which held up to 2,000 people at a time. Not to diminish the annihilation of the Jews, it must be acknowledged that many other people were also killed and marginalized during Hitler’s rule, including people living with disabilities, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Romanies (gypsies), communists, and homosexuals. We should not forget the thousands of ordinary German people who took a stand against Hitler, and who were also brutally murdered or condemned to death. Gradually, testimonies were collected from survivors, captured war criminals, and soldiers, especially during the Nuremberg War Trials of 1945-1949 which publicly confirmed the attempted annihilation of the Jewish people.
An exhibition in 1946 off Regent’s Street, London, displayed photographs of the liberated concentration camps. My father, David Lamb, can remember visiting the exhibit as a teenager. I spent my childhood listening to my parents’ personal stories about the Second World War. My mother, Annemarie, was born in Pomerania, Germany, in 1926. Her family moved to Berlin in 1935, surviving Allied bombings and Russian occupation. She left Germany after the War and came to England in 1948. My father, David, was born and brought up in Clapham, London. A German bomb exploded on his family home in 1941. They also survived the many Doodle Bug flying bombs of 1944. So my heritage propelled me from a young age to think about the consequences of the Second World War for both England and for Germany, as well as what the Holocaust means for the Jewish people.
I had been considering for some time to make a set of carved Stations of the Cross, but in November 1996, I suddenly felt inspired that they should include the images which I had been pondering for many years, namely the attempted annihilation of God’s people, the Jews. My mother sponsored my trip to Auschwitz in May and June 1997. I travelled by train, first visiting my family in Hamburg, and then going on to Berlin to see my family’s old flat, which had remained intact despite the street being bombed by the Allies. Thereafter, I continued to Gdańsk (old Prussian Danzig) and then to Słupsk (old Prussian Stolpmunde), the small seaside Baltic port where my mother was born and where her father worked as a customs officer until 1935 when he was posted to Berlin. From there, I travelled back to Berlin, and then on the three-day journey to Oświeçim in Poland where the German Auschwitz concentration camp is situated.
Designing the Stations
Before the trip, I had drawn out the designs for the work in charcoal, which is a flexible medium allowing me to make artistic changes as my perceptions were altered throughout that period. My visit to Auschwitz only confirmed much of what I had seen in my mind’s eye in terms of the designs. It was only when I drew them onto the wood that the design for each Station changed. This was mainly due to the fact that the drawings were made in a square format, whereas the wood was a double square wide.
The elm log from which the Stations were carved was retrieved from a Lincolnshire field in 1996. Fifteen pieces were then cut for the fourteen Stations, plus a fifteenth piece which was used to make the new Processional cross for Bristol Cathedral in 2001. Each relief is approximately 16 inches by 32 inches (40cm x 81cm). My carving of the Stations of the Holocaust began in 1999 and continued to 2012. I carved one station per year from that time, beginning on Ash Wednesday and continuing throughout Lent. On average, each station took around five months to complete. I fasted and prayed during the carving process and read books about the Holocaust in the day during breaks from carving. The readings, often of individual accounts by survivors, spurred me to seek justice through art with my faith. These books also provided historical context for the individual accounts of survival.1
The carving process begins with large ‘V’-shaped chisels working along the lines of the drawing in charcoal, and cutting directly into the wood. Large ‘U’-shaped gauges continue to take out the unwanted wood. The process continues using increasingly smaller chisels which are eventually hand pushed along the surface of the wood. After light sanding, I then painted each relief with oil paint and linseed oil.
The Stations of the Holocaust in the Coventry Cathedral exhibition were casts from the originals, made in silicone moulds with jesmonite plaster. I painted them in oil with genuine turpentine between 2014 and 2015. The reason for casting the stations was simply a practical one, in the sense that it is easier to tour with casts than the originals. People now have the option of purchasing a cast for themselves, which they would not have been able to do if I only had the original set carved from wood. Furthermore, I noticed a small amount of damage on the originals after each Exhibition, due to handling during each exhibit. I realized that they would not be able to withstand travelling without continual renovation.
Publishing the Stations
It soon became clear that a catalog would be needed to convey meaning and interpretation during the times when I would not be physically present with the exhibitions. I was helped with the making of the catalog by the Sisters of Holy Cross Convent Costock near Nottingham. During the Lents of 2000 to 2013, the last station that had been carved was placed in the entrance foyer of the Community of the Holy Cross for meditation and prayer during the period in which I was carving the next station. Sister Mary Michael was especially drawn to the works and I asked her to contribute a meditation to accompany each station. To assist with the theological context, I asked Dr. Peter Doll of Norwich Cathedral, also a member of ACE, to write an essay detailing how the stations can be placed within a liturgical and theological framework. Dr. Doll has also broached the problem of Christian supersessionism. He describes how Christian theology had to change in the aftermath of the Second World War and the subsequent revelations of genocide of the Jewish people. Christian theological imperialism had to revisit St. Paul’s letters to the Romans in chapter 11, as the apostle reminds his fellow believers that God’s covenant with his people, the Jews, continues for all time. The Jewish people are the main stem of the tree and God’s revelation of his promise to the Gentiles is merely a branch grafted onto the main stem.2 I also dearly wanted a contribution from a Jewish perspective, and I have been immensely grateful to Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg as he comments on his experience of viewing the atrocities of the Holocaust next to the image of the cross when, for many Jewish people, the cross has been seen as the symbol of and cause of their persecution by Christianity.
The central part of the catalog is divided into fourteen sections. Each begins with the title page, followed by my visual meditation on each station, which draws upon my artistic inspiration and theological training. Opposite the high resolution image of each station are Sister Mary Michael’s meditations, enabling us to see the narrative around the images and encouraging us to pray over these events and those of our present time. Here, for example, is the meditation I wrote about Station I:
Jesus stands before his people, serene and melancholic as he faces the prospect of his own death. He stands before two sets of time. He is in his own time, yet turns to look forward to what will happen to his people in every century: especially culminating in the twentieth century. He has been condemned by Pontius Pilate whose hands sit limply on his knees as though giving up responsibility for what will happen to Jesus from now on (Luke 23.4). On his left stands one of the Jewish scribes holding the Book of the Law which was used to condemn Jesus for blasphemy (John 19.7).
During the first century AD, Israel was under Roman occupation. It was for this reason that the inscription INRI, an anagram meaning “Jesus of Nazareth: The King of the Jews,” was written on the cross beam in Roman letters. In my station, the Roman soldier who carried out the orders of his masters to varying degrees of brutality stands to Jesus’ right. Pilate and the scribe stand under the classical architecture, spatially distanced from the people, with its perfect lines of raised steps denoting wealth and power. Jesus stands alone in the courtyard, a broken and troubled man: betrayed by one of his friends, and now deserted by all. He does not want to look at those who have condemned him, but stares ahead with pity at the impact this action will have upon future humanity. There are three cauldrons of fire across the picture plane. One is behind the Roman soldier, another before the group of Nazi soldiers, and the third to the far right corner of the sculpture, as though going off the edge and into the future. These cauldrons of fire are like markers in time, bringing the consequences of Jesus’ condemnation right into our own century and further into the future. The railway lines brush past the legs of the Centurion and travel on until they bring the herded European Jewish peoples into the very gates of death at Auschwitz. The people came, past the same fire of condemnation and brutality, to stand before the hateful scrutiny of Nazi soldiers before being swallowed by the gates of Arbeit macht frei. Within weeks, what remains of their flesh will be turned into a pitiful starving whimper, whose bodies are then burnt in purpose-built ovens. The head of Jesus is surrounded by wings of light, denoting both Jesus’ holiness and the presence of the Father, who sees his son being taken away to death.
The Coventry Cathedral exhibition during Lent 2015 was the first public viewing of the cast stations in their entirety. Workshops and talks alongside the exhibition, together with the release of the catalogue were intended to enhance understanding of the subject and my reasons for making the body of work.
My Hope for the Stations
Though I never faltered in my determination to make the carvings and casts, there have been many periods of doubt and darkness as to how the stations would be received in a world now so torn apart by religious hatred and ideology. My impetus and passion for them to be seen and understood by both Jewish people and Christians, alongside people of all faiths and none, is that we are all made in the image of God, and that this kernel of eternity longs to be reflected in the hearts of all human beings. Jesus, as the Savior of Christians, had and continues to have a message for a world which has yet to hear of the God of the Bible. Christian proclamation of Jesus’ message is actually also a proclamation of the First Covenant which was given to Abraham and Moses, written in a new way, and which is inclusive of and for all peoples. The First Covenant is the message which inspired Mohammed, the prophet for Islam, who continued to affirm Jesus as the Word of God, together with the reality of the gift of the Holy Spirit, to those who surrendered to Allah. All three faiths anticipate the coming of the Messiah. Christian theology needs to understand anew the Jewish and Islamic scriptures, in order to foster peace and mutual understanding in our world today.3
Simon Wiesenthal’s book, The Sunflower, which I bought at the Washington D.C. Holocaust Centre in 2004, describes how the young trainee architect was thrust into persecution by the Nazis and how he survived the camps.4 It speaks eloquently of his anger at the flagrant injustice meted out in particular on the Jewish people by the Germans, but also by the Poles, the Ukrainians, and wherever there was an ideology of antisemitism. Most of the book is taken up by different academic responses to Wiesenthal’s unwillingness to forgive a young dying German Nazi. Wiesenthal had been asked during the persecution to go into a hospital, a building which had at one time been his college, where he studied architecture, to talk to a soldier whose head was entirely bandaged and whose infected wounds eventually killed him. During the soldier’s time in the hospital, he pleaded with the nurse to invite a member of the Jewish community to talk to him, so that he could seek forgiveness for the crimes he had committed as a Nazi. Visiting over a number of days, Wiesenthal found himself unable to forgive as each night, he returned to the reality of the concentration camp in which his fellow inmates dropped dead from exhaustion or were forced into the gas chambers. There, Wiesenthal discussed his moral dilemma with his friends in the camp and came to the general consensus that, as a randomly selected representative of the Jewish race, to grant forgiveness to this one dying soldier would be inappropriate. The soldier had not personally hurt Wiesenthal and he feared that, if he forgave the soldier, a form of forgiveness would in turn be given to the German nation, which was unthinkable to him. Most, but not all, of those who respond to Wiesenthal’s dilemma agreed with him: it is impossible to forgive a specific representative of a nation on behalf of all. Consequently, the young repentant Nazi would never know the peace of reconciliation with representatives of the Jewish people.
The need for continued dialogue and responses with each other is what I similarly have in mind as the Stations of the Holocaust travel across Britain and other parts of the world. The parallel images of the cross alongside that of the holocaust will not be easy for any viewer. It might take us a long time to understand its theological implications. But the process of looking, like the process of making, has the potential to bring healing and resolution to communities struggling with anger and guilt after their engagement with conflict has ceased. It is a small step toward seeking forgiveness from the other to state the truth openly about what has happened, and why. For this reason, I made a public act of repentance an hour before the preview of the exhibition in Coventry Cathedral on February 16, 2015. Reading a prepared script, I renounced those parts of Christian theology I had received and assented to in the past as a minister, such as the requirement to replace the beliefs of the Jewish people with those of Christianity, and the confession that Jews must convert to Jesus to have a relationship with God. Whilst I read from the prepared script, I asked my son to cut off my hair, and my daughter to film my Act of Identification. I had been in an accident that morning, and my head was bleeding profusely from an open wound. It felt as though the wound represented something of the pain and suffering experienced not only by Jesus on the Way of the Cross but also by the Jewish people as they experienced the ultimate working out of Christian theology under Nazi domination. As Christians bring our guilt and shame before Jesus through the Stations of the Holocaust, we can perhaps know that the process of healing has begun.
At the National Holocaust Memorial Days that I have attended in Nottingham, I have been struck by the magnanimous gestures of the Jewish people after the recitation of stories by survivors of the Holocaust; namely that we must also remember the genocides which have occurred after 1945. Though none are of the same scale, duration, intent, or ferocity, the generous gesture to remember establishes a wake-up call that the world needs to hear now.
NOTES
CAPTIONS
I first saw Mietje’s powerful, brooding work in the Dresden Kreuzkirche in July 1993 during the second Art and Christianity Enquiry (ACE) conference, organized by the Reverend Tom Devonshire Jones. I picked up the last leaflet left during the exhibition and wrote to Mietje, inviting her to show her work at St. Mary’s Church Nottingham, where I was artist-in-residence at the time. I was responsible for showcasing twelve exhibitions per year. To my surprise, she accepted my invitation, and her work was installed in the church during June 1995. The exhibition, “Versöhnung (Reconciliation)—Shades of Darkness and Light,” then travelled to Coventry Cathedral under the care of Canon Paul Oestreicher, the director of the Peace and Reconciliation Centre at Coventry Cathedral. The exhibition was opened by the bishop of Warwick, Clive Handford, and a speech was given by the German ambassador to Britain. Mietje’s courageous act to paint her deep sorrow after the loss of her sister transformed her artistic ability in the very last years of her life. She went on to present many more exhibitions in Germany, fighting to speak the truth boldly through her art about the atrocities carried out by the German army which had arrested Cato. Despite the German army’s attempt to blame the SS for the atrocities committed, the army holds responsibility for carrying out their orders. Mietje died in November 2012 at the age of ninety.
Standing in the new Coventry Cathedral is an awesome experience. It is adjacent to the eastward facing medieval Cathedral which was bombed by the Nazis in 1940, and which is now a memorial site. Inside, the southern light is tempered through the entrance hall of screens designed by John Hutton and full of dancing angels and saints. The Cathedral is a historic masterpiece from the post-World War era, designed by Sir Basil Spence. The backdrop to the high altar is dominated by Graham Sutherland’s Christ in Glory. The shining stained glass of the baptistry, designed by John Piper and made by Patrick Reyntiens, fills the expanse between floor and ceiling.
Stations of the Holocaust
It was therefore appropriate that I should bring my completed Stations of the Holocaust to Coventry Cathedral for the inaugural exhibition during Lent 2015, not long after we had commemorated, with our Jewish friends, the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Russian army (January 27, 1945-January 27, 2015). My Stations of the Holocaust describe the historic narrative of the last hours of Jesus’ life alongside the last hours of the Jewish people who were caught up in the Nazi reign of terror in Germany between 1939 to 1945. In these Stations, Jesus’ life is portrayed from the time of his trial to the time of his burial. The Jewish people are also shown as they were forced into ghettos, humiliated, tortured, and executed in the most barbaric and calculated ways. The images make the point that Jesus, the man that Christians name as the Son of God, was born a Jew, raised a Jew, and taught as a rabbi from the Jewish Scriptures.
“Stations of the cross” are artistic representations of the last hours of Jesus’ life, as he carries the cross to his crucifixion. They originated in the medieval period, and are an historically established part of the Christian tradition, allowing believers to meditate on the reasons why Jesus died. Along the way of the cross, Jesus meets various people: his mother, families, and a stranger who is forced to carry his cross. These encounters help us to consider Jesus spiritually. Traditionally, the fourteen stations did not include a resurrection, as they were used for meditation only through the Christian season of Lent. During these six weeks, Christians remember Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness when he fasted and prayed. The forty days echo the forty years the Israelites spent in the wilderness after they left Egypt. The stations were used liturgically during the Middle Ages, as the penitent typically moved counter-clockwise within the sanctuary of churches contemplating each station.
My Family and World War II
Images appeared after the Second World War from 1945 of the appalling atrocities committed by the Nazis and their allies—photographs which continue to shock the world. The majority of people in Europe were not aware that thousands upon thousands of European Jews were systematically expelled from their homes and sent not only to labor camps, but to death in vast gas chambers which held up to 2,000 people at a time. Not to diminish the annihilation of the Jews, it must be acknowledged that many other people were also killed and marginalized during Hitler’s rule, including people living with disabilities, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Romanies (gypsies), communists, and homosexuals. We should not forget the thousands of ordinary German people who took a stand against Hitler, and who were also brutally murdered or condemned to death. Gradually, testimonies were collected from survivors, captured war criminals, and soldiers, especially during the Nuremberg War Trials of 1945-1949 which publicly confirmed the attempted annihilation of the Jewish people.
An exhibition in 1946 off Regent’s Street, London, displayed photographs of the liberated concentration camps. My father, David Lamb, can remember visiting the exhibit as a teenager. I spent my childhood listening to my parents’ personal stories about the Second World War. My mother, Annemarie, was born in Pomerania, Germany, in 1926. Her family moved to Berlin in 1935, surviving Allied bombings and Russian occupation. She left Germany after the War and came to England in 1948. My father, David, was born and brought up in Clapham, London. A German bomb exploded on his family home in 1941. They also survived the many Doodle Bug flying bombs of 1944. So my heritage propelled me from a young age to think about the consequences of the Second World War for both England and for Germany, as well as what the Holocaust means for the Jewish people.
I had been considering for some time to make a set of carved Stations of the Cross, but in November 1996, I suddenly felt inspired that they should include the images which I had been pondering for many years, namely the attempted annihilation of God’s people, the Jews. My mother sponsored my trip to Auschwitz in May and June 1997. I travelled by train, first visiting my family in Hamburg, and then going on to Berlin to see my family’s old flat, which had remained intact despite the street being bombed by the Allies. Thereafter, I continued to Gdańsk (old Prussian Danzig) and then to Słupsk (old Prussian Stolpmunde), the small seaside Baltic port where my mother was born and where her father worked as a customs officer until 1935 when he was posted to Berlin. From there, I travelled back to Berlin, and then on the three-day journey to Oświeçim in Poland where the German Auschwitz concentration camp is situated.
Designing the Stations
Before the trip, I had drawn out the designs for the work in charcoal, which is a flexible medium allowing me to make artistic changes as my perceptions were altered throughout that period. My visit to Auschwitz only confirmed much of what I had seen in my mind’s eye in terms of the designs. It was only when I drew them onto the wood that the design for each Station changed. This was mainly due to the fact that the drawings were made in a square format, whereas the wood was a double square wide.
The elm log from which the Stations were carved was retrieved from a Lincolnshire field in 1996. Fifteen pieces were then cut for the fourteen Stations, plus a fifteenth piece which was used to make the new Processional cross for Bristol Cathedral in 2001. Each relief is approximately 16 inches by 32 inches (40cm x 81cm). My carving of the Stations of the Holocaust began in 1999 and continued to 2012. I carved one station per year from that time, beginning on Ash Wednesday and continuing throughout Lent. On average, each station took around five months to complete. I fasted and prayed during the carving process and read books about the Holocaust in the day during breaks from carving. The readings, often of individual accounts by survivors, spurred me to seek justice through art with my faith. These books also provided historical context for the individual accounts of survival.1
The carving process begins with large ‘V’-shaped chisels working along the lines of the drawing in charcoal, and cutting directly into the wood. Large ‘U’-shaped gauges continue to take out the unwanted wood. The process continues using increasingly smaller chisels which are eventually hand pushed along the surface of the wood. After light sanding, I then painted each relief with oil paint and linseed oil.
The Stations of the Holocaust in the Coventry Cathedral exhibition were casts from the originals, made in silicone moulds with jesmonite plaster. I painted them in oil with genuine turpentine between 2014 and 2015. The reason for casting the stations was simply a practical one, in the sense that it is easier to tour with casts than the originals. People now have the option of purchasing a cast for themselves, which they would not have been able to do if I only had the original set carved from wood. Furthermore, I noticed a small amount of damage on the originals after each Exhibition, due to handling during each exhibit. I realized that they would not be able to withstand travelling without continual renovation.
Publishing the Stations
It soon became clear that a catalog would be needed to convey meaning and interpretation during the times when I would not be physically present with the exhibitions. I was helped with the making of the catalog by the Sisters of Holy Cross Convent Costock near Nottingham. During the Lents of 2000 to 2013, the last station that had been carved was placed in the entrance foyer of the Community of the Holy Cross for meditation and prayer during the period in which I was carving the next station. Sister Mary Michael was especially drawn to the works and I asked her to contribute a meditation to accompany each station. To assist with the theological context, I asked Dr. Peter Doll of Norwich Cathedral, also a member of ACE, to write an essay detailing how the stations can be placed within a liturgical and theological framework. Dr. Doll has also broached the problem of Christian supersessionism. He describes how Christian theology had to change in the aftermath of the Second World War and the subsequent revelations of genocide of the Jewish people. Christian theological imperialism had to revisit St. Paul’s letters to the Romans in chapter 11, as the apostle reminds his fellow believers that God’s covenant with his people, the Jews, continues for all time. The Jewish people are the main stem of the tree and God’s revelation of his promise to the Gentiles is merely a branch grafted onto the main stem.2 I also dearly wanted a contribution from a Jewish perspective, and I have been immensely grateful to Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg as he comments on his experience of viewing the atrocities of the Holocaust next to the image of the cross when, for many Jewish people, the cross has been seen as the symbol of and cause of their persecution by Christianity.
The central part of the catalog is divided into fourteen sections. Each begins with the title page, followed by my visual meditation on each station, which draws upon my artistic inspiration and theological training. Opposite the high resolution image of each station are Sister Mary Michael’s meditations, enabling us to see the narrative around the images and encouraging us to pray over these events and those of our present time. Here, for example, is the meditation I wrote about Station I:
Jesus stands before his people, serene and melancholic as he faces the prospect of his own death. He stands before two sets of time. He is in his own time, yet turns to look forward to what will happen to his people in every century: especially culminating in the twentieth century. He has been condemned by Pontius Pilate whose hands sit limply on his knees as though giving up responsibility for what will happen to Jesus from now on (Luke 23.4). On his left stands one of the Jewish scribes holding the Book of the Law which was used to condemn Jesus for blasphemy (John 19.7).
During the first century AD, Israel was under Roman occupation. It was for this reason that the inscription INRI, an anagram meaning “Jesus of Nazareth: The King of the Jews,” was written on the cross beam in Roman letters. In my station, the Roman soldier who carried out the orders of his masters to varying degrees of brutality stands to Jesus’ right. Pilate and the scribe stand under the classical architecture, spatially distanced from the people, with its perfect lines of raised steps denoting wealth and power. Jesus stands alone in the courtyard, a broken and troubled man: betrayed by one of his friends, and now deserted by all. He does not want to look at those who have condemned him, but stares ahead with pity at the impact this action will have upon future humanity. There are three cauldrons of fire across the picture plane. One is behind the Roman soldier, another before the group of Nazi soldiers, and the third to the far right corner of the sculpture, as though going off the edge and into the future. These cauldrons of fire are like markers in time, bringing the consequences of Jesus’ condemnation right into our own century and further into the future. The railway lines brush past the legs of the Centurion and travel on until they bring the herded European Jewish peoples into the very gates of death at Auschwitz. The people came, past the same fire of condemnation and brutality, to stand before the hateful scrutiny of Nazi soldiers before being swallowed by the gates of Arbeit macht frei. Within weeks, what remains of their flesh will be turned into a pitiful starving whimper, whose bodies are then burnt in purpose-built ovens. The head of Jesus is surrounded by wings of light, denoting both Jesus’ holiness and the presence of the Father, who sees his son being taken away to death.
The Coventry Cathedral exhibition during Lent 2015 was the first public viewing of the cast stations in their entirety. Workshops and talks alongside the exhibition, together with the release of the catalogue were intended to enhance understanding of the subject and my reasons for making the body of work.
My Hope for the Stations
Though I never faltered in my determination to make the carvings and casts, there have been many periods of doubt and darkness as to how the stations would be received in a world now so torn apart by religious hatred and ideology. My impetus and passion for them to be seen and understood by both Jewish people and Christians, alongside people of all faiths and none, is that we are all made in the image of God, and that this kernel of eternity longs to be reflected in the hearts of all human beings. Jesus, as the Savior of Christians, had and continues to have a message for a world which has yet to hear of the God of the Bible. Christian proclamation of Jesus’ message is actually also a proclamation of the First Covenant which was given to Abraham and Moses, written in a new way, and which is inclusive of and for all peoples. The First Covenant is the message which inspired Mohammed, the prophet for Islam, who continued to affirm Jesus as the Word of God, together with the reality of the gift of the Holy Spirit, to those who surrendered to Allah. All three faiths anticipate the coming of the Messiah. Christian theology needs to understand anew the Jewish and Islamic scriptures, in order to foster peace and mutual understanding in our world today.3
Simon Wiesenthal’s book, The Sunflower, which I bought at the Washington D.C. Holocaust Centre in 2004, describes how the young trainee architect was thrust into persecution by the Nazis and how he survived the camps.4 It speaks eloquently of his anger at the flagrant injustice meted out in particular on the Jewish people by the Germans, but also by the Poles, the Ukrainians, and wherever there was an ideology of antisemitism. Most of the book is taken up by different academic responses to Wiesenthal’s unwillingness to forgive a young dying German Nazi. Wiesenthal had been asked during the persecution to go into a hospital, a building which had at one time been his college, where he studied architecture, to talk to a soldier whose head was entirely bandaged and whose infected wounds eventually killed him. During the soldier’s time in the hospital, he pleaded with the nurse to invite a member of the Jewish community to talk to him, so that he could seek forgiveness for the crimes he had committed as a Nazi. Visiting over a number of days, Wiesenthal found himself unable to forgive as each night, he returned to the reality of the concentration camp in which his fellow inmates dropped dead from exhaustion or were forced into the gas chambers. There, Wiesenthal discussed his moral dilemma with his friends in the camp and came to the general consensus that, as a randomly selected representative of the Jewish race, to grant forgiveness to this one dying soldier would be inappropriate. The soldier had not personally hurt Wiesenthal and he feared that, if he forgave the soldier, a form of forgiveness would in turn be given to the German nation, which was unthinkable to him. Most, but not all, of those who respond to Wiesenthal’s dilemma agreed with him: it is impossible to forgive a specific representative of a nation on behalf of all. Consequently, the young repentant Nazi would never know the peace of reconciliation with representatives of the Jewish people.
The need for continued dialogue and responses with each other is what I similarly have in mind as the Stations of the Holocaust travel across Britain and other parts of the world. The parallel images of the cross alongside that of the holocaust will not be easy for any viewer. It might take us a long time to understand its theological implications. But the process of looking, like the process of making, has the potential to bring healing and resolution to communities struggling with anger and guilt after their engagement with conflict has ceased. It is a small step toward seeking forgiveness from the other to state the truth openly about what has happened, and why. For this reason, I made a public act of repentance an hour before the preview of the exhibition in Coventry Cathedral on February 16, 2015. Reading a prepared script, I renounced those parts of Christian theology I had received and assented to in the past as a minister, such as the requirement to replace the beliefs of the Jewish people with those of Christianity, and the confession that Jews must convert to Jesus to have a relationship with God. Whilst I read from the prepared script, I asked my son to cut off my hair, and my daughter to film my Act of Identification. I had been in an accident that morning, and my head was bleeding profusely from an open wound. It felt as though the wound represented something of the pain and suffering experienced not only by Jesus on the Way of the Cross but also by the Jewish people as they experienced the ultimate working out of Christian theology under Nazi domination. As Christians bring our guilt and shame before Jesus through the Stations of the Holocaust, we can perhaps know that the process of healing has begun.
At the National Holocaust Memorial Days that I have attended in Nottingham, I have been struck by the magnanimous gestures of the Jewish people after the recitation of stories by survivors of the Holocaust; namely that we must also remember the genocides which have occurred after 1945. Though none are of the same scale, duration, intent, or ferocity, the generous gesture to remember establishes a wake-up call that the world needs to hear now.
NOTES
- For a historical perspective on this, I would recommend Helmut Gollwitzer, Kathe Kuhn, and Reinhold Schneider, eds., Dying We Live: The Final Messages and Records of Some Germans who Defied Hitler (London: The Harvill Press Ltd., 1956; Wipf and Stock Reprint, 2009).
- I was most influenced by William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011; reissue edition) and Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War (New York: Holt, 1987).
- In our own time once again, Christians have become the most persecuted peoples of the world, wherever they are in a minority under sharia law.
- Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness (New York: Schocken, 1998).
CAPTIONS
- Artist Jean Lamb working on the Stations of the Holocaust in her studio.
- Jean Lamb
Stations of the Holocaust I (1999), Jesus is condemned to death: the Jews are condemned to death.
Oil paint on wood (32 inches wide x 16 inches high).
© Jean Lamb, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the artist. - Jean Lamb
Stations of the Holocaust II (2000), Jesus takes up his cross: the Jews are made to cart off their dead.
Oil paint on wood (32 inches wide x 16 inches high).
© Jean Lamb, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the artist. - Jean Lamb
Stations of the Holocaust III (2001), Jesus falls for the first time: a boy is shot.
Oil paint on wood (32 inches wide x 16 inches high).
© Jean Lamb, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the artist. - Jean Lamb
Stations of the Holocaust IV (2002), Jesus meets his mother for the last time: the Jewish mothers are separated from their children.
Oil paint on wood (32 inches wide x 16 inches high).
© Jean Lamb, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the artist. - Jean Lamb
Stations of the Holocaust V (2003), Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus with the cross: a mother helps her dying child before the pits.
Oil paint on wood (32 inches wide x 16 inches high).
© Jean Lamb, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the artist. - Jean Lamb
Stations of the Holocaust VI (2004), Veronica wipes the face of Jesus: Jesus sees the faces of the suffering children.
Oil paint on wood (32 inches wide x 16 inches high).
© Jean Lamb, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the artist. - Jean Lamb
Stations of the Holocaust VII (2005), Jesus falls for the second time: the Jews are rounded up in the ghetto.
Oil paint on wood (32 inches wide x 16 inches high).
© Jean Lamb, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the artist. - Jean Lamb
Stations of the Holocaust VIII (2006), The weeping women of Jerusalem: woman fleeing with her children: children punished in the death camps.
Oil paint on wood (32 inches wide x 16 inches high).
© Jean Lamb, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the artist. - Jean Lamb
Stations of the Holocaust IX (2007), Jesus falls for the third time: Jewish victims of experimentation in vats of freezing water.
Oil paint on wood (32 inches wide x 16 inches high).
© Jean Lamb, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the artist. - Jean Lamb
Stations of the Holocaust X (2008), Jesus is disrobed: the destruction of all flesh.
Oil paint on wood (32 inches wide x 16 inches high).
© Jean Lamb, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the artist. - Jean Lamb
Stations of the Holocaust XI (2009), The crucifixion of Jesus: the children are thrown into open fires.
Oil paint on wood (32 inches wide x 16 inches high).
© Jean Lamb, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the artist. - Jean Lamb
Stations of the Holocaust XII (2010), Jesus dies for the whole world: the Jews bless one another before the ovens of Auschwitz.
Oil paint on wood (32 inches wide x 16 inches high).
© Jean Lamb, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the artist. - Jean Lamb
Stations of the Holocaust XIII (2011), The deposition of Jesus from the cross: the Jews are lined up to be shot and to fall into pits.
Oil paint on wood (32 inches wide x 16 inches high).
© Jean Lamb, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the artist. - Jean Lamb
Stations of the Holocaust XIV (2012), Jesus is buried in the tomb: the archangel Michael calls the dead to rise from their graves.
Oil paint on wood (32 inches wide x 16 inches high).
© Jean Lamb, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the artist.