The Holocaust, Told in Slovak Photos
The Georgian National Museum and Embassy of the Slovak Republic in Georgia invites guests to see the 'Last Folio - a Photographic Journey by Yuri Dojc and Katya Krausova’ in the Shalva Amiranashvili Museum of Fine Arts. The opening took place on September 25.
Dojc and his documentary film team shot an abandoned Jewish school in eastern Slovakia, where time had stood still since the day in 1942 when all those attending it were taken away to the camps. The school books are still there, corrected texts, school reports; even sugar still sits in the cupboard. Decaying books on dusty shelves are the last witnesses of a once thriving culture, treated by Dojc as the individual survivors that they are: each book captured in a portrait, preserved in its final beauty; these are pictures that speak a thousand words.
“These pictures are from Slovakia, true, but I would say they are global. They are windows into the past,” said H.E. Rudolf Michalka, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Slovak Republic to Georgia. “When you look well, when you open your mind, those pictures transform to reveal emotions, destinies, joy and cruelty, the silence of the wise rabbis and all the sounds and laughter of Jewish celebrations. [This exhibition] is a testimony to human stories. Mankind has learned to fly, to explore space. We play Gods by playing with our DNA. We have come so far, yet we are unable to see what we were supposed to learn at the very beginning: to be brother and sister to each other; to cherish peace which is the biggest possession that one who has survived a war can know”.
Georgia is the 28th country to show the exhibition after, amongst others, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, the UK, US, Canada, Brussels, Italy, Austria, Latvia, Germany, Russia, Brazil and Israel. A number of images in the current exhibition are already in the Permanent Collection of the Library of Congress (US).
“We are presenting this project in a country where there has never been a holocaust, a country where there is a very different Jewish story. The attitude towards Jews in Georgia was always special and friendly,” said Lela Tsitsuashvili, curator of the exhibition.
WHEN: Until October 25
WHERE: Shalva Amiranashvili Museum of Fine Arts, 1 L. Gudiashvili Str., Tbilisi.
Maka Lomadze