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NEWSLETTER

May 2006 Volume 42 No. 5

Shoes of Memory

Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre
50 - 950 West 41st Avenue, Vancouver
Show runs until May 30

I recently visited the Shoes of Memory exhibit by Jenny Stolzenberg, a British ceramics artist who has
chosen the discarded shoes of Jewish prisoners as the subject for her art. The shoes look beaten down,
mouldy and broken, evoking images of forced marches, the hardships and the brutal conditions experi-
enced by the wearers. As I moved closer to the collection, my eyes were immediately pulled to a young
child’s pair of red shoes. Who would not be prompted to picture a small child, proudly showing her new
red shoes to all who would take the time to admire them? And yet, as I focussed longer on those red
shoes, they spoke to me of the tragic story of a young life cut so short. This is a powerful and emotional
exhibit. I recommend that you take the time to see it.

Following is the artist's statement.
I can create beauty out of the unspeakable because my work is a tribute. It is
about paying homage to the memory of people whose lives were destroyed. The
deed was ugly, but the victims were not.

Jenny Stolzenberg is a second-generation British ceramicist, living and working in London, England. Her
father, William Powell, was a Holocaust survivor. Born in Vienna and arrested before the war for distrib-
uting Communist literature, Powell spent 18 months in Buchenwald and Dachau. After his release,
Stolzenberg's father immigrated to England. The rest of his family perished in the Holocaust. Powell
rarely spoke of his experiences. He passed away in 1990.

Stolzenberg began researching the Holocaust in order to try and understand her father's
experiences and her family history. She visited Auschwitz and says that, "I was most
taken aback not by the piles of shoes and suitcase which I had expected, but more by the
mounds of human hair, spectacles, shaving brushes and artificial limbs, which I had
not.” She chose to make ceramic shoes precisely because of her reaction to the items.
While some of the other objects in the piles were more shocking, Stolzenberg felt that
the shoes had the potential to be transformed into evocative and compelling works of
art.

To create the Shoes of Memory, Stolzenberg did extensive research into styles of the peri-
od. A unique pattern was cut out of clay for each shoe and then hand-moulded, glazed
and fired. The result is an attempt to rescue the shoes, and victims, from the anonymity
of the piles at Auschwitz by restoring a sense of identity and therefore individuality to
the victims.

One of Stolzenberg’s main inspirations for Shoes of Memory is a passage from the novel
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michael: "I imagined that if each pair of shoes could be named,
they could be brought back to life.”

Jinny Whitehead