Putting faces on a tragedy

JAMES AUER,

Journal Sentinel art critic

October 9, 2004

Artist returns to Milwaukee to paint portraits of Holocaust survivors he's known all his life

What machine-gun bullets, barbed wire and deadly fumes could not do, age and infirmity are quietly achieving.

First-person memories of the Holocaust are fading away as survivors of Hitler's notorious death camps, freed by Allied troops in the final bloody months of World War II, enter their 80s and 90s.
For Leo Neufeld, a Milwaukee-reared artist whose parents, William and ka Neufeld, were themselves Holocaust survivors, keeping the 20th century's cruelest tragedy alive for the benefit of future generations has been an irresistible challenge.
Neufeld, who now lin Albuquerque, spent five weeks last summer completing a series of 11 oil portraits, each measuring 7 inches by 5 inches, that depict individual survivors, all emigres from Poland and friends of his late parents.

It was, he said in an intervvery much like painting members of an extended family, linked not by blood but by the imminent threat of extinction 60 years earlier.

"This project was miraculous," Neufeld, 54, mused during an informal preview of the series. "I did 11 paintings in less time than I'd usually do with a single portrait. There's lots more spontaneity."
The completed character studies are neither fashionably cool nor intellectually detached. Rather, as Neufeld put it, they are "from the gut, an instinctual response to people I've known since childhood. When I was growing up, all of our friends were survivors. Wen't know any Americans . . ."

The portraits, executed deftly and quickly in a style that is looser and more intimate than his usual brand of pinpoint realism, will make their debut in Albuquerque this January as part of a group show titled "Bridges of Peace: Prejudice and Anti-Semitism."

Then, on June 29, they will have their local premiere at the Milwaukee Art Museum in conjunction with a ceremony marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps.
They will then become the property of the Holocaust Education and Resource Ce, a program of the Coalition for Jewish Learning, which is in turn part of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation.

"The idea was exciting when Leo first proposed it to me," said Stearuch, executive director of the Coalition for Jewish Learning. "I knew what would happen would be profound, but it has exceeded my expectations."

Like family

Neufeld himself found the project, made possible by a grant from the coalition, a memorable return to childhood, when the subjects of his active brush were an important part of his life as members of the aptly named New American Club.

Among themselves, he recalled,y referred to each other as "Greenehs," or newcomers. They seldom spoke Polish, only Yiddish and the dominant tongue of their new homeland, English. They were eager to become fully Americanized but to retain their cultural cohesion.

Today, the old links have been strained by travel, illness and relocation, but the Milwaukee connection remains firm and binding.
The youngest member of the surviving group, Morris Parzen, is 73; the oldest, Michael Kleiner, 85. Somewhere in between are Cyla Schwerasberg, 79; Israel Wolnerman, 82; Bluma Weinstock, 83; Bernard Feiler, 79; Rose Chrustowski, 81; Lusia Mauer, 75; Sala Garfinkel, 83,; Eva T. Lepold, 74; and Rebecca Peltz, 84.

All escaped death in Europe to find new lives in the United States. Painting them was, for the University of Wisconsin-Madison-trained Neufeld, a long-held dream.

"I was in Milwaukee a year ago," he recalled, "at a bat mitzvah for a niece, when my companion, the artist Kristin Diener, suggested that I had to do this project now if I was ever going to do it."
Neufeld agreed, and approached the Learning Council's

Baruch, who immediately grasped the possibilities and arranged for Neufeld to have room and board provided for him during his subsequent stay in Milwaukee.

"It was my way," explained Neufeld, "ofng back to the community . . ."

Most of the survivors he painted met and married other survivors in the camps, he said. Of the four men and seven women he depicted, almost all have lost their spouses. are in periods of extended mourning for their life companions.

Family history

The saga of Neufeld's own family follows this same basic pattern. It is as dramatic - and bittersweet - as that of anyone portrayed in his series of Holocaust portraits.
His mother, Franka, spent much of the war in the ghetto at Lodz, Poland, whics second in size and longevity only to the Warsaw ghetto.

The Lodz ghetto was liquidated in 1944, explained Neufeld's sister, Sandra Hoffman, who serves as the family historian and is president of The Generation After, an organization of children of Holocaust survivors.

During the war, Hoffman reported, Franka was transported to a number of camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen. She was liberated in May, 1945, from yet another camp and taken to a displaced-persons facility. There Franka received the awful news that all of the remaining members of her family, including her father, mother and siblings, had vanished during the war. She, alone, was still alive.

Leo and Sandra's father, William Neufeld, had an equally mind-numbing story William grew up in a small city named Zawiercie, not far from Krakow. He was taken into custody by the authorities late in 1941 and held in six different concentration camps, the most well wn of which was Buchenwald in Germany.

A month before the end of the war iam was with a group of inmates who were being moved to yet another location in the face of oncoming troops. At this point, while walking through a rural area, William and another prisoner managed to escape.

They took refuge in arn whose owner - a local farmer - took pity on them. He protected them from the authorities and brought them food and drink.

Ironically, when the area was liberated by American GIs, William had to prove to them that he was Jewish because he not an occupant of a camp.

Emigrated to St. Paul

Neither Franka nor William ever went back to their former homes in Poland.

Instead, having met in the displaced-persons facility, they were married. Sandra was born in 1948.

The following year the family emigrated from Germany to the United States with the helpembers of the Jewish community in St. Paul, Minn. After six months in St., where Leo was born in 1950, the Neufelds moved to Milwaukee, where William's brother was already l established.

The brothers went on to own and operate a successful construction business, Neufeld Brothers, together.
Not too shabby, said Hoffman, for a poor young Polish couple who had landed in America with no money, no mastery of the English language and little more than the clothes on their backs.

Neufeld's now-completed Holocaust portrait project is only part of an ongoing et to document Jewish history in Milwaukee and Wisconsin.

Oral histories of personalities prominent in the life of the city's Jewish community are currently being captured on videotapa crew from the Milwaukee Jewish Historical Society, which is, like the Coalition for Jewish Learning, an affiliate of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation.

The resultant archive of tapes is open to serious researchers and students of Jewish cultural history.

E-mail: jauer@journalsentinel.com