As we see the women in our lives cope with breast cancer, divorce or other tragedies, it’s amazing that anyone can make lemonade with those lemons life throws at you. In Women of Ravensbrück: Portraits of Courage at the Florida Holocaust Museum, Julia Terwilliger portrays women’s strength and resilience in the Nazi’s major concentration camp for women.
What’s so interesting is the artist’s goal of pinpointing women’s unique experiences during the Holocaust, and how it differed from men’s stories. In the supporting wall texts across from her art, you’ll see that not only did they perform traditional "women’s work," they were also subjected to harsh manual labor that men would typically perform, like making parts for V-1 rockets. Over six years, overpopulation of the camp led to even more despicable conditions with lice, disease, and starvation. Though it wasn’t designed as a death camp, every day women were deliberately executed in a variety of horrific ways.
On Terwilliger’s seven large wooden panels, she used mixed media and photo transfer images of young and old women who were either able to walk through hell and come out the other side, or who didn’t make it out alive. Leaving them anonymous, the audience is left to speculate: What became of these women; what are their stories?
The repetition of the same grid composition in each piece can be a bit tedious as they unfold across the wall. Some transfers look like glamour shots, while other moments are more in-the-moment candids. Some women smile and laugh, and others are more solemn in the moment their picture was captured, almost as if they are remembering the horrors they endured at Ravensbrück. In “Portraits of Courage III,” one woman holds her young son close, as if trying to protect him from the world.
All of the figures are surrounded by dark washes of paint, creating ghostly impressions in the emptiness. The process of photo transfer acts the way memories do: some parts stick, and others don’t. This leaves an imperfectly printed image, aligning with the idea that there are so many blanks where stories and experiences are missing.
Though Terwilliger left her artworks open to interpretation of what happened to these women, their identity is regained with other parts of the exhibit, which includes in-depth historical information about Ravensbrück. Sections of chain-link fencing hang and loom across the middle of the room. Attached to these makeshift walls are photographs of Ravensbrück women with their names and a brief narrative of their life in concentration camps, and whether they escaped or were tragically murdered by a firing squad.
You can barely make out hidden symbols of triangles and the Star of David in the center of the gold leaf panels in “Portraits of Courage II.” They are raised from the surface and outlined with distressed-looking scratch marks.
Across the room from these works, the exhibition highlights the reasoning behind the artist’s use of the triangle as a key element. Prisons were organized into categories with color-coded triangles to tell apart Jehovah’s witnesses with purple from the lesbians or prostitutes with black. Jewish women wore yellow triangles, but if they were also political prisoners, they wore red and yellow triangles that formed the Star of David.
Keeping in line with this symbolism, “Memorial Triangle” is a wooden sculpture that stands in the back room like a large triangular tombstone. Unfortunately, the piece is so tall that it barely fits into the space with just inches to the rafters, leaving it with not nearly enough breathing room to fully take it all in. Four triangles interlock to form the larger triangle that makes up the face sides, with burnished gold leaf laboriously rubbed into the surface, which glows softly in the dim lighting in honor of these women.
One of the most tender parts of the exhibit is Terwilliger’s handmade "artifacts" juxtaposed with real items from the concentration camps, like an old recipe book and an Easter card. Made as a way to connect to these women, her stiff, stitched-up doll is unsettling, but it captures a moment of compassion, empathy, and understanding for the pain and suffering of these women.
Perhaps the works could stand on their own, but the strength of the exhibit comes with combining the emotive quality of the art with provocative historical information from the wall text. Laying everything out before you with words, the visuals become more fulfilled.
The Tampa-based artist passed away only two years after completing these large works in 1996. She died suddenly and tragically, in a strange connection to these women whose lives were stolen away too soon. It makes you wonder about all of the artwork that will never come to fruition from these series, just like all of the potential laughs, smiles, and loves that never came to be for the women of Ravensbrück.
Women of Ravensbrück: Portraits of Courage
Florida Holocaust Museum, 55 5th St S, St. Pete.
Through Jan. 2. Sun.-Sat., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. $16.
727-820-0100. flholocaustmuseum.org.
This article appears in Sep 1-8, 2016.