"The Body as the Site of Pain and Trauma": Cancer in Women's Holocaust Art

The atrophying body is a subject that dominates Holocaust and post-Holocaust art. In the art and memoirs of women survivors this aspect is embodied in an intensive exploration of the destruction of the female body, i.e.: death, illness, pain, the loss of female body curves due to starvation and that of body and head hair by forced shaving in the camps, the cessation of menstruation and so forth. The destruction inflicted on the women's bodies affected their ability to survive the camps and pass the selections, and after the Holocaust had far-reaching effects on their health, their fertility, their body self-image and identity. These aspects recur over and over again in the survivors' art works. The annihilation and destruction of the female body is also a key motif in the works of daughters of survivors. Due to the physical trauma of their mothers, many of them developed visions and fantasies around this loss. However, while the survivors' visual representations derive from their actual experience and memory as well as from the collective visual culture (photographs, films, art and more), their daughters, who belong to the generation that Miriam Hirsch termed the generation of postmemory, draw their Holocaust images exclusively from the collective visual memory, as they "remember" and imagine an event they did not actually witness. In any case the result is images that mix the personal and the collective. The subject of the atrophying body in post-Holocaust art is intensified when the artist has experienced cancer, either as a patient or as a caregiver. Clinical and psychological studies report that Holocaust survivors and their children are more vulnerable to developing symptoms of post-trauma disorder and that the illness revives the trauma of the Holocaust. The two traumas – the Holocaust and the cancer – combine to bring to the fore the experiences of death, dying, illness, pain, body injury, body deformation, anxiety, fear of losing control, helplessness and social rejection. As a result, these two traumas tend to merge into one experience whose images cannot be attributed to a specific event. Relying on artistic modern tradition of women artists such as Frida Kahlo, who used the motifs of the suffering body and pain as one of the key elements in her autobiographic paintings, in this lecture I will explore the art of the Polish Holocaust survivor Alina Szapocznikow (1926-1973), and that of four daughters of survivors: American artists Hannah Wilke (1940-1993) and Mina Cohen (born 1951), and Israeli artists Yocheved Weinfeld (born 1947) and Anat Massad (born 1951). In all these artists' works the body is the site of pain and trauma – the Holocaust and the cancer – and it represents the physical and mental injury as well as the historical analogy between the women, Jews and social illness (and especially the Jews as cancer). The interpretation of this analogy is based on Susan Sontag's reflections on the use of illness as a metaphor that expresses concern for social order and denounces “the other” in the society. The experience of cancer raises the experiences of the Holocaust past, and regenerates the perception of the self as "other".