CREATING BEAUTY FROM THE ABYSS

A man survives the Holocaust with only his art to sustain him in this biography.

Richardson tells the story of Sam Herciger, a Polish Jew born in 1917 who became an artist and gallery owner in Israel before his death in 1981, and his passage through history’s worst horrors. After an idyllic small-town boyhood and apprenticeship as a furrier, he got caught up in the antisemitism and tyranny sweeping Europe in the 1930s. A socialist at the age of 17, he crossed the border into the Soviet Union hoping to get free training in art from the workers’ state only to be arrested as a spy, beaten, and sent back to Poland. There, he was promptly arrested as a Soviet spy and tortured with electric shocks. He then traveled through Nazi Germany, dodging a German border guard’s bullets, and lived in Belgium for years, studying at an art academy, plying the furrier’s trade, and marrying. His luck ran out in 1944 during World War II when he and his wife, Hennie, were caught by the Gestapo. They were sent to Auschwitz, where Herciger was separated from Hennie and never saw her again. He plunged into a hell of backbreaking labor, starvation rations, beatings, and the threat of random killings by SS guards. He was death-marched to an Austrian slave-labor camp and got more of the same until the war’s end. Adrift—his family had been killed by the Germans—he slowly emerged from despair through painting and sculpture, which brought him growing acclaim and another chance at love. Richardson bases this searing biography on Herciger’s notes and includes informative chapters on the historical background along with reproductions of the artist’s paintings, which feature haunting, black-and-white renderings of skeletal prisoners. Her novelistic prose starkly conveys the surreal cruelty Herciger endured—“The heavy club was landing on different parts of his body, with all the force of the pig-man behind it….While he was enduring this punishment, the officer was eating chocolate”—but also finds a heartbreaking lyricism in the darkness, as at his parting with Hennie. (“Her blonde hair and pale face stood out luminously in the bleak light…as the distance between them increased.”) The result is a nightmarish yet ultimately hopeful portrait of spiritual survival in the most terrifying circumstances.

A gripping, harrowing account of suffering and hard-won humanity.