SAN DIEGO (Press Release) — The David Labkovski Project (DLP) creates a living bridge from the lessons of the Holocaust to the realities of today’s world. The DLP introduces and preserves the legacy of the Holocaust experience through the artwork of world-renowned artist David Labkovski (1906-1991). His work empowers participants to engage in curated multi-disciplinary projects, involving components of collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, historical knowledge, mediation, and problem-solving.
The student-curated exhibit that Rebecca Leeman co-curated, “Visual Diary of the Past,” inspires youth to become advocates for Holocaust education. Students engage with the art to understand the Holocaust, discrimination, hatred, and form deep and meaningful connections with the artist and the history.
Labkovski’s artwork is a diary of his own life, beginning with the images of his youth, and continuing up to the time and place in which he died. He painted what was going on around him. He painted the people he knew and saw, the familiar landscape around him, and daily life in the places he lived.
Engaging student populations and making history relevant to them can be challenging. Navigating the present is overwhelming enough for students, and the prevalence of social media only adds to that burden. History, with all of its themes, lessons, and perspectives, however important, may seem irrelevant in the midst of everyday struggles. Founder & Executive Director of the DLP, Leora Raikin, believes that art is a powerful tool to bridge the past and present and is a universal language that transcends culture and background.
The primary source, the over 400 pieces of artwork created by storyteller David Labkovski, enables us to teach Holocaust history in a way that personally speaks to our students and participants. Labkovski painted simple identifiable people, events, places, and times. There are bustling markets and towns, tradesmen, farmers, families, joy, and purpose in his pre-Holocaust life. Soldiers, prisoners, isolation, separation, dread, and fear are present in his artwork depicting his years in a Soviet Gulag prison camp. Silence, shock, abandonment, and despair at seeing the bombed out ruins of his hometown are present in the Holocaust’s aftermath. And finally, there is beauty, hope, and peace present in his later years, away from the nightmares of his own past. History becomes accessible and therapeutic, not through statistics, vast theories, battles, or metaphorical comparisons, but through one person’s lens of what it was like to live through difficult times. History now becomes time-travel: a living bridge from the complicated times of the past into our own time period.
Labkovski’s artwork is a diary of his own life, beginning with the images of his youth, and continuing up to the time and place in which he died. He painted what was going on around him. He painted the people he knew and saw, the familiar landscape around him, and daily life in the places he lived.
But, that was not to be his lot. The circumstances of his life have provided us with a visual bridge spanning life before the Holocaust, through the misery of the Nazi and Soviet regimes, through the aftermath of the Second World War, and finally, to peace and a rebuilt life in Israel.
Labkovski happened to be born in Lithuania, a small country in between Poland and Russia. He grew up in Lithuania’s capital, Vilna, which was one of the great cultural and educational Jewish centers of the day. That his work happened to chronicle his life within a soviet forced labor camp provides a visual diary of his torture under the Russians as a prisoner in the Siberian Gulag.
His works are one man’s cataloging, not of the grander world around him, but of what was right in front of his face: the individuals with whom he had contact and among whom he grew up.
His works are not a collective accumulation of the sentimental raptures of pre-Holocaust life, or of the metaphoric tropes of horrifying evil and the oppression of the victims of the Soviet and Nazi regimes. His works do not feel like they are trying to “make a point” about the horrors of carnal evil or of the heroism of the downtrodden. He stuck to his work-a-day “ordinary” scenes of the people and places around him, and he profoundly captured the folklore, structure, and whimsy of pre-Holocaust life. His work never screams about the brutality and hopelessness of Soviet prison camps. He simply created images of what he saw during his prolonged incarceration, thereby giving the world achingly personal images of a horrible palace: the claustrophobic encroachment of brick prison walls, the individual prisoners around him, resigned and fearful, yet hopeful, and the fragile life-affirming connections forged in the camps through shared hardship and the need for immediate companionship.
Labkovski was a genius when it came to portraiture. His self-portraiture and drawings of the people around him add to the appeal of his work and is an essential part of why his work connects with viewers of all ages, backgrounds, religions, and ideologies. For many people, it is much easier to empathize and relate to the experiences and journey of one man’s life than it is to emotionally connect with 6 million people, or to deeply understand the sufferings of “all eastern European Jewry.”
Labkovski’s artistic leanings led him into the byways and storefronts of his beloved hometown of Vilna, one of the epicenters of Jewish culture and education in the early 20th century. The peddlers and cobblers of his youth and the open markets and storefronts of his hometown were the equivalent of that Facebook friend who lets you know what they had for dinner last night.
The DLP uses his artwork as a vehicle to educate and engage students, but most importantly, to empower students to educate their peers. Many of the students become advocates for Holocaust education at their schools and some go on to become ambassadors and mentors to future cohorts.
Student Aviva Medved stressed the importance of understanding history, stating, “In order to create a brighter future for us all, we have to understand our history. This experience helps people take that first step, which is extremely valuable. It doesn’t matter who you are or what your background is — I believe everyone can learn from Labkovski’s story.”
Another student and graduate of the DLP Student Docent Training Program and co-curator of the exhibit, Aliza Lam, added, “When I began working with the David Labkovski Project, I never knew about the mass killings happening in the Ponary forest. I knew about the millions of people killed by the Nazis, but never quite understood the horrific extremes the Nazis went to. This is just one example of a gap in my understanding of the Holocaust that the DLP filled. Learning about the Holocaust, not through numbers or writing, but in art, gave me a new and more powerful understanding of the tragedy. While I knew these issues were critical to discuss, I was held back by my shyness and my introverted personality. However, by participating in the DLP’s Student Docent Training Program, I now feel equipped with the tools to communicate these difficult topics. I have used these skills to work with other amazing curators to make an accessible and interactive website to tell Labkovski’s story and the story of the Holocaust.”
Preceding provided by the David Labkovski Project