A Holocaust Odyssey (Studies in the Shoah) illustrated in art

dani & Len
Nov 10, 2014
2 min read

Frank Family member, Joseph S. Kalina cowrote, with Stanley R. Alten, "A Holocaust Odyssey (Studies in the Shoah)", published Jan. 1995, describing the odyssey experienced by Joe in his attempt to return home after being discovered by the Germans to be Jewish.

Joe's great grand nephew, Jason Asher, has created a tribute through multimedia the images are purposeful and Basquiatish in their rawness. As Jason describes in his introduction to a video piece titled, The Ghetto King:

"The Ghetto King is based upon stories told to me by my Grandmothers "Uncle Joe," Joseph Kalina.

"Uncle Joe" as we called him was a Holocaust Survivor from what was then the republic in Europe.

Starting at the top of the drawing the crown represents the aspirations hope that Uncle Joe had while inside the camps, the cards hanging off of the barb wire represent the "golems" that protected Uncle Joe while he was in the concentration camps.

Between the crown and the head is an abstract drawing and digital transfer. This represents an influencing change agent that a non-Jew played in Uncle Joe's life. He met a non-Jewish SS soldier who exchanged papers with him. The SS solider escaped the camps while Uncle Joe took on his identity which eventually enabled him to escape the camps.

Uncle Joe's escape was a true miracle, after the SS discovered that he was Jewish and not German he fled the post he was occupying and managed to run into a train and hid in the back of a car. Then the train pulled out of the camp and he made his way to America."

Jason's work eloquently illustrates Joe's own words as quoted in this passage from Anna Cichopek's 09/2009 EUI Working Papers for the MAX WEBER PROGRAMME "AFTER LIBERATION: THE JOURNEY HOME OF JEWISH SURVIVORS IN POLAND AND SLOVAKIA, 1944-46:

Since a great section of the railroad system was destroyed, returnees could rarely make a complete journey on a single train. Most often the returnees combined all available means of transportation to get back home. They walked, hitchhiked, and took trains – whatever was available at the time. Joseph S. Kalina, a Slovak Jew from Prešov, started his journey home from relatively close, 55 only 160 kilometers away, near Banská Bystrica. "A hungry, lice-ridden 100 pound skeleton,” as he described himself, Kalina first walked until exhaustion. Then he stopped at the edge of the road and pointed his thumb eastward:

"Some rides lasted only a few miles; others took me from one village to another. On foot, I begged for food, never coming up empty...When I came to a town that had a train service anywhere east, got on board and took it as far as it went... At the end of the line I started walking and hitchhiking again. The further east I went, away from the front, the fewer Russian vehicles there were. I hitched rides from farmers and townspeople in their hay wagons and buggies."

Please click on videos below and be directed to Vimeo website to see his work.