Fabric of Survival

Exhibition at the Butler preserves the memories of a Holocaust survivor.

THE ART OF ESTHER NISENTHAL KRINITZ

By GUY D’ASTOLFO

vindicator entertainment writer

The year was 1942.

Nazi soldiers entered the village of Miniszek in occupied Poland, and ordered all Jews to report to a nearby railroad station for deportation to a concentration camp.

Esther Nisenthal Krinitz, who was 15 at the time, refused to go. She and and her younger sister fled.

It was the last time either would see their family.

Krinitz and her sister assumed new identities, pretending to be Polish, and survived World War II. Afterward, she married, came to America and raised a family.

But the memories of her childhood and her family never weakened.

In 1977, Krinitz, now 50, began a project to preserve her memories so she could share them with her own children.

Over the next 20 years, she would create 36 needlework and fabric collage pieces. Collectively, they form a remarkable and powerful body of folk art that has since been turned into a traveling exhibition.

Titled “Fabric of Survival: The Art of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz,” the exhibition will be on display at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, from March 7 to May 23.

An opening reception will be at 1:30 p.m. March 7 at the Butler, followed by a program in the museum’s Zona Auditorium given by Krinitz’s daughters, Bernice Steinhardt and Helene McQuade.

Krinitz, who died in 2001, had no intention of creating art, much less an exhibition.

After all, she was a seamstress, not an artist. But her works were authentic in their narrative and aesthetically pleasing.

With vivid colors and prominent details, the pictures have the simple look of folk art. But the cheerful tone belies the terror and violence inherent in the scenes, and it adds poignancy. Krinitz stitched words into each piece, describing the scene.

One shows a young Krinitz and her sister swimming in a river in the pastoral Polish countryside. Another shows a Nazi soldier humiliating her grandfather. The Statue of Liberty is visible in another, as Krinitz, her husband and their child arrive in America.

Bernice Steinhardt —Krinitz’s eldest daughter — lives in the Washington, D.C., area, where she works for a federal agency.

She also spends a considerable amount of time overseeing her mother’s art, which has spawned a book and a documentary film entitled “Through the Eye of the Needle,” now in the post-production phase.

In a phone interview with The Vindicator last week, she talked about her mother and the exhibition.

“My mother told her story of her childhood and her survival for as long as I can remember,” said Steinhardt. “I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know. When she was about 50 she decided she wanted my sister and me to see what her home and family looked like. She was an incredible seamstress but had never been trained as an artist and didn’t have much confidence in her ability to draw. She would take a large piece of fabric, trace out her home, her brothers, her sisters, and fill it in with stitches.”

Steinhardt said her mother’s artistic style changed over the years as she learned and improved. The evolution is evident in the exhibition.

Creating the memory art was a form of catharses for her mother, said Steinhardt.

“Even as a child, I knew that my mother really needed to remember her family,” she said.

“She needed to hold on to them even though they weren’t present. I think that was an enormous part of what she was doing — trying to preserve her memory of them, to keep them alive and pass them on.”