The Art of

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ichelt’s documentary film, to be released two years later, was already in the
pipeline. Between them, there did not seem to me to be any more space for
a project that did not want to run the risk of repeating what had already
been shown and said. I discarded the idea and reflected on photography
and the fact that frozen still images are superior to moving images—which
is nonsense, of course.
When we met again a few weeks later, Boris was agitated. He had just
watched The Grey Zone, a star-studded feature film about the Sonderkommando
at Birkenau and the armed uprising. I was not familiar with
the film, but nevertheless cautiously voiced the objection that the spectacular
cast of the extermination camp in feature-film format might be
problematic. For Lurie, that was a totally irrelevant question. He urged
me to take the DVD home and to tell him what I thought of it the next
time we met. To me it seemed as if for him the film was a window
through which he was looking directly at the Sonderkommandos at
Auschwitz. He knew that they had existed, of course, but for him the
question “What would I have done?” once again raised itself with a force
and an urgency that had nothing in common with the calm, almost laidback
way in which he spoke about National Socialism and his experiences
in the camps. The question was directed at him, me, and everyone else,
regardless of whether bystander, survivor, or descendants of the perpetrator
generation.
10
BORIS LURIE
in: nGbK, NO!art,
p. 125.
“I constantly see them on television, always late at night when all
righteous working people are already asleep. At least twice a week, I
would say. I never tire of it. I know the Führer so well that it seems to
me as if he is a close relative of mine. I have good reason to hate
him; I already hated him before I got to know him so well on TV. Now,
the urge that I once felt to slowly slit him open has long since been
forgotten. And I watch him as if I never knew him, with great interest,
as if I’ve never had anything to do with him. He isn’t a stranger
to me; as seems to me now, he’s an uncle with some apparently unusual
character traits. The fact that he killed my mother is something
I simply can’t understand. It’s all rooted in the abundance of
information. The details of it all suppress feeling. It’s much more effective
to let everything float in silence, surrounded by mystery.
Overexposure kills reality. And that also applies to the Holocaust.” 10
I asked Boris if I could take his picture. What I had in mind was a portrait
of the artist as a citizen of New York City. Perhaps because I was so impressed
by him and the city, and thought to myself that it was only possible
to meet people like Boris Lurie here. I was living on 12th Street in the
EIKO GRIMBERG