>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Silence ]
>> Good afternoon I'm Peggy Pearlstein,
head of the Hebraic section here in the African
and Middle Eastern Division in the Library of Congress,
and I'm happy to welcome you to today's program
where Susan Magee will talk about her book on artist Kalman Aron
and to introduce Susan, I would like to have Sharon Horowitz,
our senior reference librarian, come up.
>> Thank you Peggy.
On behalf of the Hebraic section, welcome to the African
and Middle Eastern Reading Room.
Our speaker today, Susan Magee, is a graduate of Pomona College
and the Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania.
A teacher of meditation and a hypnotherapist with 25 years
of experience in the healing arts, having shifted her career path
from the fields of business and politics.
In her book "Into the Light: The Healing Art of Kalman Aron,"
she has collaborated with the artist to write about his life
in what one reviewer called, "a mix of memoir,
biography and commentary."
The book includes a beautifully reproduced retrospective
of Mr. Aron's work, extraordinary portraits
and landscapes as you will see.
Susan's friendship with Mr. Aron began
when she sat for a portrait at age 6.
After seeing the 2002 movie The Pianist, Mr. Aron asked her
to tell his story and Susan has spent many years conducting
interviews with the artist and others, tracing his life's path
from his birth in Riga, Latvia through labor
and concentration camps, to finally arriving in Hollywood, California.
The details of both Mr. Aron's particular story
and the book's universal story about the healing process,
I leave for Susan to show and tell.
But before I relinquish the podium, let me mention
that this event is being videotaped for subsequent broadcast
on the library's webcast and other media.
There will be a formal question and answer period after the lecture
in which the audience is encouraged to ask questions and offer comments.
But please be advised that your voice and image may be recorded
and later broadcast-- sorry, and later broadcast, sorry.
By participating in the question and answer period, you are consenting
to the library's possible reproduction and transmission
of your remarks and now, please join me in welcoming Ms. Susan Magee.
[ Applause ]   >> Good afternoon.
Thank you Peggy and thank you Sharon.
As I said my mother is smiling in heaven to see me
in this beautiful reading room.
I'm thrilled and honored and privileged
to do this presentation here and I love the building.
Let me begin by talking a little bit, when Kalman asked me
to write his story, the questions I had in my mind were,
how did the Holocaust impact him,
how did the Holocaust inform his life and his art over a lifetime,
and how did he respond to the experience
that he had in the Holocaust.
Now, if you ask those questions to Kalman, he'll say, I don't know.
He's a painter and he expressed all of this
on canvas unconsciously throughout the decades that he painted
until he decided at age 78 to tell his history.
Fortunately, I left the business and government world some years ago
and began my own spiritual journey of healing and became a healer
and became a hypnotherapist so I was able to go into his paintings
and ask those questions because if I asked him,
he'd just say I don't know why I did it.
I just did it.
So, I spent five months in the quiet of Cape May,
New Jersey with 10 groups of his paintings and I asked the questions
and the paintings started to talk to me.
So, I was lucky that I had my own healing journey and I was lucky
that I had enough training in meditation that I could pull
out the meaning of his art in terms of how his experience
in the Holocaust affected him.
So, the book is really two stories woven together.
It's his story as he tells it in his own voice and it's his story
as I understand it from the meaning of what I picked
up in his art and in his paintings.   So--
[ Pause ]
"Into the Light" from my perspective is a story
of a living master, welcome John.   My husband just arrived.
That would make my mother very happy.
[laughs] It celebrates a story of a living artist
and it presents his visual record of his journey out of the darkness
of the Holocaust into the light.
He was born an artist, he was a child prodigy.
As Sharon said, he spent 4 years in the Holocaust,
2 and a half in the Riga ghetto, and then across Europe in seven camps.
During the Holocaust, he learned, he did a couple of things.
He took the risk of drawing sketches of guards
to get an extra piece of bread.
They would then bring photographs of their children to draw
and it helped him not starve.   The second thing he did is that he
with intense concentration watched the guards.
He knew when he was born how to draw somebody's face.
What he learned in the Holocaust were how people expressed their
emotions in their body, because he studied them
and while he was studying them, he learned how to literally disappear
and become invisible to them.
And he started doing this in the Riga ghetto.
He survived, he applied for visas.
The first that came up was Los Angeles in America,
he moved to America and then successfully painted for a lifetime.
Always doing well, but kind of keeping a veil over his art.
He'd never go to New York when he had a chance
for big shows there, D.C., Florida.
Always succeeded as a successful artist until age 78 and that's
when he turned to me and asked me to tell his story.
So, for me--   [ Pause ]
Kalman healed himself in two processes.
He healed himself unconsciously until he--
by painting because he worked everything out on canvas
and he healed himself at the time he decided to remember cognitively
and make-- and get over this decision to be invisible
for the rest of his life and invisibility was life and--
if he were seeing he was going to die.
So, he literally came out of a world of black and white.
His paintings are a mirror of what's going on inside him into a world
of color and that's how he healed himself.
My journey begins with him in a wonderfully interesting way.
My mother was an interior decorator in the '50s.
She went to a gallery where she had things framed for herself
and her clients and in the window was this pastel portrait
of a black-eyed Mexican boy and it reached into her heart
and grabbed her because she had loss a black-eyed baby 10 years before
at nine months.
She went into the gallery owner and asked who painted that?
He explained an immigrant who just came from Europe.
She said I want to meet him.
She learned that he had done port-- you know done drawings in the camps
from photographs and she said please have him call me.
I want him in my home.
I like him to paint my two living daughters and I want him
to paint the daughter that I lost
and this was the baby that my parents lost.
Her name-- she was named after my mother Marichu,
they called her Nonnie, but you can see the black eyes
in both these portraits.
And then I remember, this is the portrait he did of my sister,
and this is the portrait he did of me, and I can remember to this day
when this white young man with curls, blond curls
and blue eyes walked into our living room.
He told me to sit still and he'd go like this and then he looked
and take his thumb as though measuring the relationship
of my nose to my eyes.
I don't know what, but he clearly knew what he was doing
and when he was done, I saw myself and I believe,
when I look in my eyes, I have been curious
about the meaning of life forever.
I have been curious about this cruelty and suffering on this earth
and I think he caught that in me at age 6.
Now, my mother introduced him to all of her clients
and essentially kept him busy painting portraits throughout
the '50s.
They became like long friends and then it was 50, literally 50 years
after the first time I met him that I was
in Palm Springs visiting my mother, I called Kalman
and said why don't you come and bring some of your new art.
He had just seen the Pianist.   He said it gave him permission.
He never wanted to talk about the details of what had happened.
It gave him permission.
People had asked him over the years to do a book or a film on his life,
he didn't trust them and completely out of the blue, he turned to me
and said, "Susan, will you write my story?"
I took it seriously because 16 years before that, in a meditation,
I saw this huge book come out of my stomach
and I looked and there was no title.
I looked for a table of contents, there was none.
And I said what is this about, and what I heard was good and evil.
This is the book you are going to write about good and evil.
I said, tell me more.
Not now. So, it was such a powerful experience.
I didn't-- I knew I was going to write a book.
I didn't know until that day in Palm Springs that it was his story.
So, Kalman was born in Riga, Latvia in 1924.
He had his first gallery show at age 7 and all
of the drawings were gone the first day.
At age 13, the president of Latvia learned about him and asked him
to do a formal portrait in the palace which he did.
The president Karlis Ulmanis was so impressed.
He pulled him out of his local Jewish neighborhood school
and put him in the Riga Fine Arts Academy at age 14.
Kalman loved it.
And then at age 17 in 1941, the German's arrived,
immediately took his father and his Uncle David and Klein [phonetic]
and he never saw them again.
They were among the first Latvian Jews killed.
They were told to leave their home, his mother,
his brother who was older and himself
and they were put into a ghetto.   I have gone to the neighborhood.
It had room for about 8,000 people.
Mostly Russians lived there at the time.
They put 35,000, 30 to 35,000 Latvian Jews
in this small neighborhood.
They fenced it all off and within 5 months,
they took 25,000 Riga Jews women, men, and children to Rumbula forest
and killed them in the most horrendous way
and that was how he lost his mom.
They kept 4,000 young men who were strong enough to work alive.
Kalman and his brother were among them and this is
when he began to risk his life.
If you were caught with a pencil and paper at that time,
you could just be shot because they would be afraid you were sending the
message out to escape, but that's when he started drawing guards.
There was one German in the factory where he worked who was a painter
who saw what Kalman could do, he got him a canvas, he got him oils
and had him paint a portrait of him.
He has never forgotten that man and it's also
when he began to learn to disappear.
In 1943, the Germans closed the Riga ghetto and he began a journey
across Europe in camps in Latvia, Poland, and in Germany.
He was in Kaiserwald which was outside the outskirts of Riga
and that was a transit camp, that's when he
and his brother were separated.
He was then sent into Poperwahlen and Dundaga.
There's a lot less known about what happened in Latvia
than in other countries during the Holocaust.
I found people who knew, who had been alive at that time,
who took me to these two places in the forest of Latvia,
this Baltic for-- I mean nothing is there.
It's freezing cold and he was in those two work camps.
Then as the Russian started to come towards Latvia, they walked them
to the ocean to move them down to Poland.
That's the one time he was beaten.
He tried to hide in a haystack and a little boy saw him and turned him in
and that was the only time he was beaten throughout the 4 years.
So, he went in a boat from Liepaja is the name of the city on the coast
of Latvia, down to Stutthof where he was reunited with his brother
for a very short time, a couple of weeks, and then he was put
on a train, he didn't know to where, to Buchenwald.
He was moved to the Rimsdorf subcamp where there he worked
in a synthetic gasoline factory.
And then as the Allies were bombing Buchenwald and Rimsdorf,
he and a little over 2,000 prisoners were put on a train.
The Allies bombed the train.   They walked for 4 miles.
He was one of about 575 people who survived that move from Rimsdorf
to Theresienstadt and in Theresienstadt, within 4
or 5 days, the Russians arrived.
If you ask Kalman how he survived, he'd say a couple of things.
He was very lucky that he was young and strong and able to work.
He drew for bread for himself and his brother.
He learned literally how to become invisible.
He never ever gave up hope and if you talk to survivors,
I've heard this many times, Kalman said if somebody,
whether they were starving or not, gave up hope,
you'd see it in their eyes, and within a day or two they were gone.
You simply couldn't give up hope and he lived minute to minute,
not day to day, but minute to minute.
And the other thing that sustained Kalman,
he always had a very strong relationship with nature.
He's always drawing land-- he's always painted landscapes.
And in Buchenwald, when he got there, there were some--
the Jewish camp was called the "Little Camp."
If you've ever been there, it's down at the bottom of the hill.
The barracks were full.
By the time he got there, he slept on the ground next to a rock,
and he said, he looked up at the stars at night and say,
"The Nazis cannot control the stars
at night nor the sun in the morning."
And when he'd wake up each morning he'd say to himself,
"I've survived one more day."
So nature has always sustained Kalman.
Now when he was liberated, he wasn't really liberated
because the Russians had reoccupied Latvia and Estonia,
and Lithuania so he and five other Latvians
and Lithuanians were set aside, taken in a truck to a forest,
held up by gunpoint by these Russians
and Kalman thought he was going to be killed.
They stole the Red Cross packages and then they went
to go find some horses, and just told the six men to stay there,
and they all looked to each other and said.
"I don't think that's a good idea."   So they escaped the Russians.
They found their way to Prague.
They were afraid to be seen because it was clear,
they were in Russian territory, and it was clear
that they were Latvian and Lithuanian Jews.
A truck came by, they finally asked for help
and the driver was a Russian Jew, and he knew they were Jewish,
and he hid them in the back of his truck
and got them to Prague in safety.
So at the end of this war, Kalman was one
of 1,000 Latvian Jews to survive.
They were 70 to 75,000 at the beginning of the war
and they were killed almost within the first six months.
The Wannsee Conference came long after the majority,
long after at least 90 percent of the Latvian Jews were gone, killed.
They were killed extremely quickly.   [ Pause ]
Now, he was in Salzburg in a displaced prisons camp,
always drawing to get an extra piece of bread.
A judge, a former judge, a Jewish judge, American GI took two
of his drawings, sent them to the Fine Arts Academy in Vienna
which is one of the finest art schools in Europe.
He doesn't even know about this.
He gets a letter, "you have a full four year scholarship
if you can make your way from Salzburg to Vienna."
His friend said, "You're crazy.
You're going to be in the Russian territory.
You have no food.   You're going to go hungry."
He was an artist.
There was no way he was not going to do this.
So he made his way, again, escaping Russians on the train on the way
to Vienna and he loved this art school.
When he arrived, the head of the art school says "Some years ago,
a young man came to be a student here.
We didn't think he was qualified.
We turned him his way, his name was Adolf Hitler.
He couldn't draw."
He also met a lovely young woman, Gertrude Schneider,
who lost most of her family in Vienna.
She had gone at age 13 on the Kinder [inaudible] train to England,
and so she lived through the war in England.
They were kind of, as Trudy said, two lost souls together.
When Kalman decided, when he got the opportunity to come to America
on a visa, he married Trudy 'cause she wanted to get out of Europe
as well, and they came to America together, and she just died.
I spent a lot of time with Trudy, wonderful, wonderful women.
So, this is a painting that Kalman did in Uppsala, Sweden,
when he had a show in the '70s, but Sweden and Riga are very similar
in climate and the way they look.
So this is the closest kind of winter scene
that I could find the he had painted that was similar to Riga.
He will not go back to Latvia.   He will not go back to Riga.
When I went on, I went back and did his whole journey.
He said, "I'm not going.   They killed my mother.
I am not going back."
And he said "Furthermore, I don't think it's safe
for you to go either, Susan."
But this gives you a feel for the kind of climate that he had lived
as a child growing up, and this is the climate that he left.
Now he arrives in L.A., which is a place of warmth, and light,
and color, a very different place to live.
And Los Angeles since 1949 has provided sanctuary to him.
And as a native Californian, I asked myself,
how is it different than Riga?   Well, California is a place--
Southern California is a place of open visitors.
They were no walls for Kalman there, there were no boundaries.
He was not closed in.
It's obviously been a place of new beginnings for generations
of immigrants and Americans.   It's a home for creative people.
You can do whatever you wish in the arts, in film.
You think-- I always think
of Walt Disney whom I grew up with and loved.
Steven Spielberg.
It's a wonderful place for creativity.
And then very importantly, it's so spread out, it was a place
that he could remain invisible.
He could be successful as an artist for a lifetime.
Directors, producers, you know, lots of famous folks had him paint them
that he could stay under the radar.   When I was in Vienna, I realized
that he had been in Vienna after the war.
He could've never hidden his life.
He would have been known, because it's such a small community,
they care about art and culture.
But in L.A., you could stay pretty invisible.
He achieved success quickly.   As I mentioned in the '50s, he--
mom got him all kinds of commissions for portraits.
He was named one of the most outstanding young American artists
in 1956.
He was commissioned to do people like Henry Miller,
they became good friends, the writer Henry Miller.
This is a wonderful oil with great strong brush strokes.
He got a commission during Reagan's presidential campaign in 1980
to do this poster for the campaign.
One way he stayed invisible was when it was done, they printed it,
and the red was not the right color, and he would not let them use it
for his presidential campaign.
This is the painting of Andre Previn, the composer, conductor.
He also had he not been an artist would have been musician.
There was a lot of musical ability in his family.
He loved being around musicians.
This is a fabulous tall oil again with strong brush strokes
of a very famous African jazz player.
He did a lot of drawings.
You can see he does oil, he does pastels, he does acrylics,
and he does just, you know, pencil and charcoal.
This is a wonderful drawing of a man he met, Rabbi Sonderling,
who was a founder and a prominent educa--
founder of a Fairfax Temple in L.A., and a very prominent educator.
The rabbi was interested in the intersection of art
and religion, art and spirits.
So they spent a lot of times over coffee talking.
Now Kalman gave up any interest in God as a result
of what he experienced in the Holocaust.
He will not say God doesn't exist.   He's just not interested in him.
So, Rabbi Sonderling wrote him a note and said,
"While you're not a religious man, you are a man of great spirit."
Kalman was proud of that.
The style that he developed that was entirely his own was named
Psychological Realism.
These are small and large studies of people, and if you notice
with very few lines, and color, he creates these images of people.
This is a small one of Two Men Seated.
It was in a show in Sweden, and the president of the University
of Uppsala gave the style of painting the name
"psychological realism" and it stuck.
Here's another small one, A Woman in Blue.
And I-- these are my favorites.
He also does large oils in this style.
This is the Checker Players, and you can see it's just usually a couple
of bodies of large bodies of color, and a few lines creating the image.
This is The Dreamer.
One thing I learned-- when Kalman paints, he goes to another place.
It's a way he's maintained his sanity over a lifetime.
It gave him a sanctuary inside himself.
When he got to America, he made a decision not to discuss the past.
He and Trudy made a conscious decision
to make new American friends.
He found that when he talked to other survivors, he just went down
and became unable to function.
But if you look at his art, I think he learned to this in the camps.
I think these are places that he took himself in order to survive.
This is a large oil.
And this one, Lady in Waiting, I love.
The drawing on the left is the line drawing.
He did one of his favorite models in the 1970s, and typical Kalman,
a decade later, he'll go through his drawings, pull something out,
and decide to do something with it.
He pulled this out in the 1980s, and as you can see he distilled
and changed the mood of what he saw and he again used three major fields
of color, and I'll use his own words to describe.
He said "Some years later I decided to make a painting from the drawing.
I tried to capture a mood, I changed a little bit of the face
and the mouth to get the mood,"
and again his eyes are exquisite, and always expressive.
He also became known immediately for his landscapes,
and he paints landscapes wherever he is,
whether he is in Europe, or Canada, or America.
This is Laguna Beach.
It happens to be the cove that my husband
and I spent the first two nights of our honeymoon many years ago.
This is a painting of San Jacinto Mountains that are
between Los Angeles and Coachella Valley
where Palm Springs and Palm Desert is.
In the '60s, a man commissioned him to go to Venice
and just paint all over Venice.
As always, he paints for himself as well.
This is a painting of the ghetto in Venice.
It's the origin-- that's where the word ghetto originated.
It was right here in this neighborhood.
And this is a painting of the rooftops of Chinon in France.
He and Trudy were married for 7 years, they divorced,
and he met a woman named Suzanne in England, and they married,
and spent 10 months in Europe,
and he will tell you it was the best time of his life.
He loved painting the people.
He loved painting the buildings, and he loved the light.
Now, since Kalman wouldn't tell me his story,
what I did that I asked myself, what were the first categories
of paintings he did for himself, not on commission, but when he was
at night, what did he paint for himself, just unconsciously do,
and there were three categories.
Neighborhood children, landscapes, and then clear echoes
of the Holocaust, things where he was working things out.
So what I did is I looked at what he did in the '50s
and then I watched those categories change over time
because I believe his canvases are a mirror of what's going on inside,
and if I'm going to understand his own internal transformation,
I had to see it in the paintings.
This is a painting he did in the '50s, the Girl in Red,
and as you can see, she is surrounded by darkness.
There is no joy on the face of that young girl, but there is light
in the garment, there is still light in the garment.
In the 1950s, he went to visit his friend Salzy Peretsman [phonetic]
with whom he survived, another Latvian.
And he was in Brooklyn, and he just drew a regular drawing
of two children, didn't look like this at all.
He came home and he painted this, and I call them the Lost Children,
and if you look at them, they're in a fog,
they look like European children that have survived the Holocaust
or in the middle of it, and he said to my sister, I don't know why
but I gave the little girl the face of an old woman.
Well, if you've experienced what children experienced during those
times, you would be old before your time,
and Kalman did all of this unconsciously.
So then what I did is I took these two paintings that showed
where he was inside in the '50s,
and I looked at two other paintings that he did of children.
Now, the Mexican boy, he did in the '50s, but if you look at it,
this little boy has a determined look.
He's got vitality, he's going to face life and live it,
and he's got a determination in his chin, which is just like Kalman.
So I think he connected to those qualities in this little boy
to recapture those qualities in himself.
Twenty years later, he painted the portrait on the far right,
it's the portrait of my nephew Eric, and you can see this boy is full
of light and full of curiosity in his eyes.
You cannot paint what you do not know and you do not see.
So in looking at these paintings of children over time,
I think by the time that he painted Eric, he's reclaimed some
of that curiosity himself, inside himself,
or he couldn't have painted that portrait.
He married for a third time.
He met a woman named Tanis Furst in 1968.
They had a wonderful honeymoon traveling
and painting over across America.
He did a bunch of commissions in Texas and then they went on up
into Montreal, and they had a son.
And I think too when you think about what he went through,
it's got to be a conscious decision, do I dare bring life into this world
or not, and he did, and he did it with Tanis.
And his son is an artist in New York
who has had his own rough time because, as you know,
children of Holocaust survivors carry that whole load
Now, the second category that I looked at were landscapes.
He worked near Bunker Hill.
Bunker Hill is where the Chandler Center and the Gary Music Center,
Disney Center, sits in Los Angeles overlooking the basin.
In the late 1800s some developers built these big Victorian homes
and they were very wealthy and then the street cars came
and the folks moved to Pasadena and these became tenements.
This is what he was drawn to draw in 1950 when he was working there.
And if you look at this painting, there are no humans,
there are no animals, there are no trees
and there is absolutely no color
and I think this reflected his interior landscape
when he came to America.
Thirty years later, he painted the backyard of the mayor
of Beverly Hills, he had done a commission,
painted several portraits for this family, this mayor, and he asked,
"May I paint your backyard?"
And I always watched, what did he ask to do?
He didn't have to stay there and do this.
And if you look at this, it is full of light.
The light is dappling through the trees, full of color.
There's balance in it, there's harmony in it.
So that again shows the progress that he made from 1950
where his world, interior world, was totally gray to a world
where he's reclaimed color in his life, in his own life.
And this last painting is one that he did in the 1980s,
it's office balcony, it's the night lights of Downtown,
L.A. And the reason that I-- this is one my mom had.
I love this painting because what it tells me, intuitively,
Kalman understands that there is no such thing as absolute darkness.
There is always light and shadow within the darkness.
[ Pause ]
Third category that he did were clearly were he was working out
and he did this late at night 'cause he worked during the day.
Clearly, where he was working
out what he had witnessed in the Holocaust.
This is an 8 foot by 3 foot painting of the mother and child
and I will use his own words.
"I came up with the idea of getting the two faces close together
to show the bond of the mother and child and her anxiety,
trying to run away from the ghetto or camp.
Glued together, she will not let go no matter the punishment."
And this is what he saw over and over and over again.
So it's his portrayal of what happened.
And it's very unusual.
This is now hanging in the Los Angeles museum, the Holocaust.
The founder Jona Goldrich wanted it there.
The chairman said to me, "It's not a Holocaust painting."
And I said, "That's because you don't see a lot of paintings
of mothers and children because they were killed immediately."
So, the wise curator got Holocaust survivors around it and asked them,
"Does this belong in this museum?"
And of course they all said yes and it hangs at the entrance.
And if you look, there's always a reference to nature.
He told me, "I put a moon in, I don't know why."
That he always has some connection to nature.
But this is sort of like a warps time,
I mean it's outside of our time and space.
The second painting is when he did, it's a smaller oil of a mother
and child and to me it's what happened to them in the Holocaust.
And if you look at this mother and child, they're stripped naked.
There's no light in their eyes, a tiny bit in one eye of the child.
They are not bonded.   They are not connected together
and they may not even be connected to themselves.
So this is sort of an evolution of what happened to children
and mothers as a result of what they experienced in the Holocaust.
Thirty years later, Kalman painted this portrait, this infamous style
of psychological realism.
Painted this painting of the mother nursing the child and it amazes me
that he could reconnect to the kind of tenderness
and intimacy that's shown in this painting.
His mother believed in a world of beauty and love.
He said to me, "Of course she was wrong," but he's recaptured I think
in this painting, he's recaptured the world his mother gave him
as a child growing up.
That next set that show his evolution are self portraits.
And he, this first one is a small, really small gauche that he did
and he is the skeleton figure.   It's called Marching in the Camps.
It's a symbolic one of his experience in the camps.
It's quite powerful.
He is in the center and I noticed he's also here on the right
and then I realized as I looked around it,
all these different faces, the sad man, a wise man, a terrorized man,
that they were all aspects of what he experienced during the Holocaust,
and I'm sure he went through many, many different psychological phases
and what he ended up is in the front and center.
And if you look at that, he had, there's a steely strength.
He's solitary among many.   No light in his eyes.
They're just dark black holes.
There's a dark hole for the mouth for him to eat.
It feels it has an-- in person it feels like a medieval painting.
He still has, if you look in the upper right corner,
he still has some night sky there.
There is your nature, there is your touch of nature,
but there's no emotion permitted, he's become a skeleton of bones.
For me, this is the image of what happens to a human being
when we treat a human being the way he was treated,
this is what we become.
And I know from my healing practice, when we're traumatized,
we have to give up our light in order to survive.
Then the question is, can we regain it?
This he did in the early '50s.
And then next, oops, I'm going in the wrong direction.
This is a self portrait he did in 1934, he was 30 years old.
And if you look at this, he's in two different worlds.
His right side is in the shadow, his left side is in the light
and if you study his eyes, one is looking backwards,
his right eye is looking backwards
as though it's still trapped in the Holocaust.
The other one is looking forward but it's rather weary
about the present, it's in the present.
So what this tells me is
that he still is traveling two parallel universes,
he's in two different realities.
He has not integrated what happened to him in the Holocaust
with his new life in California and he was 30 at this one.
And now this one on the far right is a self portrait he did
when he was aged 43.
And you can see that color has returned.
He's got the robust markings of a man who has lived.
I used to think this was going to be the cover of the book
but I sat with it in Cape May.
If you study-- if you look at his eyes,
You see that determined chin that he connected
to with the Mexican boy's pastel but there's a certain kind
of weary watchfulness in his eyes.
He is not comfortable yet in his own skin on this earth.
So you can see that Kalman spent a lifetime painting
to maintain his sanity.
It was, it's always been a place he can go and find peace.
He metabolized, I think, the evil he experienced, literally working it
out on canvas, and to a certain degree,
we can see that he reclaims his light
but he still kept his art under the radar.
He has not given up the belief
that if he's really sane that he'll be safe.
Everybody who was close to Kalman throughout his career has always
said get an agent, do the show in New York, he always had a reason not
to do it and he still at this age still did that.
Now in 2003, he made a huge decision to cognitively remember his story
when he asked me to write it.
I think that the pain of not remembering became greater
than the pain of remembering.
And it was a very courageous decision on his part.
There were huge cost, the nightmares came back.
He'd wake up with a raising heart, he ended up, there were a lot
of trips to the hospital.   And I'll share one story.
Well, I-- when I-- when he asked me to do it,
I went out to spend two weeks interviewing him.
I got a message at home, don't come, I'm in the hospital,
I have pneumonia, Cedars-Sinai, don't come.
I was already out there 'cause I was in Palm Spring seeing my mother.
I sat down and did a meditation and I asked for an image,
what's really going on here?
And I saw Kalman with this thick black vest of energy
with spikes sticking out.
And it-- the energy of that vest in a very low voice said,
"We do not tell our story.
Paint, keep your head down and stay invisible."
So, that I learned very quickly and I shared this, you know, he's not,
he doesn't like my spiritual meditations, it's not where he goes.
And I remember saying this to him and he looked at me and he was ready
to dismiss it and then he looked at me again and he said,
"You're absolutely right, Susan.   Being invisible saved my life."
So he has throughout the 9 years had a civil war going on inside him.
There's this one voice of survival from the camp saying,
you don't get seen out there.
You don't write a book and have your life before the public.
And then there was this other voice who said,
"I just got to finally tell it."
Now the benefits, the benefits are wonderful.
[laughs] I see four.
The first one is he is comfortable in his own skin.
He has a new ease and peace within himself,
and of course it always shows up on canvas.
He's always painted men playing cards and chess and checkers
in public parks in California,
around Santa Monica, around his neighborhood.
The one here on the left is the Chess Players done in the 1960s.
The one down below on the right is the men playing cards
in Roxbury Park in 2004 after he told me his story.
And if you look at them, the old one has a brooding heavy look,
darker colors.
There's one man in the center with his arm up here and angst trying
to figure out what to do.   You look at the one he did in 2004.
The colors are entirely different.   They're lighter.
You look at the men, they are not brooding,
they're not penetrating the meaning of life, they are simply living it.
And again, I think that shows one of the benefits of him becoming at ease
in his own body, and it always shows up on canvas.
The second big decision he made after he told me his story,
he'd been married three times and divorced.
The last divorce was about 71.
He met a woman in 2003 and they started dating and he made it's--
they decided to get married.
And he knew, I mean, he said, I hope we can bring each other happiness.
He would've never opened his heart and married another woman if,
I don't think, if he had not told his story.
So it was an opportunity to try and create an intimate relationship
that brought happiness to him before he died.
The third thing, and very powerfully, he had this painting
of the mother and child in his studio for 60 years.
He has a whole series of paintings he did
around the Holocaust in the '50s.
He had been asked to show these many, many times.
The answer was always no, he wouldn't do it.
In 2010, a new Tolerance Center in Rancho Mirage opened,
he was asked if he'd show them, and he did.
In that night, he ended up in the hospital.
He was honored with the reception and his paintings,
his Holocaust paintings and some of his normal ones,
he ended in the hospital, he almost died.
That was in 2010.
I arranged for him to have this painting hang in the new building
in L.A. They just-- the Los Angeles Museum
in the Holocaust is the oldest one in the country.
And they created a new building on Pan Pacific Park.
It was a dreamer of-- it was a dream of Jona Goldrich.
There was only one place this painting could hang and it was
in the front entrance, and it is there today.
He held onto that for 60 years.
He was not about to let it go until he had told his story
and gotten comfortable enough.   And what I learned is as long
as we don't heal whatever trauma we've experienced,
we hold things tight.
And once we've remembered and healed it, we can let go,
and for him that literally meant letting go of the painting.
[ Pause ]
And this-- this freedom to me is the big one, the freedom to be seen.
When I grew up, I really-- and I've spent a lot of time with art,
I would say to myself, why is he not more famous?
He's always been successful, he's always paid his way,
but why is this man not more successful?
And it was this old belief about if I'm seen, I'll be killed.
He has given that up.
We had in the last month, in LA, in October,
we had a book event presentation.
There were two former governors of California.
Rabbi hired the dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center
at the Museum of Tolerance.
On stage, honoring this man, introducing me
to do the same presentation, Kalman stood and beamed for the first time.
And that night, he did not end up in the hospital.
So he has finally given up the belief
that it is not safe to be seen.
It is finally safe to be seen in this world for him.
That is huge.
So then, I asked myself, you know, what is his legacy?
What is the legacy of a living master?
For me, the first legacy is the power of his example,
and it has played in my life, you know, every win we know is a mirror.
I've learned so much from this journey with Kalman.
But he, he not only survived, he pursued his passion,
he created art all of his life, and that is truly what he loved.
He's done it and maintained his integrity.
Everyone who knows Kalman will tell you, he--
including Trudy, what she really liked about him when she met him
in Vienna, he was good-looking
and he was a wonderful mind, but he had integrity.
He was not bothering like everybody else was.
So he's always maintained his integrity.
And you can see in his work that he's wrestled, literally,
with the evil of what he witnessed and what he experienced.
So in his body of art, there are no shortcuts here.
He really worked this stuff out.
Secondly, for me, I believe his body of art is the vessel
of healing for other people.
I believe that anyone who touches this book has the potential
of having past trauma healed.
His art carries literally the resonance of what he transmuted,
what he transformed in himself and that is a human condition,
that is a universal reality.   It doesn't matter who we are.
What he went through is worse than anything I've gone through.
But humans around the world suffer trauma and loss.
And his being around his art, somehow,
on an unconscious level, helps people heal.
Now, if they're consciously reading the story, that's even better.
[laughs] But I think it's a vessel of healing.
[ Pause ]
I love the fact that it is-- that his journey is visual.
I love being able to see him go from this world of gray to this world
of color and for me, that's personal alchemy that's available
to all of us.   We all do this in a lifetime.
He just happened to do it on canvas from a place of darkness that few
of us have ever known in this lifetime.
[ Pause ]
The third legacy, I think, is it certainly is for me and hopefully,
for people around the world, I think his life is an invitation for all
of us to go inside and deal with whatever hatred, anger, sorrow,
or loss we have so we don't project it on somebody else, and go around
and kill people, number one.
And he is a very good example of what--
if you have the courage to remember and go back to the trauma,
of the benefits that you get.
So I hope it's an invitation for all of us to make different choices
in resolving conflicts so we don't resort to violence.
The final thing that I think is so powerful about Kalman's life
and speaks to me very deeply, I think his life is an invitation
for us to remember we're all one,
we're all connected, we're all human.
And what we do to one person here, we do to ourselves here.
I know that when-- I think when we all realize that,
we're going to be able to literally live in peace among each other.
And I'm hoping that this book will inspire people
who have suffered brutality, witnessed genocide,
been part of war, whether--
and it can also help people who have been brutalized
in their own home or village.
It doesn't have to be on a mass stage.
Inspire them to take the same kind of journey that Kalman did
to reclaim their own light.
I believe we're walking sticks of light.
And the more we go inside and know what's in every, you know,
shadow and in the corners, and see it, we have the ability then
to bring light to all of it, and our own light is that much greater.
If you saw his eyes today, compared to the painting of him Marching
in the Camps, you see the transformation of a human being.
Thank you all very much.   [ Applause ]
>> Are there any questions?   >> You bet.
I love questions.   I'm a talker, you know.
[laughter] Any questions?   Yes.
>> Since the book and your exploration of his art,
have other paintings come forward of his
that may have been sold to other people in--
>> Yes.   >> Where, in Europe as well?
>> Not in Europe yet.   I think that could happen in Europe.
I've gotten a lot of emails of people showing me paintings
that they or their parents had purchased.
That's happened a lot.
I've gotten emails from people who knew--
Salty Peretsman's daughter found me, because her father is gone now.
So yes, things like that are happening.
I also want to take an opportunity.
I want to introduce two people that I see here today.
The first is the brilliant publisher, editor,
and owner of Posterity Press.   I want you to stand, Philip.
This book could never be what it was without you.
[applause] And I honor you, and I thank you.
[Applause]
And I also want to ask Michael Cardiss [phonetic] to stand up.
Michael has been a friend for years.   She's a neighbor.
[applause] She and her husband are creative filmmakers.
They produce interactive museum exhibits.
And when I started doing this,
Al Hillman [phonetic] said this is the camera you get, you go out there
and you record these interviews with him on camera, not just orally.
And they helped me in all kinds of ways, so thank you.
All right.   What other questions?
[Inaudible Remark] [Laughter] Yes, Peggy?
>> So then you have all these oral histories.
>> Yes. [Inaudible Question] Yes.
Yes. On film, thanks to Mickey and Al, I do.
And I haven't had, I mean, I used all, I've had them all transcribed,
so I used them in creating the book.
But one day, there would be something that can be done.
I also have to show a transcript interview,
which is on the book website.
Now, if you go to kalmanaron.com, I have an internet person
who knows how to do these things.
[laughter] And this full show interview.
And the most interesting part in the show interview
for me is he was asked at the end by the interviewer, Dana Schwartz,
"Is there anything you haven't told me that I've not questioned,
you know, raised a question?"   He said, "Well, there is one thing.
I've never had a normal family life as my parents created for me.
I've been an artist and that's given me the freedom to do all of my art
but I regret that I don't have that."
And she said, "Well, you're still young.
You may remarry," and indeed, he did.
[laughter] Larry.
>> At what point in the process did you share your thoughts regarding
[inaudible] and what was his reaction?
>> That's a wonderful question.   2009, I will never forget it.
I had the manuscript, I took it to him, I put it on the table in front
of him, and he looked at me and he looked away--
he put his hand on and he looked away from it
and he said he was concerned that everything was accurate,
that was the first thing.
And then he said, leave it with me for a week.
Let me read it.
I mean, he was shaking, his body was shaking.
He was very nervous.
I'll call you when I've read it and then you come back.
I got a call and I went over.
I mean, the book could not have been published
if it wasn't authentically his story, I mean.
I went over, and he looked at me with those blue eyes.
He said, "Susan, I don't know how an American girl could possibly have
understood what a European man went through.
You've done it, you've done it poetically.
Keep doing what you're doing."
And that was a huge relief, because everything would have stopped had
that book not reflected who he was.
And a lot of what I got, I got in meditation.
I sat in Buchenwald and said, "Kalman,
what do you want me to say about this camp?"
I put it in the book.   I didn't say how I got it.
I put it in the book in his voice.   It was right, it was all right.
[sighs] [laughs] And when Phil and I went out, an artist cares
about the correct color reproduction
of their paintings, period, end of story.
It's very hard to get them correct.
Phil and Robert and I went out to do the color correction.
When I sent him the printed book, he was thrilled.
He said the paintings are all the right color.
One actually is a little off because I have to know that.
He is absolutely thrilled with this book and the story.
Lyn [phonetic].   [ Inaudible Question ]
Okay, I'll repeat that since we're doing a webcast.
Lyn is asking, in all of the research and the experiments,
what was the highlight and the lowlight?
[ Pause ]
I think the lowlight was sitting at Stutthof, in front of a gas oven
and I don't remember whether it was crematorium or gas.
It could've been a crematorium.
And as I sat there, it's very interesting, Buchenwald--
the Germans have done more soul searching
than the other countries that I visited for sure.
And Buchenwald has had a cleansing process.
The Dalai Lama has been there, Buddhists monks have been there.
Tony Nanchanti [phonetic], Stutthof--
and Poland doesn't have money.
It is, it felt like the way it felt when he was there.
I mean, the imprint was so powerful.
And I sat there to try and get a feel of what it was like for Kalman
and his brother, and my back went out.
It just flat out went out.
So I think that may have been the time that I was,
in the energy of his experience, perhaps the most,
there were other very moving times, but that was really, really heavy.
More so than Buchenwald which is surprising,
because Buchenwald was awful but not as awful as Stutthof.
The highlight, I learned that even though I did not,
Kalman was a mirror to me.
I always said there's no way I can understand what he went through,
but I must, as my husband said, you must go to those sites.
You cannot write this book if you're not, where he lived and where,
you know, and serendipitously I found these camps in Latvia.
I was just, you know, it was fabulous.
I did a meditation in Rumbala with his spirit, his mother's,
his father's, and his brother's.   It was profound.
It was on the ground where she was killed with 25,000 other people.
And what I realized, the terror that he experienced, I know that terror.
I don't know why I know it.
I don't know whether it's in our DNA, in our human-- our humanity.
I know the terror.   His heart was like a shriveled prune
and his mother wanted to give him a new heart.
His father said, "Don't blame God, blame people, people did this."
And his brother said, "Forgive me for not protecting you."
I actually typed this up and gave it to him.
And his body shook.
I said, "You want me to take it with me or leave it?"
And he said, "Leave it."
But then about two weeks later, his son called.
"Don't do any of that spirit stuff with him.
It upsets him too much."
I've learned in my healing practice that I'm capable of doing everything
that any human's ever been done, has ever done.
And I'm responsible for cleaning myself off inside,
wherever the anger, the sorrow, the rage, you know,
the hatred, whatever it is.
And I believe there'll be no peace in my world or the world
until we individually do this.
But I knew what Kalman had, I knew that terror, that stunned me.
I also sat one time and I realized he literally sent his light
out in order to survive.
He couldn't have survived if he had kept his full light in.
I had done that in my history as well.
And I remember the day that I went "Aha!"
you know? I knew that my sun wasn't in this solar system.
It was a long ways away.
So I think the commonality of what we share, which gets us back
to the reality that we are all one, and what happens to him happens
to me, what I do to this person, I'm doing to myself.
I think maybe that realization.   Thanks, Lyn.
All right, thank you.   >> Thank you.
Thank you very much, Susan.   Thank you.
[applause] I just want to tell people that there are books for sale
in the back, and Susan will be happy to sign them if anybody wants.
>> Absolutely.   >> And thank you all for coming.
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.