Esther Nisenthal Krinitz created 36 crewel embroidery “pictures” that tell her personal Holocaust experience. The pictures helped her tell her story in a way that words could not. Esther started out with a picture of her childhood home in Mniszek, and when she was done, she was pleased: it looked exactly like her house.
Esther did not stop there, with the depiction of her childhood home, but shows the entire tragedy of the Holocaust as it came to Mniszek and to her family.
In this picture, her mother sends her off in a different direction, to hide from the Nazis, that she might live. You can see the beautiful blooming fields, two strips of color, one blue, one yellow, and how the mother and her daughters are swallowed up in the fields.
Some of Esther’s pictures are difficult to take in. The detail is remarkable, almost obsessive. And the story is painful. Nature seems somehow oblivious to tragedy: no matter what happened to Esther and her family, the flowers still bloomed in the Polish countryside.
Watch the video to see more of Esther’s painstaking work and history.
The only disappointment in this amazing documentary comes at the very end of the clip, when talking heads weigh in and conflate the Holocaust with other tragic events, sucking the “Jewness” out of the Holocaust, making it “just another genocide.”
