Five Diaries represents my first effort at postmodern photography.  This is a work of Post-memory.  I have tried to create a portrait of a child through his diary.  There are five diaries in total.  Each one outlasted its young author.  There were over 1 000 000 children that died in the Shoah. I know these five.

Yitzhak Rudashevski

b. December 10, 1927; Vilna

d. 1943; Maidanek

David Rubinowicz

b. July 27, 1927; Kielce

d. 1942; Treblinka

Moshe Flinker

b. October 9, 1926; The Hague

d. 1944; Auschwitz

Eva Heyman

b. February 13, 1927; Nagyvarad

d. 1944; Auschwitz

Anne Frank

b. June 12, 1929; Frankfurt

d. 1945; Bergen-Belsen

            A diary is a person’s most intimate confidant.  It is a friend.  It allows you to confide in complete confidence.  It never judges you.  These children shared their experiences with their diaries. 

            I have looked into the diaries of five children that perished in the Holocaust. I looked through their eyes to see their experiences of the Shoah.  All of what I know of the Holocaust, thank G-D, is through the documentation and experiences of others.  My parents were children in the Shoah.  Most of my parents’ families perished in the Holocaust, but those members of the family that did survive were reluctant to burden me with their horrific recollections.  I unlocked this Pandora’s box in high school, when I first read Anne Frank’s diary.

           Even though Anne Frank hoped her diary would be published after the war, there were many parts of her diary that I felt were too personal for me to be reading.  It was raw.  I felt that I knew Anne better then I knew some of my friends.  Through her recorded experiences, I felt the war going on outside. 

            This project is an effort to share some of my post-memories of the holocaust.  When I read, I see images flicker on a small distant screen in a darkened room that are projected from the film of letters on the page before me.  I have tried to generate some of the images that I saw when reading these five diaries.  The choice of the triad is a form that I have used in the past, and I feel is well suited to telling a photo-narrative.  Since each triad represents one person I have tried to make this set of three visually similar and consistent.  I have chosen three images from each diary that work together on some level.  In addition, as each diary represents a unique individual, I have tried to make each series of 3 images look somewhat distinct from each other.  The text relating to each image will be a quote or summary of the diary that served to generate the image in my mind’s eye, and in turn onto paper.