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VIDA JOCIC:
The artist Vida Jocic is the author of the exhibition An Appeal for Peace at the Centre for Cultural Decontamination To our suffering and scattered ashesBy M. Marjanovic "My sculptures are the synthesis of the Slavic, Jewish and Romany camp inmate. There are still 25 tons of women's hair in Auschwitz today. With the palms of my hands, qute unaware, I have formed the face of the Polish woman." At The Centre for Cultural Decontamination, in Belgrade, was opened the Appeal for Peace exibition by Vida Jocic, who was from 1942 until 1945 the prisoner of the Belgrade camp Banjica and concentration camps Auschwitz and Ravensbruck. Vida Jocic had exhibited everywhere, from Belgrade to Paris. She was awarded all the major prizes for sculpture, and her works are presented in all the world collections... This is her story.
You have written: "If there was ever hell on Earth, it was Auschwitz..."
Even today, when one utters letters of that word which symbolize
the horrors of war, it is as if these letters transform into daggers.
Today, there are still 25 tons of women's hair in Auschwitz...
We dug canals at Auschwitz... A Polish woman from Warsaw was one of us.
She was caught in a raid, when she was buying bread for her children, who
she had left locked in. Suffering terrible grief for her children,
her mental state was shattered. Lonely, sick, half-insane, we Serbian
and Yugoslav women accepted her as one of us. I used to force her to
eat that meagre slime we were given. She was silently going with us ewerywhere.
The fate of that Polish woman had guided your life toward art. How did that happen?
One morning a young German, in shining boots, rushed down
the canal side and begun to beat her, repeating that she was
a pig and should wash herself. She started to grasp mud with
her hands and rub it over her body. Not satisfied, the German
pushed her and stepped on her head. So he drowned her - and then
kicked her. Then he came over to me and ordered me to laugh. I could
not. He was probably irritated by the horror he recognised on my face.
Horror from pain, bewilderment and helplessness. I was holding on to my
shovel, stuck into the slime, so as not to fall down... I was looking at
the woman's face - it radiated nobleness and beauty, like Christ on the
cross. It reminded me of our frescoes. I clutched the canal side and
felt in my hands something I could squeeze. It was clay. Trembling,
I held it tightly in my palm, without knowing what I was doing. As if
I wanted to bring her back to life, to capture the Polish woman's expression...
Who pointed out to you that you have formed the woman's face on the palm of your hand?
I climbed out of the canal and looked for my friend
Staka Diklic. I shared food bowl with her. She got in line
before, and having drunk her half was waiting for me, staring at
the bowl. Suddenly she raised her eyes at me, sighing: "Look, it is t
he Pole. Vida, you are a sculptor. If you stay alive, do not forget
this and sculpt it."
After the war ended you did not become a sculptor right away?
No, I did not. My hands were in wounds. It took a long time
to heal them. I had to cure eczema. As I used to recite poetry,
everyone was telling me to become an actress, so I became one.
I finished the film school, acting department. After I had cured
my hands I went to study sculpture.
How old were you when you were deported to camp?
I was twenty one. Since 1942, untill July 1943, I as at the
Banjica camp. Then we were transported to Auschwitz. The number
49865 on my arm was tattooed in July 1943.
Your first exhibition, held way back in 1958, was also an
appeal for peace to the world. Whose faces are now
on the exhibited sculptures?
They were always the camp inmates' faces, but as a
symbol. They are the synthesis of the three faces: Slavic,
Jewish and Romany. They are alike, because we were all
the same - equal - in the camp.
What is your message with this exhibition?
I address all the surviving inmates, their friends
and offspring to raise their voices against this crime:
bombing of the Yugoslavia, and the new fascism...
I dedicate this exhibition to our suffering
and the ashes scattered throughout all the camps in World War Two.
Own experience of the drama of collective death has guaranteed the authenticity
and sincerity of an individual creative act ever since art came into existence as a human
experience. This huge theme - perhaps the greatest in the history of human civilization-
had artists who related to it directly, creating works
that formed the corpus of the most valuable, most important
and artistic masterpieces - milestones in the history
of art. Most certainly, one of these is Pablo Picasso's Guernica.
And in terms of its characteristics, the monumental composition
of sculptures Appeal for Peace by Vida Jocic has its place in the same
lineage.
Its basis is the universal semantics of the Holocaust (for each individual,
community, nation - always and everywhere). Its creative background is the number 49865
tattooed on the artist’s hand in Auschwitz in 1943. Its aesthetics is the dramatic
expression of the individual form, multiplied into many. As has already been written, it
is the Cathedral of Pain which acts through destructive torment, an echo of terrible
silence, seting in motion in one place a whole whirlpool of emotions in space and
time…
The first ‘Appeal’ by Vida Jocic, although created in 1958, actually
symbolizes the evident state of literal destruction as the dominant ideological category
of the ongoing fin de siècle. Reflected through the actual contrasts of the age, the need
for construction is transformed into an impulse of destruction, optimism is replaced by
fear of an extremely dangerous future augured at the very beginning of the new century.
For the next thousand years of the third millennium, from this cataclysmic perspective of
ours, seem to prophesy a period whose end will be impossible to envisage. And is this not,
finally, the aim of the warning - the appeal by Vida Jocic which travels through time and
remains eternal with unchanged meanings and messages of great importance.
Belgrade, April 1999 Contact |
I invite all the prisoners of the nazi