LEBENSRAUM - THE ESKIMO ICE CREAM DRAWING

The child victims portrayed in this mixed media piece were drawn from Warsaw Ghetto photos — the child at to theleft from a photo by Nazi soldier Heinz Jost. Jost's caption for the photo stated: "On the sidewalk in a side street I saw this tiny child who could no longer pull himself upright. The passers-by didn't stop. There were too many children like this one."

Lody means ice cream in Polish. Store signs seen in Warsaw Ghetto photos pre-date the Nazi occupation and the sealing in of the ghetto. I was struck, living in Seattle — with my home city's close proximity to Alaska and Native American culture — by the incongruity of a store sign in the Warsaw Ghetto for Eskimo brand ice-cream.

The Polish word POSTOJ is seen in a photo by the late Jewish photographer Roman Vishniac from his book of photos A Vanished World (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, NY '86). During the 1930s Vishniac traveled through eastern and central Europe, including Germany, where he photographed Jewish life in the countryside and city alike, at great risk. A photographer could easily be considered a spy, and Vishniac took many photographs with a hidden camera.

A 1937 photo by Vishniac shows the licenses and papers of the artel of Jewish porters in Warsaw. in the foreground of the photo (plate 28 in the paperback edition of the book) is seen a bearded man's license, which is stamped POSTOJ No. 81 (Postoj in Polish means station). His porter station then was No. 81. Porters hauled goods, some by backbreaking labor with ropes connected to a cart slung to the back and shoulders; better-off porters had a horse and cart.

Lebensraum, meaning "living room," was the German Nazi term used to justify their seizing of neighboring lands at the onset of World War II. Germany needed "living room" for their imperial conquests and an expanded Germany.