Against the wars: War in Ukraine – pictures with flowers

Flowers? I wondered. Are pictures with flowers the topic that landed me after my superheroes in front of the concentration camp? I had painted the superheroes from the comics of my childhood in front of the “Arbeit macht frei” gate at Auschwitz. And now a series with the “trivial” motif of a flower, an opening – three-dimensional blossom. From 2019 to 2021, I wondered whether the Holocaust could be compared to other genocides. What is a breach of civilization and what is barbarism?

No, I said to myself, I can no longer paint Beavis and Butthead in front of the gates of Auschwitz, the barbarism is happening in the here and now. A war had started in 2022. I want to let the lust for life rise against the backdrop of hell, flowers in protest against Russia’s war in Ukraine. I painted flowers in front of a ravine. I couldn’t do it anymore, I didn’t want to do it anymore, but what I wanted was healing. A life on the brink of destruction, I longed for hope. Paintings with layers of color that are applied and removed, sometimes more impasto, sometimes more flowing, to enliven the senses. There are openings and closings at the same time.

Not only was it the beginning of the Ukrainian War, but also the funeral of my grandmother, Rachel Gorodetskaya, who died a short time later on March 8th. Jews usually don’t put flowers on a gravestone, but rather stones. But we are Russian Jews and we put flowers and stones on her gravesite in Dortmund. She was the last Holocaust survivor to leave our family.

Back in Berlin, there were a lot of people standing in front of the house where I wanted to rent my apartment, most of them were Ukrainians. They wanted to speak to me in Ukrainian because my last name is typically Ukrainian. My grandfather Michael Grynszpan changed his surname Grynszpan to Kharchenko shortly before he was drafted into the Red Army. He wanted to avoid speculation as to whether he could be related to Herschel Grynszpan, who shot Ernst von Rath, secretary at the German embassy in Paris, in Paris in 1938 to take a stand against the first deportations of Jews to Poland. This act served as the reason for the Nazi pogrom night on November 9, 1938.

“Stop” – I said to the Ukrainians, “I hardly understand a word, let’s all speak Russian.” I asked a woman with a daughter: “Where are you from?” – “From Mariupol” – she replied. She only spoke when I asked her something. Then we rode on the subway together and spoke Russian. “I don’t understand that there’s a war,” I said, “we all speak Russian.” She was born in Mariupol, I was born in Moscow. “Aren’t we united in language?” I asked. The woman looked at me suspiciously and remained silent. When I got back home, I remembered the films “Schindler’s List” by Steven Spielberg and “Shoah” by Claude Lanzmann. I looked again at photos of bombed Mariupol. I called the woman and told her she could have the apartment. “Where are your parents?” I asked. – “You are dead,” she said.

And then another war started last year. Hamas invaded Israel and Israel attacked Gaza. The subjects I painted were mixed together in my head: T-Rex and Ptyrodactellus from “Jurassic Park” and above it says “Welcome to Jewish Museum,” flying Stars of David that mix with Soviet stars, celestial stars and US Army stars . My grandfathers in blood-soaked Superman costumes at the gates of Auschwitz and it’s raining Stars of David and Soviet stars, Beavis and Butthead smoking a joint at the gates of Auschwitz and showing the peace sign, Israel on a black map, portraits by Oppenheimer about David Ben- Gurion to Jacques Derrida and Amy Winehouse.

“Israel does not exist,” “it was a mistake to found this state,” “you are a German Jew, but only a guest in Germany,” “you profit from our taxes and present yourself as a victim,” “you are a “Homo Sovieticus and paints socialist crap – a disgrace for every society” – the Bio-Germans have been writing me posts like this since October 7th. In the last four months I have received a dose of anti-Semitism that would normally take me five years. I can only say this much about the remaining 25 years of anti-Semitism in Germany: A neo-Nazi attack in Düsseldorf almost cost me my life. At the art academy a professor said: “He’s a Russian Jew, but strangely enough he’s good.” A long-time friend suddenly said: “For you, the Holocaust is the greatest shrine. How long are we Germans supposed to remember it?”

Despite this dark world we live in right now, where fascism and nationalism threaten to swallow us all, I will not stop relying on universal values. Not the increasing German anti-Semitism, not the terrible tragedy of October 7th in Israel, nor Netanyahu’s right-wing radical government will stop me from doing so.

My grandmother Rachel wanted me to remain an artist and a universal human being. Being Jewish means “not obeying,” that was Abraham, Emmanuel Levinas, Viktor Frankl and that was my grandmother. And so was her husband Arkady, who resisted German Nazism in the Red Army, from Stalingrad to Berlin. So that we can all live in a free world.

My grandmother was born Rachel Schatz on January 26, 1929 in the city of Yaroslavl, USSR. Her father was Boris Schatz and worked as a lawyer for a factory. He was also a poet and was friends with Alexander Block, the famous poet and Russian symbolist. Her mother Nadja was a pharmacist. Boris was seriously injured during the First World War and therefore did not have to fight in the Second World War. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, little Rachel hid in the Yaroslavl bunkers. After the war she studied medicine and then worked as a pediatrician for half a century.

In the late 50s she met my grandfather. Born Arkady Gorodetsky in 1922 in the suburbs of the city of Smolensk on the border with Belarus, at the age of 13 he saw the Bolsheviks deport his father because he owned a mill. The Stalinist purges began and his mother was alone with Arkadij and his two siblings. When he was 15, his father was brought back to the family with a broken leg. When he turned 16, his father was taken away again and he was never seen again. He was shot as an “enemy of the people”. At the age of 18 he was drafted into the Red Army and fought in the most terrible battles in Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, Minsk, Warsaw and Berlin. He died in Dortmund in 2013 at the age of almost 92. His last words were: “Father, mother.”

I painted him in 2023 as Superman in front of the gates of Auschwitz, together with his parents. I don’t want to mention the number of my family members who were all killed by the SS. It is important that my maternal and paternal grandparents survived, so that my parents were born and at some point I too.

In Germany, the Holocaust history up to 1945 is mainly processed, without responsibility for the here and now of the Jews. They believe that the liberation in 1945 was archived with stumbling blocks and melancholy Anselm Kiefer pictures. However, many people do not want to accept that the catastrophe of the Holocaust and the Second World War after 1945 brought with it a new spiral of violence and countless deaths. Many see the terrorist mass murder of Jews on October 7th and the Gaza war that Israel is waging today as outside their historical responsibility. It is the silence of my grandparents that makes me speak and paint. There remains an emptiness and a sense of optimism and an endless desire for expression.

Yury Kharchenko: Painting 2018–2023, Hirmer, 304 pages, 220 illustrations, hardcover, €49.90.