Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Gallery Talk

Trauma, Resilience, Resistance, Photography, and Memory of the Shoah

Saturday, June 17, 2017

12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Visitor Center (130.10)

Join guest speaker Dr. Harold Bursztajn, clinical and forensic psychiatrist and professor at Harvard Medical School, for a gallery talk on Henryk Ross’s photographs of the Lodz Ghetto. Dr. Bursztajn has a long-standing interest in the relationship of art and the artist to the representation of massive psychic trauma. He is the son of Abraham and Miriam Bursztajn, two of only 877 recorded survivors of the Lodz Ghetto in Poland. In the face of oppression and the Nazi program to use Jews as slave labor, humiliate, and destroy via mass murder, Ross captured the dignity, beauty, resistance, and resilience of the Ghetto’s inhabitants. These artful portrayals of hope in the midst of suffering, life in the midst of death, love in the midst of hate, vitality in the midst of entropy, move this exhibition from photojournalism to art in the tradition of Rembrandt, Goya, and Bloom.

Learn more about Dr. Burztajn’s family story in this interview with WBUR’s Bob Oakes.