The photographer’s “TEI” exhibition René Revach follows the trauma of extermination of Jewish her Thessaloniki In Birkenau-Auschwitz camps.

The intergenerational trauma and reconciliation with it. For a few more days in the Branch of the National Bank of the National Bank in Thessaloniki in Villa Kapantzis, Rene Revach’s photographic exhibition presents the painful journey of the loss of members of her family from Thessaloniki to Auschwitz.

A redemptive photographic journey that goes through pain and heavy historical heritage to healing love.

The photographic narrative starts from the dark wagon of the train that carried the Jews of Thessaloniki to the gray landscape of Birkenos, the corridors, the stairs, the Auschwitz dormitories and the walls of the gas chambers from March and until August 1943.

“Tehom” in Hebrew means the primordial depth, thus symbolizing the abyss of the horrible acts of the Holocaust. Among them is Rene Revach’s grandmother, Sol Venice, and the children of Olga, Lina and Isaac, as well as other relatives. Her grandfather, Albert Revach, was the only one to survive, fleeing to Athens until the end of the war. With two consecutive trips to Revach to Birkenau and Auschwitz camps, she is mentally talking to her grandfather who had never found the courage to visit.

A mental narrative to the grandfather

“About a decade ago I felt the need, looking for some answers to my soul, to go deep into the family trauma I inherited on my father’s side. It was a need to go back in time to explore this story, to see what answers will I get »Talking to Deutsche Welle, photographer René Revach. He grew up in a family in which the wound of loss was alive at the narrative level, transparent and behavioral.

Core of the exhibition, a white knitted fabric, a family heirloom rescued from concentration camps and had taken the Revach grandfather from the timepiece of history. She confuses “the spirit of the family” and spreads it to the wagon that carried her relatives, on the branches of a tree and at the end of the exposure in the water of a lake, wrapped in the body of a naked woman and dragging her into her seabed into a kind of purification. “It was a carrier for me between the material world and the intangible world. To bring life into this space that represented the loss for me. ” In the Revach texts, the visitor browsing her experiential narrative, next to the powerful images. The protagonist in the photos is nature trying to impose the dark landscape of the past, accompanying Revach in trying to accept it in dialogue with her grandfather.

Shocking meetings

In too many testimonies she finds many in common points that really leave her sometimes speechless. “At the end of a tour came a gentleman who confessed to me that his own family was Nazi. It was very intense to see a man who in theory is the other side of coin, “he says. The photographic narrative has a search for treatment, purification and forgiveness. Indeed, as part of the exhibition, a special laboratory for forgiveness was held in an attempt to reconcile with pain.

What are the demands of forgiveness? What about the unforgivable and the guilt of what we cannot forgive? “It was shocking when in the first moments of a guided tour I heard from a visitor: “I understand why I was in these trains too. I can’t forgive, “Revach recounts. It was Lola Encel, I survived the Bergen Belsen gathering camp. Another shocking meeting in Thessaloniki with German psychiatrist Titus Milech, who grew up in Germany from parents, supporters of Hitler. “He suffered so much from that when he realized in adulthood what he meant, he left Germany, he no longer wanted to speak German. Is the part of the trauma of a child born in a condition that did not choose, ” The Revach stresses.

Revach’s individual, family trauma is also collective. Her art manages to transform many things. “It’s a circle that fits more and more narratives and people. The loneliness I felt about this trauma has declined and the sharing it lightens it. It is also a family ‘settlement’ that our story has been preserved but also having processed the wound I try not to be transferred to the next generation. “says Revach.

Moving impressions and continuity

“A moving representation of an era era. Never again to no human being »reports a comment by visitors to the exhibition. ‘Every man has the right to live without pain’ students write from 1st GEL Kilkis while in another comment we read about ‘Poetry of absences and everlasting love’.

Students of the German School of Thessaloniki also visited the exhibition.

“We felt the power of these images that associate so tender and so humanly the past with the present”, Speaking to Deutsche Welle, student Athanasia Kalavrouziotis. “We felt like sinking with the girl in the lake water physically, but also emotionally, under the weight of history and memory,” Students Ariadne Ioakimidis and Aria Dadi are mentioned. Next stop of the exhibition most likely Milan.

Rene Revach’s special look will be transferred to the documentary “Tell me“Directed by the journalist Nikos Megreli and will be screened at the next Thessaloniki Documentary Festival. Interviews with Holocaust survivors, guided by Revach’s mental narrative with her grandfather, the camera follows the paths, even with animation elements that brings to life the narrative, utilizing drawings and drawings made by prisoners in the concentration camps.