Johnstown Symphony Orchestra to present 'Heroes' concert
JOHNSTOWN, Pa. – A personal understanding of the Holocaust will be felt throughout this musical experience.
The Johnstown Symphony Orchestra will present 'Heroes' at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Pasquerilla Performing Arts Center on the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown campus in Richland Township.
The concert is in collaboration with the Community Foundation for the Alleghenies Blanche Beerman Holocaust Education Fund and Hope Springs Eternal: Holocaust Education Project.
The project brings together local and regional arts and community organizations, each contributing to fostering an understanding of the tragic time in world history and commemorating the enduring resilience of humanity.
The orchestra will perform poignant and inspiring works by Jewish composers whose lives and careers were tragically affected by the Holocaust, including Zikmund Schul, Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein, Franz Schreker, Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Hans Gal and Ilse Weber.
The concert also will extend gratitude to World War II veterans for their bravery and sacrifices in a visual display.
'We are grateful to the Johnstown Symphony Orchestra for their interest in this very special concert,' said Mike Kane, president of the Community Foundation for the Alleghenies.
'Mr. and Mrs. Beerman wanted people to remember the Holocaust so that something like it could never happen again. This concert is the culmination of a year-long effort through the Hope Springs Eternal campaign to do just that.
'We all know how the arts can be so impactful in making an impression on people, and we expect this concert will certainly be powerful.'
The performance will feature Grammy Award-winning violinist and composer Michelle Barzel Ross, who will appear as a guest soloist.
In addition, a 30-member student choir from Forest Hills High School, led by music educator and Johnstown Symphony Chorus member Phil Parlock, will perform.
Erin Codey, executive director of the JSO, said the concert will be more than a performance. It will be a moment of collective reflection, remembrance and resilience.
'Through our partnership with the Community Foundation for the Alleghenies and the Hope Springs Eternal Holocaust Education Project, we honor the legacy of those impacted by the Holocaust while uplifting the voices and stories that continue to shape our community's pursuit of justice, healing and hope,' she said.
Season leadership sponsors include 1st Summit Bank, AmeriServ Financial, Concurrent Technologies Corp., Somerset Trust Co. and Sposto Interactive.
Tickets are $20 and must be purchased in advance online at www.johnstownsymphony.org.
No tickets will be sold at the door.
For more information, call 814-535-6738.
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Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. On June 6, 1944, my great-uncle, the combat artist Mitchell Jamieson, stood on a Tank Landing Ship with hundreds of other soldiers waiting to join the assault waves and demolition parties already heading to Utah Beach. In his description of his painting of that morning, Dawn of D-Day Off of France, he recalled the freighted tension of the moment: These men … could only wonder what awaited them as they stared at the distant coastline, barely discernible. The boats, suspended on davits above their heads, expressed oddly in their dark shapes the taut, waiting threat of this dawn off the Normandy coast. Hours later he would come ashore with a .45 pistol, pencils, and a sketchbook. 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As I began helping Craig unearth the sheaves of Mitchell's records, photographs, and drawings, I became intrigued by his life and the significant role he'd played, almost haphazardly it seemed, in many of the pivotal events of the 20th century. It is an odd thing to become acquainted with a family member decades after their death, and doubly strange when this person was a well-known artist in their time. Mitchell's astonishing art spoke to me first, his intricate visual renderings of everything from military tanks and orphaned children to shells and flowers. His sketchbooks, in particular, about 80 of them in the family collection, offer a remarkable record of his working style as an artist, the rapidity with which he drew, his ability to capture details in high-stress moments, his delicate notations of colors to add when he later painted from the sketches ('water grey-green, blue reflections'). But in exploring this archive, it is his voice as a writer and a thinker that has surprised me most. Knowing him as a visual artist, I was prepared to see through his eyes; I was not prepared for his poetry, his prose. Mitchell composed descriptions of his combat artwork, over 500 pieces of which have been collected by the Naval History and Heritage Command, and his writing provides context for each piece. Some of his notes are literally scrawled on the back—the verso in artistic terms—of the art, while others were clearly composed and submitted when the pieces were given over to the Navy. These descriptions range from straightforward accounts to lyrical observations, short essays, and scraps of poignant reportage from the field. On a simple pen-and-ink drawing, Waiting for Burial, Cemetery Above the Beach, he included direct quotes ('told to the artist') from an unnamed sergeant grappling with the challenge of burying thousands of American, British, and German corpses in a war zone: Why, when we landed we didn't know what to do or where to start. Bodies everywhere you looked and firing going on all around you. Some of the officers of another outfit wanted to use a bulldozer [to bury the dead] but our lieutenant said no, we'd do the job proper and decent. In the sketch, four covered bodies represent the anonymous dead, but the verso reveals the real savagery of the beach scene. Mitchell described the 'apologetic' tone of the sergeant when he acknowledged how the horrifying task and the sickening smell had become routine. In this exchange we see his encompassing role as an artist correspondent on the battlefield: the listener, the watcher, the witness to it all. Before Normandy, Mitchell had been embedded with a convoy to North Africa, and landed at the invasion of Sicily, where his sketchbooks were soaked through, and men all around him were hit by shrapnel. From Europe, he was sent to Iwo Jima, where 'every square foot of earth seemed to be torn or pockmarked by shell fire and shrapnel,' and then Okinawa. Craig remembers his father telling stories of a Japanese kamikaze plane dive-bombing and hitting the aircraft carrier he was aboard. In an interview with the Washington Post, Mitchell described his work from that time as 'filled with pleasure of drawing, of fighting with men I loved, the exhilaration of color and war.' He learned of the atomic attack on Hiroshima from a shipboard broadcast. 'I was glad,' he said in the same interview. 'I wanted the war to end. I hated those bastards.' The combat artist role is inherently paradoxical. In Mitchell's art and writing it's evident that he's straddling the line between surviving and creating, being in the action and observing the action, capturing the details while not losing the larger picture. In contrast to war photography, visual art requires a longer, intimate engagement with the moment. It demands conceiving, sketching, lingering; it demands time. In the chaos of the battlefield, he became aware of all the moving pieces and terrible nuances: German prisoners so relieved to be out of the fighting that they'd salute when approached; the truck called the 'meat wagon' which transports the dead; the 'slow, steady and appalling' work of burying the fallen. And in the midst of this, he recognized the frustrating impossibility of seeing and expressing it all, what he later described as a 'gnawing dissatisfaction and awareness of the disparity between the enormity of the tragic subject and one's own trivial effort.' After three years of service, Mitchell returned from World War II with a Bronze Star and the foundation of a successful career in the arts. He had a one-man show at the Corcoran Gallery, his paintings were included in an exhibit called 'Operation Palette,' which toured the country for five years, and he won two Guggenheim fellowships. He started teaching at art schools nationally, and eventually landed a tenure-track position at the University of Maryland. During this time, his perspective on his combat service began to change, gradually it seems, and then all of a sudden. In a 1962 talk for the Society of Federal Artists and Designers, titled Razzmatazz and Tatterdemalion: The Myth of the Useful Artist, he shared his ambivalence about his role as documentarian and propagandist for the US Navy: For a period of three years, during the Second World War, I occupied a position in the U.S Navy known as Combat Artist. According to your predilection, this designation will seem either a contradiction in terms or a natural state of affairs …The war experience left me with a curious duality in my art and in my thought. On the one hand, my painting reflected a great and universal theme, of concern to everyone. Recognition for it was not lacking, stemming as much, I am sure, from the subject matter as from my mastery of my craft and art. There was, on my part, a gratifying sense of fulfilling both a useful public role and a personal potential for development at the same time. On the other hand … the sense of being manipulated by vast forces. It was these 'vast forces' that made him want to understand what was really going on in the Vietnam War, beyond the news reports. In the summer of 1967, he reprised his role on the battlefield, this time as a civilian volunteer artist under the auspices of the Office of Military History. Visiting Saigon, Pleiku, and Dak To, he filled sketchbooks and took hundreds of photos. Sickness forced him back to the United States after less than a month, but he had seen enough to transform his life and art forever. If Mitchell's World War II combat art built his career, then his obsession with Vietnam destroyed it. My grandfather, usually a reserved man, opened up to a journalist about his brother's state of mind after going to Southeast Asia: 'For two years he had insomnia. Ludy [Mitchell's wife] said she heard nothing but Vietnam for six years after he got back.' Through all those sleepless nights he painted and listened to Vietnamese music and read 'every book published on Vietnam,' many of which are still in the Alexandria townhouse. He created an opus of work, still unfinished at his death, called 'The Plague,' which is both a reference to Albert Camus' book of the same title and the U.S. military itself. Mitchell's post-Vietnam art was prolific, pointedly political, and largely unsaleable. To render Vietnam, Mitchell became a new artist altogether. Gone is the heroic sense of comradery: the brave, grim-faced men piling onto boats to fight and die together. Now we see only black-and-white drawings, faces and bodies emerging from midnight splotches of ink. Mitchell felt the horror of this war should be captured in monochrome; color was by its very nature sensual and inappropriate. These drawings, he wrote, were 'composed in a spirit of cold fury, animated by an overwhelming sense of the obscene, insane, waste of young lives, and addressed to a new and revolutionary young consciousness.' The brutality, the viciousness of killing, and its aftermath are all documented, but also something else. A sense of claustrophobia, of trapped, hypocritical, pointless violence. Tortured, decapitated, castrated victims ringed in barbed wire; prostitutes suffering the affections of grinning, obese officers; grieving peasants wailing, hunched over dead children. While his World War II work is clearly reportage, here he goes beyond what he actually witnessed, imagining scenes in harrowing detail. His art pivots from stylized to surreal; if his early pieces had echoes of Edward Hopper, they now seem haunted by Hieronymus Bosch. Mitchell's anti-war crusade had real-life impacts, including delaying his tenure at the University of Maryland. Institutions which had once welcomed him back as a returning war hero refused to acknowledge his incendiary new body of work. In an unpublished article titled 'Das Kannibal,' Mitchell wrote angrily about being blackballed for speaking out against the war. The Defense Department, which had first invited him to Vietnam, declined to show 'The Plague' drawings, he said, suggesting that perhaps they could be exhibited in '50 years time' when they would be less controversial. The Smithsonian, too, turned their back on him (a cutting blow for an artist who'd lived in the D.C. area his whole life) because (Mitchell wrote) they were 'intimidated by celebrities like [Alexander] Calder' who threatened to withhold gifts of his art if they circulated an exhibit on the war. In a scathing rejection of his newest work, Bernard Quint, art director at Life magazine, wrote on Nov. 28, 1967, 'From looking at your drawings, I would gather that only American G.I.'s are guilty of poking their daggers into Christ-like Vietnamese and obviously Hanoi and the Viet Cong are blank pieces of paper which symbolize innocence.' The doors that were once opened to Mitchell now slammed shut, and he felt profoundly betrayed. 'No medals this time,' he told a Washington Post art critic. (I asked the Smithsonian and the Department of Defense for comment on the events Mitchell described. A spokesperson for the Smithsonian replied that they were unable to offer informed comment due to the time that has passed, and the Department of Defense did not reply to my request before press time.) All my life, I heard that the trauma of my great-uncle's visit to Vietnam killed him, and his obituaries and many of the articles about his life and legacy reflect this sentiment. But as I've learned more, I've started to question whether it was the three weeks he spent in Vietnam or the three years he served in World War II that led to his ultimate breakdown. In 'Das Kannibal,' Mitchell writes that Saigon 'brought back vividly to me the Algerian city of Oran in 1942-43 … first city I'd ever seen surrounded by the feverish activity of war-time.' Just over 20 years after the end of his World War II service, he returns to the battlefield and finds another formerly peaceful country overtaken by war. It is all too familiar, but now he is 20 years older, a reporter and not a soldier, his vision no longer clouded by the communal spirit of war. Standing apart from the machine, he sees it for what it truly is. Camus' The Plague is set in Oran, and with this connection in mind he christens his new series of unflinching depictions of massacre. This time, he seems to be saying, I will tell the truth about war, all the wars I have seen and all the wars to come. But how much of this was already brewing before Mitchell stepped foot in Indochina? In his 1976 eulogy at Mitchell's funeral, Lt. Cmdr. J. Burke Wilkinson described how Mitchell's art evolved during World War II: I heard he had gone to the Pacific … and we saw in Life his Iwo Jima pictures … the growing depth and compassion of his art … the terror and the beauty too … a sadder, harsher note, colors more disturbing … a sense of strain, exhaustion even …Later we heard he had been ordered home by the Head of the Art Unit and had begged to be allowed to stay. As a military man, Wilkinson would have known that 'strain' and 'exhaustion' could be signs of serious mental health deterioration. The diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder was not recognized by the American Psychiatric Association until 1980; before that it was known simply as combat or battle 'fatigue.' There's also evidence that the profusion of bodies and nightmarish scenes that characterize Mitchell's later work started to creep in before he went to Vietnam. The catalog for Mitchell's posthumous Corcoran show in 1979 notes that a group of dream-influenced paintings, including one called Fragments From the Apocalypse, were exhibited before he visited Vietnam, and closely resemble his painting The Saigon Follies, 'with its melange of grotesque images.' In going through the art in Craig's house, I've also come across pieces in the same surreal style that predate his Vietnam experience. It leads me to wonder: How long had Mitchell been suffering? Had he ever gotten help? I'm left with the uneasy sense that both my great-uncle's life and death have been misunderstood. We know that he'd witnessed countless losses in World War II, saw wounded men dying in agony, traveled the world to participate in some of the bloodiest battles history has ever seen. And his official duty was to bring this brutality to life on paper. While other men had terrible jobs, they also had the possibility of forgetting, putting the war behind them after their task was done. But Mitchell's charge was ongoing: to capture the slaughter in his mind's eye, to witness and remember and translate everything he had seen for the broader public. Once these images were seared into his memory, they tormented him and they emerged in his imagination, his dreams, his art. He could never forget. Could it be that Vietnam was the trigger, not the cause, of his self-inflicted demise? In 1964 Mitchell had an exhibition at the University of Maryland of work from World War II called 'On War: Drawings from the Arena,' pulled from his personal collection. On the postcard promoting the show, he quoted James Joyce's Ulysses, 'History is the Nightmare from which I am trying to Awaken.' Below he added this text to justify displaying his wartime artwork, these 'odds and ends of catastrophe found in history's wake': If it is asked why this assemblage of faces from a dusty picture, burning villages and cities, refugees and invasion armadas … should be presented at this time, one can only reply that for so many of us the longest day in history dawned, cheerless and cold, off the coast of Normandy twenty years ago. Mitchell survived that 'longest day' in body, but the damage to his spirit would only become evident two decades later in another land ravaged by a new American war. At such close range, sketchbook in hand, the repeating cycles of history proved too much to bear. In the last, he must have felt his only chance to awaken from the nightmare was to end the dream.
Time Magazine
6 hours ago
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How an Auschwitz Prisoner Saved the Lives of Twins Targeted for Nazi Medical Experiments
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Why did Auschwitz conduct experiments on twins? Nicknamed 'the angel of death,' Josef Mengele was 'the most notorious of the Nazi doctors,' as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum puts it. Mengele sought out twins who arrived at Auschwitz in order to subject them to medical experiments. Spiegel, a twin, was separated from his twin sister Magda, and at Auschwitz, Mengele tasked him with looking after a group of male twins and escorting them to Mengele's office for experiments. It's unclear exactly what kinds of medical experiments were performed on these boys. 'There's very little evidence of exactly what was done,' says David Marwell, author of Mengele: Unmasking the Angel of Death, who did not work on the documentary. The survivors in The Last Twins are among the few left. Many of the twins who were subjected to the experiments did not live to talk about it. The twin prisoners in Auschwitz did not give their consent, and the experiments were not conducted by scientific research standards. If a twin died during one of the experiments, Mengele ordered the surviving twin be executed so their bodies could be autopsied and compared. Twins may have been saved from death by the gas chamber, but many who survived the experiments ended up permanently maimed. One survivor, Ephraim Reichenberg, who appears in the doc describes how he and his brother were subjected to injections in the neck. His brother was discovered to have a beautiful singing voice, but he did not have one, and the Nazis focused experiments on their necks. A year after the war, his brother died a painful death, and in 1967, Ephraim's throat and gullet were removed. He speaks in the documentary with a voice amplifier. Spiegel, he says, 'gathered all of the young children around him and took care of them, taught them, and watched over them.' How Spiegel helped the twins While Spiegel couldn't stop the experiments, he did his best to keep the boys alive. In a place where prisoners were known by numbers tattooed to their arms, he made sure the boys called each other by their real names. If one boy found a piece of food, then he had the youngster share it with the rest of his peers so everyone could enjoy some of it. He even taught them math, history, and geography in the barracks. 'He was a father figure to us,' says survivor Tom Simon. 'We had no father there.' The documentary also features a man that Spiegel snuck in as a twin to save their lives. Gyorgy Kun says he and his brother were directed to the twin medical experiments, even though they weren't actually twins. Instead of turning them away, Spiegel changed the birthdates for the Kun brothers so that, on paper, it looked like they were born on the same day, and therefore they wouldn't be sent to the gas chambers. Mengele was never prosecuted for his crimes and lived in fear that authorities would come after him. Marwell says he didn't find 'any specific evidence that he was in any way remorseful.' Mengele fled to Brazil after the war. TIME's 1985 obituary called him "the most hated man in the world." After Auschwitz was liberated, Spiegel moved to the Czech city of Karlovy Vary and lived near his twin sister Magda, who also survived Auschwitz. He got married, had a child, and immigrated to Israel in 1949. LIFE magazine featured him in a 1981 article about Mengele, and surviving twins started to reach out to him. He always took their calls. He died in 1993 at the age of 78. Richter says her father used to tell his children that Nazis 'could take away your family, your house, everything, but they would never be able to take what you have learned and your knowledge.' She cites Spiegel as a reason why she pursued a career in academia and set up a program that schools young people in the basics of medicine. Now she is the co-founder and active chairperson of Medinol, a medical device company, focusing on ethical forms of medical treatment, in stark contrast to the unethical medical treatments that her father saw in Auschwitz. She hopes viewers will inspire them to act and help others. 'One person matters,' she says, explaining that she hopes that her father's story will empower people to be courageous in dark times. 'This film is not just a Holocaust film. It's a universal story about the human spirit triumphing over evil. It's a story of resilience…not just of surviving, but protecting others.'
