Creating Beauty from the Abyss. The amazing story of Sam Herciger, Auschwitz survivor and artist
Sam’s story begins in Zawiercie, Poland, 1917. From childhood Sam Herciger felt the awe-inspiring essence of nature which transported him into another realm where his imagination could run free. Exploring the feelings that nature inspired in him, Sam developed a love for drawing and sculpting- “as he carved… he was wholly absorbed in his creative task…lifted into a world where a sensation of freedom and purpose seemed paramount”. However, growing up in an Orthodox-Jewish household, this creativity created tension between Sam and his family leading to Sam feeling suffocated and needing to escape.
In Creating Beauty from the Abyss, the reader comes to understand how Sam was driven by his belief that his artistic calling was his destiny bestowed upon him by a transcendent force. Threatened by the growing antisemitism across Europe Sam’s dreams were put in constant jeopardy. Nevertheless, this would not crush Sam’s spirit. Sam journeys across Europe - facing multiple accusations of being a spy, being imprisoned, tortured, escaping the clutches of a German solider - all in the pursuit of this greater calling. On reflection, while at moments Sam wishes for death these challenges taught him how to deal with authority figures in hostile places: building his resilience for the future.
Throughout Creating Beauty from the Abyss, art appears to imitate life and there is this real sense of the presence of a mysterious power. After some of Sam’s toughest moments he likens his own experiences to those depicted in artworks.
[Sam’s mind] flew to Rubens’ painting of Daniel... It showed the prophet after the long night he had spent in the company of the wild beasts, his gaze steadfastly turned to heaven; all about him prowled the monumental, savage creatures – but he had been kept safe and unscathed, sheltered by a mysterious power.
These vivid reflections of how what he is felling is represented in art really help us the grasp the intensity of his emotions.
War, in Creating Beauty from the Abyss, is like an unwanted guest that constantly intrudes on Sam’s creative dreams. Sam tries to fight for his right to pursue his calling. When studying art in Antwerp, Belgium,
He made a silent pledge to himself: “I’ll work and work, and will try to arrive at their level. I’ll make the material live, will bring it my soul and my passions.”
But the realities of the political situation followed him like a shadow. Pressure from the Belgian secret police and the invasion of Belgium by Germany turns his world upside down.
By December 1941 Sam Herciger had moved to Brussels and was in hiding. Sam spent the next 3 years in a twilight existence - only going out at night - clinging to the words of a mysterious character called ‘the prophet’ who bestowed upon him with an aura of authority beyond this reality that Sam would “become exactly what you want to be”. In Creating Beauty from the Abyss, even in some of the darkest moments, you get the sense of the strength of Sam and the desire to have the same opportunities as everyone else so that he could surpass all expectations and demonstrate he was not wrong to ignore his artistic calling.
One morning in May 1944, Sam was found by the Gestapo and was sent to Auschwitz. The only hope that anyone had of not being murdered immediately was if they looked as if they could work. As they all waited in line to be assessed.
The words from the Succot prayer, the Unetaneh Tokef, drummed in his ears:
Who will live and who will die?
Who in their time, and who not their time?
Who by fire and who by water?
Having ‘passed the test’ Sam is plunged into the maniacal daily regime of life at the camp, where every day bought a new battle for survival - not just for life but for a sense of self-worth.
Life in ‘Planet Auschwitz’ required prisoners to possess unbelievable physical and psychological strength, due to the uncertainty of their fate, exposed to constant beatings and abuse, always standing at the edge of death’s door. While some prisoners in the camp succumbed to death, others wanted against all the odds to stay alive. Sam Herciger was among the latter group. It was during this time that Sam began to feel a sense of oneness with his fellow Jewish inmates, through their suffering they became transfigured.
He could see through their wasted frames to the radiant spark within where the embers of life yet glowed. The images that imprinted themselves on his mind and heart were endowed with a mystic quality, evoking the fires of suffering his people had passed through.
After Sam was liberated, the book provides a glimpse into a new territory of the human spirit. The battle did not stop for survivors, they had to come to terms with the loss of almost everyone and everything they had known and fight against the extreme reduction of humanity. Sam’s:
memories began to rise and subside in his mind as if they were living chords playing an unfinished symphony. They marched in solemn procession across the banks and shoals of his awareness, as across a formless sea where gray waves were heaving and tossing, alternately precious and horrifying. He was accessing a secret, hidden realm in which the memories had their own separate existence, from where they came to visit him one by one. “Do you remember us?” they seemed to be asking.
The abyss was calling out to Sam beckoning to him to succumb to the darkness. However, a spark laid buried deep. He begins to remember the feeling of victory when gazing at a piece of art and accessing the genius of the beautiful works creator, and the excitement as he felt the lines of his own sculptures, which:
seemed to be a key that in turn opened up another realm, transcendent, filled with a glory he could not name, where everything in life that was hard, difficult, excruciating, was expunged, transmuted, resurrected, as the hard skin of a seed will crack open with fructifying warmth and sunshine, and spring into blossoming existence.
His passion for art had pushed him to experience Life in his younger years and maybe it proved to be his saviour once more. Although he struggled to speak of the horrors that had engulfed him, it was through art that he was able to express himself, encapsulating brutality but also a reaffirmation of life.
The anguish of that time of intense suffering seemed to burst forth from the pictures and images as if restrained for too long: a misery that could not captured in words, but was present in the starkness of the elongated figures, in the sadness that marked each countenance, in the skeletal bodies bundled together in death, all the savagery and sorrow of camp life. But there were also other images being birthed, and they had to do, fundamentally, with LIFE – life lived in the very teeth of death – defiant, assertive, with a deliberate asseveration of joy. It was the Jewish theme of the ages.
Sam’s story came into the hands of Lesley Ann Richardson through Annabel Herciger, Sam’s daughter. The book was written from a collection of notes that Edith Herciger, Sam’s third wife and Annabel’s mother, had written about Sam’s life. Richardson manages to capture the heart of Sam’s inner turmoil between a passion for art and creativity and his religion that gets lost in the abyss. Richardson re-tells Sam’s story alongside the major historical moments that had an impact on and shaped Sam’s life, and the lives of many other Jews.
Lesley Ann Richardson’s new book?Creating Beauty From the Abyss is a riveting manuscript that should be required reading for this generation. It is a biography of Holocaust survivor and Israeli artist Sam Herciger, with each chapter of one man’s story set within the context of brilliantly researched historic narrative. The gripping tale of artist Sam Herciger describes the heroic spirit of Holocaust survivors and the supernatural strength often imparted in the most dire circumstances, even when their bed was made in Hell.?Lesley Ann Richardson has painstakingly given us a monumental work of historic fact and power. - Christine Darg, Founder, The Jerusalem Channel
Creating Beauty from the Abyss. The amazing Story of Sam Herciger, Auschwitz Survivor and Artist by Lesley Ann Richardson, 341pp, April 2022, Amsterdam Publishers, available on Amazon, B&N, and in bookshops around the world. getbook.at/SHercLAR1