Homage to Sabine Herszlikowitz
28/09/2024
60 x 45 cm (h x w)
acrylic on paper
Sabine Herszlikowitz, a young Jewish girl, was born on March 27, 1936, in Paris. Her life was tragically cut short when she was murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau on February 11, 1943, at just 6 and a half years old. Her story serves as a poignant reminder of the many innocent lives lost during the Holocaust. What poetry or science might Sabine have created? What love, strength, laughter, and joy could she have brought into the world? What insights or contributions to humanity were lost to us due to her senseless murder?
Even today, children are losing their lives at the hands of people who neither respect them nor care about the deadly consequences for these children. Children are falling victim to abuse of power—not only through politics and war but also through economic decisions, business practices, and, on a large scale, through the climate change we continue to drive forward. The resulting deaths of children are morally justified by those responsible, dismissed as collateral damage, necessary sacrifices for some declared greater good, or simply seen as unavoidable. While I do not intend to equate today’s atrocities against children with the systematic killing machinery of the Nazis, such actions still reflect shocking cruelty, total lack of compassion, and a pathological arrogance, fueled by the narcissistic belief that there is a justification for actions that knowingly accept the deaths of children.
Little Sabine was murdered in a gas chamber as part of the so-called Final Solution. It is difficult to comprehend what drove people at the time to embrace such contempt for human dignity. Hannah Arendt aptly pointed out that evil requires nothing more than banality. I fear that this same banality still drives our political decisions today—a situation we should all approach with caution. How can we escape the banality of evil? What must I do to avoid becoming complicit? Will I one day tell my grandchildren that my actions were driven solely by self-preservation, a false sense of duty to my insulated corner of society, or—worse still—by the conviction that I was acting pragmatically?
Links to information about Sabine Herszlikowitz