Creating Beauty from the Abyss: The Amazing Story of Sam Herciger, Auschwitz Survivor and Artist

by Lesley Ann Richardson

Overview

Seeking a World of Art and Beauty in the Shadow of the Holocaust

The enthralling story of Sam Herciger provides us with a heart-wrenching and powerful Holocaust memoir. It traces the journey of an aspiring young artist who embarks on a passionate quest to find artistic freedom during the danger-filled period of Nazi hegemony in Europe. Sam's life is then caught up in some of the most dramatic events of the 20th century.

His intriguing adventures begin in prewar Poland, where Sam grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home. It is there that he meets a mysterious figure on the banks of the shining Vistula River, a man who prophesies he would one day achieve fame. Sam's desire to study art leads him into countless places of peril, including Stalin's Russia and Nazi Germany. Yet, the creative vision which drove him on gave him the courage to endure unimaginable trials, as did the inspirational works of art he encountered.

Sam Herciger's panoramic story shows that steadfast commitment to the ideals of love, beauty, and truth can conquer seemingly invincible evil. It is a testament to the greatness of the human spirit.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789493276109
Publisher:	Amsterdam Publishers
Publication date:	04/28/2022
Series:	Holocaust Survivor True Stories WWII
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.79(d)

About the Author

Lesley Ann Richardson is originally from Queensland, Australia, where she grew up and eventually studied English Literature and Theology. In the 1980s she moved to Israel, and spent a number of years working for different Christian organizations in the land. While there, she met and married her husband, David Richardson, in Christ Church in the Old City of Jerusalem. David was a Canadian, who himself had a remarkable life story, which she also set down in a book. Later she went on to publish Bible Gems from Jerusalem, an award-winning work on history and theology in the feasts of Israel. Lesley is presently living on Vancouver Island, Canada, the home of her late husband, and devoting herself to writing and teaching.

Editorial Reviews

★ 2023-01-16
A man survives the Holocaust with only his art to sustain him in this biography.

Richardson tells the story of Sam Herciger, a Polish Jew born in 1917 who became an artist and gallery owner in Israel before his death in 1981, and his passage through history’s worst horrors. After an idyllic small-town boyhood and apprenticeship as a furrier, he got caught up in the antisemitism and tyranny sweeping Europe in the 1930s. A socialist at the age of 17, he crossed the border into the Soviet Union hoping to get free training in art from the workers’ state only to be arrested as a spy, beaten, and sent back to Poland. There, he was promptly arrested as a Soviet spy and tortured with electric shocks. He then traveled through Nazi Germany, dodging a German border guard’s bullets, and lived in Belgium for years, studying at an art academy, plying the furrier’s trade, and marrying. His luck ran out in 1944 during World War II when he and his wife, Hennie, were caught by the Gestapo. They were sent to Auschwitz, where Herciger was separated from Hennie and never saw her again. He plunged into a hell of backbreaking labor, starvation rations, beatings, and the threat of random killings by SS guards. He was death-marched to an Austrian slave-labor camp and got more of the same until the war’s end. Adrift—his family had been killed by the Germans—he slowly emerged from despair through painting and sculpture, which brought him growing acclaim and another chance at love. Richardson bases this searing biography on Herciger’s notes and includes informative chapters on the historical background along with reproductions of the artist’s paintings, which feature haunting, black-and-white renderings of skeletal prisoners. Her novelistic prose starkly conveys the surreal cruelty Herciger endured—“The heavy club was landing on different parts of his body, with all the force of the pig-man behind it….While he was enduring this punishment, the officer was eating chocolate”—but also finds a heartbreaking lyricism in the darkness, as at his parting with Hennie. (“Her blonde hair and pale face stood out luminously in the bleak light…as the distance between them increased.”) The result is a nightmarish yet ultimately hopeful portrait of spiritual survival in the most terrifying circumstances.

A gripping, harrowing account of suffering and hard-won humanity.

Kirkus Reviews