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| Gershon Iskowitz - AGO 40 year retrospective - 1982. |
It is odd how a series of small events lead to a project which now occupies most of my time and thoughts. On May 1st, 2010 I was reading the National Post newspaper in the Toronto Public Library. I read a column by Conrad Black who casually dismissed the more than two and a half million Jews who were gassed to death in concentration camps as victims and not warriors.
This so incensed me, e.g. there were over 20,000 Jewish partisans who fought the Nazis during WWII, that I emailed a letter to the editor to the National Post wondering why Conrad Black had done so little fact checking before penning his erroneous assertion. My email was published in the National Post on May 5th.I had misspelled the name of Sir Martin Gilbert, the noted historian I had quoted to refute Mr. Black. His letter to the National Post corrected my spelling of his name and added further documented incidents of Jewish resistance to the Holocaust.
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| Condemned 1944-46 |
However, I realized that many people are not aware of European Jewish resistance to the Holocaust. So I started a blog,
The Spurned Stone, to communicate the many ways that Jews resisted the Holocaust - through humour, art, literature and combat. A room mate of mine read the blog and said that he had known an artist, Gershon Iskowitz, who painted while he was interned in concentration camps. Gershon (d. 1988) actually used to live a few blocks away from my home. I became intrigued. Gershon had two brothers and one sister as did I. His family and mine originated from the same area of Poland.
I began to research him, but found little on line. So I decided to set up a wikipedia page,
Gershon Iskowitz, as a tribute to his moving art and valiant life story. It turned out that a former room mate of mine knew Gershon in the seventies. Iskowtiz's major art dealer was located a few blocks from my home. A friend of mine used to provide fine arts services to Gershon. I read everything in my library system on Iskowitz.
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| It Burns 1950-52, The burning of the Kielce Ghetto |
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