The celebration of Hanukkah continues. So I share this drawing of a menorah by Victor Tulman, done for Hella Tarnow while they were both prisoners in the Gurs internment camp in France. #Hanukkah #Chanukkah #art #holocaust #holocausteducation
From the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum: “Hella and Victor became engaged in the camp in 1941. Victor was sent to Camp Malaval for forced labor for some months and then left for the underground in France. He corresponded with Hella for the duration of the war sending letters by way a Protestant minister in Switzerland by the name of Lauterbourg. They sent him the letters not knowing where the other person was. Victor was not deported as he was Hungarian (and Hungary was not invaded until March 1944). When Gurs was closed, Hella was sent back to Germany for forced labor and then taken to the Ravensbrueck concentration camp in November 1943. After liberation Hella and Victor reunited with the help of the Swiss Pastor Lauterbourg. Hella converted to Judaism, and she and Victor married in Paris in 1949. Their daughter Paloma was born in Paris in 1952. Victor David Tulman died in 1987. Paloma with her mother Hella immigrated to Israel in 1989. Hella died in December, 2008 and is buried with her husabnd in the Mount of Olives cemetery.”
From the Gurs Camp Memorial Museum, explaining the text: ‘When Chanukah came, I drew a candlestick with eight lights on a white sheet and wrote for Hella Tarnow: "Light must enlighten us! We want to be the messengers of light! Let us act around the light, let us place ourselves under its law! You and I who are in the darkness, we want the light to shine everywhere... In the service of the light.”’