Escaping the Holocaust
By Adrienne LawrencePhotos by Bill Millios
A survivor’s legacy through tapestry
When Esther Nisenthal was 15 years old, she decided that she simply wasn’t going to follow the Nazis’ orders to report to a train station with her family. That was October 15, 1942.
She and her 13-year-old sister, Mania, escaped the concentration camps and survived largely by determination and fortitude. They went to family friends for help, but were protected for only two days. After that, they lived in the woods and traveled to nearby towns looking for work. While in the woods, Esther came up with a plan. They needed to create a new background story. They would no longer be Jewish; they both took Catholic names and would be from Poland. She and her sister also pretended to no longer understand German, only Polish. It was a ruse they thought would deflect at least casual Nazi inquisitiveness.
Their stories are documented in 33 tapestries handcrafted by Esther over the years. A few will be on display at 4:30 p.m on April 22 at the Delaplaine Visual Arts and Education Center in downtown Frederick during an event featuring a 30-minute documentary on Nisenthal’s life.
It was after Esther moved to the United States, married—becoming Esther Nisenthal Krinitz—and started a family that she decided to make a tapestry to show her daughters what her childhood home looked like. Both daughters, Bernice and Helene, loved hearing their mother’s heroic tales as they understood the significance of the Holocaust and World War II through her stories. But they never saw pictures of their mother’s home. There simply weren’t any.
“I was always very captivated by her stories,” daughter Bernice Steinhardt says. “And to see them visualized that way, just added a whole other dimension. It was pretty stunning, the first pictures that she created.”
The Krinitzs raised their daughters in Brooklyn, New York, but Steinhardt now lives in Chevy Chase with her husband—and her sister Helene McQuade lives in Pine Plains, New York, also with her husband.
In 1983, Krinitz and her husband, Max, moved to Frederick to be closer to Steinhardt and her children. When they came to Frederick, they also moved Esther’s clothing and alteration business to North Market Street.
“My parents were very happy living in Frederick,” Steinhardt says. “It was a very warm and welcoming place.”
Both lived out the rest of their days in Frederick. Max died in 1998 and Esther died in 2001.
Though Krinitz took a 10-year break after she made the first tapestries, her daughters think she really found her voice through the art form.
“She always really wanted to write a book, or leave some permanent record,” McQuade says. “She really wanted to memorialize her family for us—for me and my sister. She was frustrated because of her language barrier.”
Krinitz’s first language was German, but she also spoke Polish, and was self-taught in English. But she didn’t know how to write well in her new language.
“She wasn’t able to express herself in writing,” McQuade explains.. “She was frustrated by that. And so when she discovered that she could tell her story through these fabric works of art, they just poured out of her.”
It’s an outpouring that apparently not only benefitted Krinitz’s family, but, arguably, anyone who views them.
While in Frederick, Krinitz spoke with schoolchildren and adult audiences about her experiences. She died before much acclaim came, but at least not before getting a taste of it when she saw her work as part of a small show.
There was also talk of a Disney, feature film about her life, but it didn’t work out. The initial recorded interviews with her by filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan however, provided a basis for the documentary—released in 2011—that the Delaplaine will be showing.
In 2003, Krinitz’s daughters created the nonprofit “Art and Remembrance”— a vehicle to care for and organize the tapestries’ travels. The nonprofit aims to use the power of art and personal narrative to, as the organization’s website has it, “illuminate the ravages of war, intolerance and social injustice on its victims.”
Steinhardt also wrote a book about her mother, and called it Memories of Survival. Translated into Japanese and Korean, Memories of Survival one year became required reading for a class of Japanese students—and many wrote to Steinhardt about their impressions.
Touched by these gestures and their seeming affirmation of the universality of the book’s story, Steinhardt says, “Having both the story and the visual representation of it is what helps underscore the universality of these scenes [in the tapestries].”
Not only, then, does Krinitz’s universal message of difficulty and survival apparently trans late across languages, it also, it seems, bridges generations.
“It’s accessible to audiences, not only of different cultures, but also of different ages,” Steinhardt says. “Kids get it.”
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