Artist, students capture Holocaust survivor's life in art, words

Featured on startribune.com

When he was a boy growing up in a village in Poland, Joe Grosnacht and his brothers would line up six chairs to make a pretend train to ride.

Years later, when Grosnacht re-created that scene in a picture, he drew himself seated in the front chair, with the other five empty.

“They didn’t survive,” he explained at the time. All five of his younger brothers, along with his parents, had lost their lives to the Nazis.

Now the 91-year-old Holocaust survivor has found entire classrooms of eager young artists, along with an enthusiastic writer, eager to hear, and to retell, his story.

Illustrated by middle-school students from Breck School in Golden Valley, “Six Chairs: A Holocaust Survivor’s Story” outlines both tragic and uplifting chapters in Joe Grosnacht’s life.

With a series of one-page short stories, the book captures one survivor’s account of the Holocaust at a time when those who lived that unspeakable chapter of human history are becoming fewer and fewer in number.

“I wanted to be able to capture his stories before he’s gone,” said the book’s author, Rowan Pope, an adjunct art lecturer at the University of Minnesota and full-time studio artist. “I felt they were stories that needed to be heard.”

Just a teenager when Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Grosnacht was separated from his family, escaped from Nazi labor camps only to be recaptured, and eventually was sent to Auschwitz, where he survived until the death camp’s liberation.

“So many people died, and I couldn’t do nothing about it,” he said during an interview last week in the New Hope assisted-living facility where he now lives. “I always had hope.”

After the war, he immigrated to the United States. He found help at Jewish federations in Texas, worked in a meatpacking plant, married, and moved to Minnesota, said his son Lenny Grosnacht.

“[He] never really made any waves,” the younger Grosnacht said. “Nothing crazy about his life after the war.”

Growing up, Joe Grosnacht’s children only learned about their father’s past by asking questions.

“He didn’t talk much about it at all,” Lenny Grosnacht said. “We knew other people who had folks who were in the Holocaust, and they went and did speaking tours. … That wasn’t his cup of tea.”

That changed about 30 years ago when a teacher in the family invited Joe to speak in a classroom. “Sometime down the road from that, he started opening up,” Lenny said.

In the early 2000s, Joe contributed to Voice to Vision, a University of Minnesota collaborative project that captures the experiences of genocide survivors in works of visual art. Rowan Pope first met Grosnacht as a doctoral student in the program in 2012, and eventually began working with his family on the concept for “Six Chairs.”

David Feinberg, Voice to Vision’s founder and an associate art professor at the U, said it takes special qualities to connect with genocide survivors.

“You have to bond with them before you get the story,” he said. “Then you get the deeper story. Everyone likes [Pope] immediately.”

The result of their partnership is a book that uses art to inspire readers while still telling a haunting tale of survival, said Pope’s twin brother, Bly Pope. “It talks about a really tragic subject, but I think it deals with it in … a very positive way,” Bly Pope said. “Rowan was able to walk that tightrope really well.”

Click here to read the full article.