2 Holocaust Survivors Turn to Art to Reclaim Lost Lives

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The collage artist Ruth Jacobsen, 83, and the handbag designer Judith Leiber, 95, both Holocaust survivors, have relied on the creative process and a strong-willed entrepreneurial spirit to reclaim their lives and break glass ceilings for women in the United States.

For decades, Ms. Jacobsen kept a family photo album unopened in her closet. A neighbor and member of the Dutch resistance had risked his life to creep back into her Nazi-occupied house in Oud-Zuilen, the Netherlands, to save it. He later presented the album to her as a surprise gift after the war.

She didn’t open it for 40 years.

In the United States, she became a textile artist, and her art focused on the oppressed and voiceless, without referring to her own history.

“I was afraid to remember everything that took place, ” Ms. Jacobsen said in a recent interview at her house in Southampton, N.Y. At age 60, she finally opened the album. Painful memories flooded back and, to resolve her trauma, she began tearing the photos in the album to create collages.

“People were horrified that she’d ripped the pictures,” her wife and partner of 31 years, Christine Epifania, said, “but she was telling the history in a different way.”

Each morning, she rooted through long-repressed memories of the blue-eyed child whose survival depended on going unnoticed as families harbored her throughout Holland. She created collages depicting the deaths of fellow Jews: her grandmother, who died in Auschwitz, and her parents, who committed suicide after the war, traumatized by their experiences. She also made fantastical collages of a childhood she wished she had had.

“This is my favorite,” said Ms. Jacobsen, her voice almost a girl’s whisper as she pointed to a collage of herself as a toddler holding a teddy bear and riding an imaginary ostrich. The ostrich was carrying her away from it all.

To lift her mood, she would create things of beauty — large works of natural wood construction, laced with reptile skins and strewn with beach-walking treasures from around the world. Her first wall-size piece, mostly of driftwood, was glued directly to her kitchen wall in Southampton. She formed later works on canvases. One, called “Beach Reflections,” is on permanent display at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the South Fork in Bridgehampton.

Eventually, Ms. Jacobsen was able to speak about her trauma. She told her story, illustrated with collages, in the book “Rescued Images: Memories of a Childhood in Hiding.”

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