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September 6, 2007

Painted Holocaust woodcarvings at NCCCA

'It makes the Holocaust real to people"

By ROBIN CAUDELL

Dr. Herbert Savel's mission to create painted wood carvings of French-Jewish children killed during the Holocaust is his Kaddish, Hebrew prayer for the dead.

He began "Kaddish in Wood" in April 2002. During the 1990s, he studied wood carving for six years with a German-born woodcarver, who also lived in Elizabethtown. Relief carving's three-dimensionality intrigued him.

Though Savel painted abstracts, "the funny thing is the German who trained me, he loved me," said Savel, who has been an internist in Elizabethtown since 1971. "He was the dearest man I've ever known in my life. Sweet, kind and funny and the best teacher I ever had."

If the two had met during the Third Reich, things would have been cast differently.

"He would have been on one side of the barbed wire, and I on the other."

Savel's teacher was a master carver of the Oberamagau school in Germany. Like his teacher, he is a by-hand purist and only uses chisels.

"Nothing is powered except by my arms. If you use a power tool, you grind away the surface and that leaves it rough. You can't use sand paper on it, and you can't paint it. You must carve with extremely short chisels to give you a smooth surface."

To date, he has carved 710 and counting works from bass wood acquired locally and from Minnesota.

All of his carvings are based on photographs of 11,400 French children of Jewish descent, who perished in "The Final Solution" death camps masterminded by Adolf Hitler during World War II. His reference is Serge Klarsfeld's "French Children of The Holocaust."

"When the show is mounted, the black and white photos I took my carving from will be exhibited alongside. Serge is a Nazi hunter. He came from Paris to meet me, and he loves it. We both gave lectures at the Florida Holocaust Museum in June."

The carvings are not for sale and Savel hopes they will be displayed at one venue someday. In the interim, "Kaddish in Wood" is on exhibit at the North Country Cultural Center for the Arts. The exhibition announcement features an image of Herbert Herschel/Dr. Dieter Gump of Burlington visiting Savel's office to view the carving of his murdered first cousin. Mark Fogelgern, Savel's cousin, also perished.

"His mother thought they were perfectly safe. His father had gone off to fight with the Partisans. He was snatched up and murdered. He was 7. The family found a photograph of him."

Savel brings to life the individuality of each child. Some are shy, forward, dark- or fair-haired and all have cadmium-yellow-light auras or halos to some faith traditions.

"I come from a long line of Jewish mystics, who believe in all of us is a divine spark. It's our mission to make the spark bigger and merge it with other sparks, called love. Divine auras don't come in a paint tube."

The carvings evoke in him tremendous anger and love. When he thumbs through the photographic images, the image that raises his ire the most is the one he carves.

"I see a little girl wearing a pin, trying to make herself look older than she is. I say, my God, they murdered her."

As he carves, a take-away process, he casts off waste wood, and a face spookily appears in the wood. Then, love emerges.

"The memorial to a child who never had a full life."

Relief carving is unforgiving of chiseling mistakes and paint missteps.

"You better get it right the first time. If it doesn't work out, you can burn it and keep yourself warm."

When he gets stumped, Savel hears his teacher's roar: "Do it!"

He has received whacky letters and hate mail. One letter stated, "It's 50 years and the slandering of the German people continues."

"I try to make them as beautiful as I can. When you look at black and white photos, you're taking reality down a peg. People have color, and their clothes have color. Black and white is divorced from reality. I use very good colors. I heightened it."

Savel's son told him that people are attracted by the beautiful colors and are sucked into the realization that this 12-year-old girl or 5-year-old boy were gassed and their bodies burned.

"It makes the Holocaust real to people."

As a physician, he gets a daily dose of pain, suffering and death, which has given him the strength to carve his subject matter.

"Sometimes, it tears me apart to see these beautiful children," Savel said. "The world lost capabilities and talents. Things might have been discovered. It's my mission to do this. I do these memorials to dead children. I put them in the world. We'll see what happens to them."

rcaudell@pressrepublican.com

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