Untitled

Acrylic on board, 20 x 30 cm, 500 NZD

This is about “The Devouring” (Pharrajimos, the Holocaust in Romani), but it’s also about survival. It depicts Hildegard Reinhardt, a Roma woman who survived the Nazi concentration camps, but lost her three young daughters. After the camps were liberated, Allied and German authorities issued the survivors certificates of racial persecution and imprisonment, in theory qualifying them for compensation by the German government. However, many people were told they had only been persecuted for criminal reasons, and their requests for compensation were denied. This was particularly the case with Romani survivors, many of whom were illiterate and also couldn’t deal with the complicated paperwork. Understandably, they also were wary of authority figures, as previous encounters hadn’t gone well.