Lessons From the Holocaust : Museum of Tolerance exhibit speaks to the human spirit

There’s a great testimony to the profound endurance of the human spirit on display at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

An exhibit, “The Enduring Spirit: Art of the Holocaust,” consists of 245 works, mostly drawn in pencil, charcoal or ink on small sheets of paper. They are the work of artists arrested by the French police in their collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust.

The artistic value of the exhibit and the individual quality of the artworks, specially those by Boris Taslitsky, a disciple of French sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, Anne Garcin-Mayade, who studied with Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Jacques Barreau, would merit a show at any good art museum.

The fact that these works of art were accomplished under such extreme conditions of duress adds another significant dimension to the exhibit.

But there’s something else that makes the exhibit topical: The recent acknowledgment by President Jacques Chirac of France’s responsibility as an accomplice to the deportation of three-quarters of a million French Jews to the German concentration camps during World War II.

“These dark hours soil forever our history and are an injury to our past and our tradition,” said Chirac, setting the record straight once and for all. The exhibit shows that there was light in all that darkness.