The Woods, Breathing
Introduction
This project is a continuation of research carried out under the project title Eden. One of the inspirations for this work was the following line:
" ...In Otwock. The air, the woods, breathing."
Adam Czerniakow wrote this on September 14, 1941. It's a sparse entry but one full of life and meaning nevertheless. Not only do these poignant and beautiful words tell us something about Czerniakow's terrible predicament (they almost tell us more about the unfolding terror than anything else) they also illustrate something which I am always trying to find; an authenticity in history - a sense of the fact that what has happened did not happen in the past but in what was then the present.
For most of the time, the only freedom Czerniakow could find was in the books he read at night. One of those books was ‘Pilgrim of the Forest [Wild]’ by ‘Grey Owl’, and of that book, on January 19, 1940 Czerniakow wrote:
“…During the night I read a novel, 'The Pilgrim of the Forest' - Grey Owl - Szara Sowa. The forest, little wild animals - a veritable Eden.” In a previous entry, dated December 26, 1939, he wrote of how when reading “… [I am] constantly envying all the heroes of my novels because they lived in different times..." and in many ways, he seems to envy Grey Owl and the animals of the forest for the freedom they enjoy, one which he only discovered for a moment in Otwock.
Having bought a 1935 edition of the book, I wanted to find a way of working with the it to create a work exploring the Holocaust.