In Light in the Shadows, Barbara Milman relates the first-person accounts of the experiences of five Holocaust survivors. Their stories are told through words and stark black-and-white linocut illustrations created by Ms. Milman. In the Preface to her book, Ms. Milman talks about the collaborative process of working with these five "people of courage," Peter Schrag, Rita Kuhn, Hielke Sheneman, Alexander Groth and Gloria Lyon. She says, "When I completed a story and gave the subject a copy of the prints depicting his or her Holocaust experience, I was gratified to be told, 'Yes, that is exactly how it was; it is just how it looked.' But I also wondered at this reaction. After all, I had not been there; the images could not possibly be accurate representations of what had happened. I concluded that my prints had captured an emotional truth...."

A crusading lawyer who grew weary of fighting to right the wrongs of the world through the judicial process, Barbara Milman has found a strong "voice" through art. We discussed her life, her career and the passion that has always been the driving force behind her choices.

As a child I loved art. During high school I took painting classes at the Art Students' League in New York, and then from a local artist. However, at college (Harvard-Radcliffe) there was no studio art program and no studio art classes. Although I did continue with classes at an art school in Boston, and then a summer program at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, eventually I dropped art. In those pre-women's lib days, it was just too hard to imagine becoming a professional artist.

So at 19, I gave up the idea of being an artist. Instead I majored, in alternate years, in English and mathematics. Having no idea what I wanted to do after college, I decided to go to law school and put off facing the real world for another three years. Even after I started law school in 1963 (the year of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique), I found it difficult to imagine having a serious career. It was not until after my second child was born in 1969, that I realized law was my career, not just an interesting way of passing time on the way to becoming a wife and mother.

I practiced law from 1966 to 1993, with some time off at the beginning for babies, and more time off at the end for art. Most of my work as a lawyer was devoted to efforts to right the wrongs of the world. I tried almost every way imaginable to do this: civil rights law, criminal defense, academic research, private practice, legal services, white collar-crime prosecution, campaign finance reform, and finally working for the California Legislature. In the end, I had no more success in changing the world than anyone else.

Although I gave up art when I was 19, I became an artist for the second time when I was 34. My marriage had ended, and I seized the opportunity to change my life. The first thing I did was go back to painting classes. A few years later I remarried and moved from Boston to California. Although I continued my legal career, art had become my main interest. By 1990, I was working as a lawyer only part time, and devoting the majority of my time to art. In 1994, when my youngest child finished school, I retired from the practice of law to become a full time artist.

Where did you study printmaking? What artists have influenced or inspired you?

I learned printmaking in a hit or miss fashion. Like many painters in the 1980s I began by making monoprints, picking up the basic techniques from friends who had studied printmaking or who had taken monoprint courses. After working for a while with monoprints, I began to add linocuts to them. Eventually I became more interested in the linocuts than the monoprints.

The artists whose prints I admire, and who influenced me the most, are Matisse and the German Expressionists. I have always loved the simplicity and grace of Matisse's black and white prints, and the power and directness of the prints of Kirchner, Beckmann, Grosz and the other German Expressionists. Another artist whose work inspired me was Charlotte Salomon, a German Jew who was an adolescent when the Nazis took power. She did an astounding series of 769 small paintings about her life as it unfolded before and during the war, titled Life or Theater, an Autobiographical Play. These paintings combined very strong images with seemingly simple text. Luckily she gave the paintings to a friend for safekeeping shortly before she was arrested and shipped to Auschwitz, where she was killed.

What was your inspiration for beginning your book, Light in the Shadows, in 1994?

Just as I had social justice in mind during my years as a lawyer, I incorporated social issues into my painting. After several years of paintings about current political issues (El Salvador and Tiannamen Square, among others), I began working on the Holocaust. Although it was a subject I had previously avoided, in 1990 I found myself avidly reading book after book about the Holocaust. Not surprisingly, this interest quickly showed up in my painting.

Once I finally gave up practicing law, I had time to undertake some long term projects. One such project, building on the work I had been doing in the preceding few years, was to make a series of linoleum prints based on interviews with Holocaust survivors. When I started, I did not have a book in mind. It was only after I done the first dozen prints (based on my first interview) that I decided to incorporate text into the prints. And it was not until after I had done three sets of prints that it occurred to me that they could be put together in a book. Eventually I did two more sets of prints to round out the book.

My first impulse was to make a limited edition artist's book. But after investigating the effort and economics of producing an artist's book of 60 prints, I decided to try for a regular publisher. The book was published in the fall of 1997 by Jonathan David Publishers.

Prior to beginning your book, what was your involvement with the San Francisco Holocaust Oral History Project? Please describe this organization's mission.

I had had no involvement with the San Francisco Holocaust Oral History Project prior to my work on the book. I had learned about it through a friend. The Holocaust Oral History project is dedicated to keeping alive the memory of the Holocaust, and has built an extensive library of video interviews with Holocaust survivors. I simply called and asked if they could put me in touch with anyone who would be willing to talk to me. They were very helpful, and suggested two women who frequently gave public lectures about their experience during the Holocaust. After I did the prints about these two women, people began to suggest other survivors for me to interview.

Who is your intended target audience for Light in the Shadows?

Since I did not begin this project as a book, I did not really have an intended audience. Or the only audience I had in mind was an art gallery audience. However, in making these prints into a book, I aimed at a general audience, ranging from young teenagers to adults. In particular, I hoped to make the book accessible to people who had little prior knowledge of the Holocaust. I had found from shows of my prior work about the Holocaust, as well as from shows of the prints that went into this book, that many people have only the sketchiest idea of what happened to the Jews during the Nazi period. I prepared a brief history to go with each chapter, so that readers would be able to put the stories into some context.

You describe your illustrations for Light in the Shadows as evoking "an emotional truth." Given that the subject matter of the Holocaust is horrifying and emotionally wrenching, how were you affected by the creative process in producing this book?

I am frequently asked how I could bear to spend so much working on such a horrific topic. But actually, it was a way for me to come to terms with the Holocaust. Before I began this work, I found it very difficult to read about, or even to think about, the Holocaust; it was much too upsetting. I just wanted to turn away, both literally and figuratively, from all the awful pictures and books. But gradually I began to feel that it was important for me to know what had happened. As a Jew I wanted to face this part of Jewish history, and as an American I wanted a way to help me comprehend contemporary genocides.

Turning this material into art was my way of becoming comfortable enough to learn and think about what happened. I believe my book also provides a way for other people to begin to understand the enormity of the Holocaust. Presenting individual stories enables readers to approach a terrible reality without being overwhelmed. The black and white prints, which have an initial appeal simply as works of art, give readers the distance and the incentive to confront this subject long enough to take it in. Instead of turning away in horror (the normal response to photographs of piles of dead or nearly dead bodies), it is possible to look at these images and read these stories, and to respond to them on a human level.

What are you working on now?

After completing Light in the Shadows, I spent over a year on another project, The Nostalgia Factory. In 1994 I visited Poland, primarily to see for myself the site of the Holocaust. I stayed in Krakow, the closest Polish city to Auschwitz. Busloads of tourists go every day to Auschwitz to see the concentration camp (preserved intact as a museum) and the remains of the gas chambers where millions of Jews were killed.

In Krakow's large central market the same goods are available in stall after stall: amber jewelry; decorated wooden boxes; and carved wooden "folk" statues of old Jews in prayer shawls and Jewish merchants carrying chickens. My immediate reaction was, "First they kill off all the Jews, and then they make a business of Jewish nostalgia, as if they loved and missed the murdered Jews." These wooden Jews seemed very similar to the Cigar Store Indians that stand in front of souvenir shops throughout the American West. I suddenly felt a great empathy with Native Americans who are confronted with Cigar Store Indians and similar kitsch on a regular basis. Do they think, each time they see a Cigar Store Indian, "First the white man tried to exterminate us, and now he exploits these phony images of us for his own commercial benefit?"

The Nostalgia Factory was my answer to this question. It was an installation of mixed media works addressing the majority culture's nostalgia for the minorities whom they had persecuted or nearly exterminated: Jews in Germany; Native Americans, Chinese- Japanese- and Mexican-Americans in California.

Now I am beginning some large scale works combining woodcuts, linocuts, and photographic images. I have received a fellowship at the KALA Institute in Berkeley, which permits me to use their very large presses and their extensive computer lab. Some of these new works will be based on my personal family history. Others may contrast the security and comfort of middle class American families like my own with the hardships and dangers faced by so many other families, both here and abroad, during the twentieth century.

©1999 Roxane Gilbert
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