GREGORY ANTIMONY:

When did you realize that your mother was such a famous poet?

 

ELENA MAKAROVA:

From early childhood.

​

Our meetings carry an almond aftertaste.
Almond is a poisonous nut.
In it lies my sin, both old and distant,
Alas, my maternal sin.

By the sea where you were growing up,
We were rarely together.
I did not read you fairy tales,
I washed down my poems with wine.

I appeal to distance and to time past,
And yet — to eternity, all at once.
Between us, like a harsh reality,
Those childhood fairy tales still stand.

​

ELENA MAKAROVA: I was completely in love with my mother. I loved everything about her: the way she lay there smoking Belomor, the way she murmured her poems, the way she arranged something under her hair so that it formed a high hairstyle.

There is even a funny story. An Azerbaijani writer once said to my mother:
“Inna khanum, don’t keep your hair shaped like a tube — wear it spread out.”
But my mother kept it shaped like a tube.

She was always wearing high heels, and her eyes were incredibly expressive. When my mother was writing, I would sit absolutely still, afraid to move. We had only one room, and so as not to disturb her, I tried to be a very obedient child.

​

GREGORY ANTIMONY: And after sculpture — where did you go next?

 

ELENA MAKAROVA: After sculpture, I could not get rid of the desire to leave this country. That country. I was constantly inventing ways to escape. I thought: I’ll leave with one of the children. But I was never allowed to go anywhere. For twenty years.

For twenty years, a KGB woman whom I recognized by sight — that is a separate story — kept telling me that I would not go anywhere. Leaving was impossible, but something had to be done.

Moscow Region, the city of Khimki, Koltsevaya Street, apartment twenty-two. What was there to do?
But in Khimki there was a school of aesthetic education. I was walking with a stroller sometime in 1976–1977 and thought: I’ll go in — maybe they’ll hire me. And they hired me to teach sculpture.

It was a special school. It had been created by five people. Children from three to seven years old studied there. The school was very well known — the Khimki School of Aesthetic Education. We had subjects such as mathematics, logic, painting, sculpture, and English. Five subjects for very young children.

The children came twice a week for an hour and a half. During the first ninety minutes they studied one set of subjects; during the next ninety minutes, another. The groups were constantly changing. There were many of them — fifteen groups in a row. That was how we worked. At the time, I thought this was normal.

There, I was happy. I was with children. Perhaps also because I had a very difficult childhood myself: boarding schools, hospitals, boarding schools again. In Baku, I was constantly ill. I was taken to a doctor named Listengarten, who said that I had a congenital heart defect. All the doctors believed that I would die tomorrow, and so everyone treated me with extreme anxiety.

I did not have a normal childhood. I did not play with other children; I lived under constant supervision. I did not live through that period the way I probably should have. That is why working with small children gave me an incredible surge of strength.

At that time, Fedya was still very small, while these children were already quick and perceptive. We worked with them wonderfully.

But very soon the school was shut down. A large commission arrived and said that we were disturbing the music department with noise. All of us were dismissed. It was a major scandal.

A large article appeared in Moskovsky Komsomolets about the damage this caused to children. It told the story of a girl named Natasha Zurabova, who became so angry that she painted over the walls of her entire apartment. And it is amusing that there was not a single name mentioned in the article except hers. Today, Natasha Zurabova is one of the most famous artists in Israel. So she did not paint over those walls for nothing.​

At the same time, I was writing. Later, my second daughter, Manya, was born. My children did not go to kindergarten. They sat under the table while I typed. Manya remembers the sound of the typewriter. Under the table she had a dollhouse, and she never disturbed me: she played, and I wrote.

During that period, the typeset of my book was destroyed at the publishing house Soviet Writer because the protagonists were Jewish. An editor came to me and said: “Why don’t you write about children? You speak about them so well.”

I did. The text was published in the anthology Time, a thick volume in which various writers reflected on time and space. My piece received a strong response. The publishing house Znanie предложило me to expand the article and publish it as a separate book. It came out with a print run of 500,000 copies.

Five hundred thousand copies is a great number. For the Soviet Union, perhaps not so much, but for subscribers it was a major event. A real revolution began. Children started being brought to me from all over the country so that I could help socialize them, work with them, support them.

At the same time, I worked with children who were undergoing bone marrow transplants — in sterile conditions, wearing protective shoe covers and gowns. I also worked in intensive care, with a friend of mine who was the head of the department. Children from orphanages were brought to him with diagnoses of developmental delay. He would call me to determine whether it was an illness, fear, a phobia, or trauma.

I came and worked with them.

There was a boy named Tyoma — an extraordinary child. A doctor named Valery brought him by helicopter, with a mechanical ventilation device installed on board. He was taken from an orphanage. We hoped that with my assessment and a psychiatrist’s signature we could place him in a good residential institution.

One day, when we were walking with him to the Sixth Maternity Hospital on Donskaya Street, he was asked a question: “What is the difference between rain and snow?”
He answered: “I don’t know. I want you to give me back to my mother.”

They said, “He doesn’t know the difference between rain and snow. Take him back.”
And he was returned to the same orphanage from which he had been taken.

​

GREGORY ANTIMONY: How old was he?

​

ELENA MAKAROVA: Fourteen.

I told my mother stories like this when I came to see her, because at that time her dissident period had begun — the Metropol story. I told her everything. And my mother was very hurt by it, because it came across as if I were doing something truly important, while she was just sitting there and, so to speak, doing nothing.

She was hurt in a very childlike way.

​

GREGORY ANTIMONY: It’s interesting how that whole Metropol story affected your family.

 

ELENA MAKAROVA: It affected us very well.

 

GREGORY ANTIMONY: That’s what I thought. It’s hard to imagine otherwise.

 

ELENA MAKAROVA: The thing is, during that time my mother and I seemed to return to one another — through letters. Later she lived with me; she died in my home. But there was a period when my mother was deeply, deeply immersed in that Metropol life: who said what, who wrote what, which foreign journalists had come, who had spoken to whom.

And this coincided with a time when everything was literally falling out of my hands. When there were all these children I could not help. When I would be traveling somewhere, thinking about a child, inventing some incredible plan to save them — and then, for example, someone would hit me from behind in the subway and I would fall on the escalator.

That is, things were constantly happening that were not directly connected to the dissident story. Perhaps they were connected, but not directly.

At that time, my task was to fully meet the needs of my mother, Semyon Izrailevich, and my father. Every day I went to my father’s place to measure his blood pressure. I went to my mother and Semyon Izrailevich’s to cook, clean, and take care of everyday matters. I was like a girl constantly running errands.

But this was not something anyone forced on me — I put myself in that position. I saw that among all those poets, I was the only prose writer. And so I felt that I had to relate to life in a practical, prosaic way: what to cook, what to bring, how to feed people.

 

GREGORY ANTIMONY: Among which poets?

​

ELENA MAKAROVA: Oh, there were many poets. My mother, Inna Lvovna Lesnyanskaya; Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin; and my father, Grigory Korin. He too was a remarkable poet — simply forgotten by everyone else.

​

ELENA MAKAROVA: Around that time, I was subjected to another brutal public attack. I went to a meeting of young writers, and they shouted at me fiercely. I already had a published book; I was twenty-eight years old. The book was called Katushka. At Soviet Writer, they screamed that it was “plasticine literature,” that it was voyeurism, a vile fascination with filth.

People stood up and said all kinds of things. Before that, Trifonov had told me:
“Lena, they’re going to kill you now. Sit quietly.”
I came — and they killed me. I sat quietly.

There was a man named Poptsov.

​

GREGORY ANTIMONY: Oleg Poptsov?

 

ELENA MAKAROVA: Yes, Oleg Poptsov. At the time, he was the editor of the magazine Rural Youth. He summoned me, asked me to bring the stories I wanted to publish, said he really liked my writing and that he would publish everything.

I came. It was the Pravda building, overlooking the railway tracks — near the Savyolovsky station, or somewhere around there. He walked over to the window and said:
“These people — these are the people you should write about. They work, they labor, they do everything for us so that we can sit here now and eat Mishki na Severe candies.”

I said:
“Did you invite me because of the stories?”
He answered:
“No one will publish your stories. What needs to be done is this: you must sign a letter. A letter stating that you do not agree with your mother’s actions.”

I said that I had never signed such letters and would not sign them. At that moment, I was breastfeeding, and my milk had come in. He said:
“Then stay here.”
And he left, locking the door.

There was a bowl of Mishki na Severe candies on the table. I ate all of them. Then I made little boats out of the wrappers — first from the colored ones, then from the silver foil. There were about twenty of them. I lined up an entire fleet — and he still did not return.

I was terrified — because of the milk, because I couldn’t get out. About forty minutes later, he finally came back and said:
“I’m asking you very much to sign it. Nothing will happen to you.”

I said:
“Something will happen to me. I cannot do anything against my conscience. No.”
And I left.

Later, during perestroika, I met him at the Central House of Writers — and he did not recognize me at all.

​​

GREGORY ANTIMONY:
He, by the way, was a great progressive.

​

ELENA MAKAROVA:
Well, there you go.

​

GREGORY ANTIMONY:
When those new times began… If we speak about your mother and Lipkin — was their interest in Metropol, in that whole environment, truly genuine? It wasn’t just participation in some kind of movement?

​

ELENA MAKAROVA:
No, no — it was a real circle. They gathered, they drank, they sang — Vysotsky was there. It was a happy time.

Even though they couldn’t publish anything. Even though all of Semyon Izrailevich’s translations were being retranslated. Just imagine — re-translating the Mahabharata. And Semyon Izrailevich, a truly great translator and a master of his craft, suffered deeply from the fact that this was being done by people who knew neither the literature itself nor its structure, nor its essence.

They were not allowed to go to the Writers’ Retreats. They were not allowed to be treated at the writers’ clinic, which they had always used. Many things were forbidden to them. They were under surveillance.

​

We have paid a heavy price
for Voltaire’s sharp disbelief.
The roll of the public carmagnole
has drowned out harmony and measure.
Marx’s chimera suddenly turned
into camps, famine, and war.
Everything fades upon the surface of the earth —
only one lamp does not go out: faith.

​

ELENA MAKAROVA:
It seems to me that Semyon Izrailevich was an epic figure. All these “games” did not sit well with him inwardly. And my mother was a lyric poet. She was always interested: “What will happen if this occurs? And what does it mean?”

​

GREGORY ANTIMONY:
Who is under observation now.

​

ELENA MAKAROVA:
Yes, yes. Semyon Izrailevich used to say only one thing — I don’t remember, he said it not to me but to my mother. He was standing in front of the mirror, shaving, and said that if they were persuaded and returned to the Writers’ Union, he would no longer be able to shave in front of the mirror or look at himself at all. That I remember.

When my mother was summoned, she said that they could take her out of the Soviet Union only in chains. In general, it was a kind of absolute Russian, literary patriotism. They were so deeply “enchurched” in Russian literature that they simply could not imagine anything else beyond it.

The two of them loved to play a kind of game: they would make lists of poets — who was first, who second, who third, who would remain in literature and who would not. They would cross names out, add others… This kind of “ranking” always interested them.

I remember bringing them the poet Veniamin Blazhenny — a remarkable poet who lived in Minsk. Semyon Izrailevich said:
“He has problems with rhyme.”
My mother replied:
“Syoma, he’s a brilliant poet. Don’t look at that — look at something else.”
And he said:
“I like everything to be complete.”

In general, Semyon Izrailevich was an epic figure. My mother told stories from life, but in him the epic always prevailed over any everyday situation.

For example, at the dacha — a downpour, rain pouring in, my mother running around with a basin in panic. She calls Marina Kudimova:
“Marina, we have a disaster, water is pouring in.”
Marina comes and sees: Semyon Izrailevich is sitting right under the leak, reading a book.

He had to be warned about everything in advance. Events happening “here and now” could not be immediately accepted or understood by him — he always needed time.

 

GREGORY ANTIMONY:
By the way, I remembered something. During all that Metropol turmoil, when, if I’m not mistaken, admission to the Writers’ Union was suspended…

 

ELENA MAKAROVA:
Yes. Viktor Yerofeyev and Yevgeny Popov.

 

GREGORY ANTIMONY:
Do you remember the moment when almost all the Metropol participants gave their word that if those young writers were not accepted into the Union, they would all leave together?

 

ELENA MAKAROVA:
Yes, of course.

When we gathered around Metropol, even before the persecution began, there was an agreement: if the Soviet axe fell on even one participant, everyone would treat it as if it had fallen on each of them.

 

GREGORY ANTIMONY:
And do you remember what happened next? Only Aksyonov followed through…

 

ELENA MAKAROVA:
Well, because he was already leaving, right?

 

GREGORY ANTIMONY:
Yes. He was accused at the time of having started all this just so he would be well received in the United States and have a wonderful life there. But what struck me most in that story was something else: only Lipkin, your mother, and Aksyonov — only they kept their word. The rest…

 

ELENA MAKАРОВА:
Well, because someone would come running and say:
“What should I do? What should I do? There is a man in Siberia who loves my poems and me so much that if I take the wrong step now, he will kill himself. Innochka, what should I do?”

That happened, yes. In general, they were like children. All of them, like children.

Except… among them I especially liked Yuri Karabchievsky — a writer, the author of a book about Mayakovsky, who later took his own life. A remarkable person. When Semyon Izrailevich fell seriously ill, the only one who truly visited him, brought Borjomi, came constantly — was Yuri Karabchievsky. I was in the hospital then, I saw who came.

Bella came once, but mostly she came in order to go to the head of the department and ask for special attention to Semyon Izrailevich.

​​

GREGORY ANTIMONY:
You know what else I noticed? That throughout your entire life, Semyon Izrailevich and your father run alongside it as two completely independent figures, and yet both are present in your life. Did it just happen that way?

 

ELENA MAKAROVA:
Yes, I simply loved Semyon Izrailevich, my father, and my mother. I didn’t love my father’s wife, to my shame. But those three were my favorites.

First of all, my father eventually calmed down, began living his own life, and later found a woman who was probably not really right for him. My task became to preserve my father. By the 1990s, my mother and Semyon Izrailevich already had recognition. My mother had almost no earlier poems that could be published — she had to write new ones. Of course, that wasn’t why she wrote, but still.

My father, however, had volumes. I bound his books — he had fifteen volumes of his works. The last volume was The Poet and His Circle, where I included all the recollections: who wrote what about him, who said what about him.

When I was in Israel and he was in Moscow, he constantly read those books. They were beautifully bound, and he had already forgotten that they were not published by a real publishing house, but that I had created this “collected works” for him.

I think I tried very hard. I even organized an evening for him in Moscow for his anniversary — many people came. I never felt any jealousy. On the contrary, I always wanted to help, to support, to do everything possible so that these poets could feel at ease. Because I was very far from that world. I only understood this when I began working on the story of Friedl.

 

GREGORY ANTIMONY:
That’s exactly what I wanted to turn to. Tell us about Friedl — and how her life and her work entered your own life.

 

ELENA MAKAROVA:
Yes, it was truly a profound transformation that I went through.

I was working with children and noticed that in their drawings the order was not artistic, but rather literary. There were rockets everywhere, scattered elements… These drawings didn’t hold together — they seemed to fall apart. There was no unified composition. Not in all children, but in many.

Then one day, when Seryozha was allowed to travel abroad and went to Czechoslovakia, he brought me a small catalogue titled Drawings of Children from the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp. I was deeply struck by the power of those works and by the dates beneath them: 1932–1944.

I knew nothing about this history — neither about the catastrophe nor about Theresienstadt itself. In that sense, I was completely ignorant. And I decided to learn everything.

There was the name Friedl — that she had worked with children there. And I decided to understand it.

And then I was lucky: for the first time in twenty years, I was allowed to travel abroad — it was 1988. Czechoslovakia was still under Soviet influence, but the Soviet Union itself was already in full perestroika.

I went to Prague. There I met Miluše and everyone I had known from my childhood. Of course, I did not meet Palach — he had already set himself on fire. And that, I must say, was a very serious moment in my life.

​​​​

GREGORY ANTIMONY:
I remembered a story related to Palach that I read quite recently. It was about the reaction of the people who surrounded him — I don’t know if you’re familiar with it. When it was happening, he was burning, and a large crowd had gathered around. Some people were trying to stop him, to put out the fire, to do something to end that horror. But another group of people in Prague who were there said, “Don’t interfere, don’t interfere. He chose this himself — let him carry it through to the end.” It’s a striking story… I only learned about it recently.

 

ELENA MAKAROVA:
I didn’t know that. But in general, it’s a terrifying feeling. Imagine: you are walking around with this Jan… He wasn’t especially interesting to me, to be honest. He was about two years older. He was one of Miluše’s students at Charles University, in the philosophy department. He was simply asked to keep an eye on me while they were engaged in their dissident activities.

In Prague, my father wrote many poems — they were broadcast on the radio. Later, I was given a magazine with his photograph — I still have it, a full-page image — and it said that he had set himself on fire.

It’s a terrible feeling when you are seventeen. You walk with a person, sit next to him, show him your drawings — and suddenly he is gone. He burned himself. It’s horrifying.

I went to Prague, and from that moment on I became completely immersed in Friedl’s world. I was captivated by children’s drawings. I sat and made copies, redrew them, trying to understand the dynamics — what was happening in a child’s mind.

After about five hundred sketches, I began to understand many things — even what Friedl was doing with them. Because it’s impossible to understand anything if you don’t have, say, at least twenty drawings by the same child and if the lesson numbers are not indicated. Without that, you cannot see the progression.

Today, this can easily be done using databases, but back then you needed the originals. Every three hours they would bring me one hundred drawings. I had to go through them in that time. In total, there were about five thousand. So I had enough material for three visits.

And Friedl… it was still a fortunate time — 1988. Many people were still alive, still clear-minded. Those you could find — surviving students, people who had worked with Friedl, neighbors — they were all accessible.

​

The one who listens for the echo of a spring storm,
who is born with a smile upon their lips,
who does not shed tears in vain,
who knows how to give and receive love —
that one will sing with you and with me.

We will laugh again on the ruins of the ghetto.
We will begin life anew — the day is near
when we will gather our belongings
and finally go home.

Despite these terrible times,
humor lives on in our hearts.
Each day we wander through the ghetto,
and in our letters we are allowed only thirty words.

Everything will be alright — if only we wish it.
We will laugh again on the ruins of the ghetto.

​

ELENA MAKAROVA:
I simply had to learn Czech — I had already started in 1968. Later I continued studying it, when those who had gone out onto Red Square were arrested. By the time of that trip, my Czech was already quite good: I could speak with mistakes, but I could read almost fluently. That helped enormously.

And many people helped me then. All of my father’s friends translated for me. So in the museum I was not only working with the drawings — I was also collecting all kinds of materials for myself. Something would catch my interest — for example, cabaret in the ghetto: “Who created it? Can I see it? May I photograph this?” and so on.

I came to the museum every day at eight in the morning and left at five. I accumulated a huge amount of material. Then we would sit — often over a bottle of wine — and translate everything so that I could understand it precisely.

That’s how it all began. And it wasn’t only about Friedl. For example, one of the girls who had studied drawing with Friedl survived, and she told me how she had sung in the children’s opera Brundibár in Theresienstadt. I asked, “What kind of opera is that?” — she began to tell me, and I was completely astonished. I asked, “Did anyone else survive?” — “Yes, this one, that one…” One lived here, another there…

And I began to travel. Eventually, I traveled all over the world, collecting stories and testimonies. There was so much material that it had to be systematized. I created a system.

My husband and I worked on it extensively — he translated a great deal as well. The two of us carried this work together, because the material was overwhelming, both in volume and in emotional weight.

We decided to make four volumes.

The first volume consisted of diaries that reveal people’s lives from within. We arranged them in a particular way. At the center was the diary of one person who wrote every day — Egon Redlich. He was a young man who had the authority to decide who would be sent away and who would remain. And naturally, he sent the elderly and kept the children.

He recorded everything that happened in the camp, day by day. He wrote in Hebrew — for which I am deeply grateful to him. But on Fridays and Saturdays he wrote in Czech, because a religious Jew is not allowed to write on those days. Strictly speaking, one is not supposed to write at all — but he did.

Then came other diaries. There was a Christian woman who was later sent to Treblinka. There was a Czech Jewish dissident who wrote extraordinary things about Theresienstadt — a brilliant man. There was Willy Mahler, a provincial newspaper journalist, who also documented what was happening. And several others.

In this way, the book became polyphonic. There was a kind of “skeleton” — the central diary — and from it, other entries branched out on the same days. Not every date matched exactly, but the overall structure emerged. It became a true polyphonic novel: multiple voices speaking, with commentary.

That is why I called it Torah and Talmud.

We created four volumes:
— diaries,
— children,
— teachers in the ghetto,
— lectures in the ghetto.

Sergei described the lectures very precisely as a “tablet of consciousness.” People were giving lectures to one another — not to the Germans. And by the titles alone, one can see what they spoke about and what they remained silent about. For example, the word “death” does not appear in any of the lectures.

We even carried out a kind of sociological analysis — together with Sergei and Vitya Kuperman from Toronto.

The fourth volume is devoted to music, theater, and art. It is structured in the same “Torah and Talmud” format. A similar volume — Lectures in Theresienstadt — also exists in English.

Working on Friedl, I learned an enormous amount about life. I became acquainted with the culture of the Austro-Hungarian world, with the Bauhaus — since Friedl studied at the Bauhaus in Weimar. She seemed to bring an entire constellation of people into my life.

And here it was the same as with poets and prose. I couldn’t do otherwise: once you begin to connect with a person, and they are alone, you cannot simply abandon them. And there were so many such people. You had to stay in touch, call them, speak with them, ask how they were — and then, God forbid, bury them…

Later, I wrote the novel Friedl. It has been republished twice in Russian and translated into German, Czech, and Hebrew. After that, I wrote other books connected with this subject.

And all the time I kept asking myself: what is it that truly interests me?

 

ELENA MAKAROVA:
What truly interests me is this: why do I keep making these leaps from one thing to another? At one moment I am conducting workshops where we laugh, joke, sculpt, draw… and then suddenly — this subject.

I thought that perhaps it comes from childhood. From a very early age I would ask older people about their lives. My grandfather and I used to walk along the boulevard; he would sit down and talk with people his own age. He died at seventy — which now doesn’t seem old at all. But to me, he was already an old man.

And I would ask those sitting nearby: “What has your life been like?” And they would begin to tell very harsh, unfiltered stories. There was everything in those stories.

And perhaps even then I began to think. Of course, now this is a kind of retrospective interpretation, but I believe I have always been interested in one theme: freedom within unfreedom, and unfreedom within freedom.

A person is so constrained by conventions — of their time, their social environment, behavior — that it becomes very difficult to break out of these bonds. But when I read the texts written there, and see what people paid attention to, how they lived within that confined space and time, it is astonishing.

Viktor Frankl. He was in Theresienstadt and created a group that worked to prevent suicides. Among its members were Richard Feder and Philipp Manes — extraordinary people. They went from person to person, speaking with them, helping them find meaning in life.

Frankl’s entire work is about the search for meaning. When you cannot find meaning, you cannot remain within life — you have nothing to hold on to. And he, being an optimist with a deep sense of humor, an extraordinary individual, connected people to one another, helping them endure.

Later, those same people were sent to Auschwitz and perished. But even the fact that they experienced a few days of inner freedom — that already means a great deal. Even a single minute of freedom means a great deal.

At the same time, my work with Friedl continued. I became a curator of her international exhibitions, and this opened my eyes to many things.

For example, how people from different cultures perceive this material. In Japan, there was an exhibition organized with the participation of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. There were many objects connected to Friedl and to that period.

And there was a Japanese man in white clothing, carefully opening a small container. Inside was Zyklon B gas. He did not understand what he was opening. We understood — he did not.

In France, at the Jewish Museum in Paris, there was a guard. When we were working on the exhibition — and that is always day-and-night work — he had a guitar. And he would sing to these children — that is, to their drawings. He would walk from one drawing to another and sing each of them a song.

There were many such moments. People came, bringing more and more information, more and more stories.

There was also Erna Furman — a professor, a psychoanalyst, and a student of Friedl. She had never spoken to anyone about her experience. She lived in Cleveland and was a very well-known specialist.

I kept writing her letters — she never replied. But one day she came to the opening of the exhibition in Atlanta, approached me, and said that she had only a few months left to live. And after what she had seen, she was ready for me to come to Cleveland for three days, during which she would answer one hundred of my questions.

That, too, was a kind of trial. And from that came a book — an interview built around one hundred questions and answers.

​

GREGORY ANTIMONY:
I’m still interested in this — if possible, could you summarize Friedl’s work? How would you describe it?

 

ELENA MAKAROVA:
What emerges, in the end, is an entirely different system of teaching art — if we speak about the practical side.

 

GREGORY ANTIMONY:
Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.

 

ELENA MAKAROVA:
Yes. In 1943, Friedl gave a lecture titled “Children’s Drawings.” It was delivered in the ghetto, at what was essentially a symposium of educators. Teachers there gave lectures to one another.

These lectures have been preserved because they had to pass through the Jewish Council and receive approval from the German authorities — in other words, they were censored.

All of these educators were extraordinary people. There were specialists in antiquity, historians, musicians — an incredible range of individuals. At the same time, formal teaching was prohibited in Theresienstadt. Everything was officially categorized as “leisure.”

There was an entire “Department of Leisure,” which included around eighty-six different activities. Within it, there were hierarchies — violinists, pianists, critics, and so on.

Friedl gave her lecture there. In it, she writes that when something is unclear to her, she turns to a certain Gertrude Baumgartl, who helps her understand what is happening in a child’s inner world based on their drawings.

And when Erna Furman came, she brought with her the notes and lectures of Gertrude Baumgartl. So it turned out that not only Friedl’s text existed, but an entire body of material from this person, which had seemed to be lost.

I began researching the history of Gertrude Baumgartl. She worked with children using Rorschach tests, Koch tests, and thematic tests. And it became clear that she was an extraordinary, remarkable woman.

And this kept happening — behind every name, a new story would emerge.

And returning to Friedl’s lecture, she formulates a number of key principles. For example, she asks: why are you so eager to make children resemble yourselves? Why do you believe that you are so perfect?

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ELENA MAKAROVA:
And then she goes on to explain how to work with a child — what to pay attention to. That a child must be given complete freedom; that until the age of ten one should not interfere at all. That it is very important to show them great works of art. That it is essential not to disturb them when they are drawing or thinking.

It was essentially a whole set of principles. And the fact that this was written in a camp is something one simply cannot imagine.

Only in one passage does she refer to reality: that the boys are nervous because there are not enough brushes and paper, that they have to stand in line. To calm them, she gave them the task of keeping a “class journal.” And they became calm — they began to write things down, waiting for their turn to draw.

But overall, it is a complete system. And it is modernist, because Friedl relied on Bauhaus principles.

The pedagogical ideas of the Bauhaus were very clear and were articulated by Johannes Itten in Form and Color and in the Preliminary Course of the Bauhaus. She was his direct student and even replaced him, teaching in his place. So already at the Bauhaus she was an outstanding teacher — and she remained one.

She did not know the term “art therapy” — such a term did not exist then. She was simply an extraordinary teacher.

 

GREGORY ANTIMONY:
But perhaps the most important thing is that these children — unlike others doing similar work elsewhere — were all destined…

 

ELENA MAKAROVA:
Yes.

 

GREGORY ANTIMONY:
And this never left their lives, not for a single moment…

 

ELENA MAKAROVA:
Yes. Because it was a transit camp. You would just begin to adapt, find friends, form relationships — and suddenly a transport list arrives: some are taken away, others are brought in. You have to adapt again.

Then eight people out of twenty are taken away, and eight new ones are brought in. It was hell. For the teachers, it was hell.

But Friedl was glad that she was not a formal teacher. She was simply a person living in the children’s home and working with drawing. She did not have to enforce discipline.

And yet, sometimes she managed better than the teachers who were responsible for it. There were bedbugs, lice, everything imaginable. The children scratched terribly in the summer, and they were not allowed outside.

And once, as one of her students told me, Friedl came in and said:
“Let’s make a theater of mourners. Take sheets — those on the left cry, those on the right laugh.”

And they began: some cried, others laughed, then they switched, then again — and at some point they all started laughing. They began to laugh at themselves.

Of course, this does not save them physically from lice and bedbugs — but it saves them internally.

Everyone I met — no longer children — said the same thing: Friedl was unlike anyone else. Neither as a person nor as a teacher. There was something mysterious about her. When she entered, the atmosphere in the block changed. She herself was a kind of medicine.

 

GREGORY ANTIMONY:
Can one draw any analogy from your story, for example, with Soviet camps? Could something similar have emerged there, in one form or another?

 

ELENA MAKAROVA:
There was theater in the Gulag.

 

GREGORY ANTIMONY:
Yes.

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ELENA MAKAROVA:
But it had a different function. The Gulag theater was, first of all, mobile: they traveled between barracks and performed their productions. It wasn’t something they staged once for themselves and that was it. It was also, in part, a form of propaganda and a kind of influence.

Like what Nikolai Zhukov once said to me about my sculptures — that they were too small.

In Theresienstadt, on the other hand, works were created there — written, performed — and later became known worldwide. For example, Viktor Ullmann’s opera The Emperor of Atlantis, or the children’s opera Brundibár.

There were not only humane but also very wise people working with the children. Because those adults shared the same fate as the children. It wasn’t that children would be sent away and adults would remain.

So they understood: if there is a day, it must be lived. On that day you can learn something, draw something, sing something — you must do something. And it was productive.

Formally speaking, the children who survived were so well educated that they didn’t even need to attend school afterward. Because they were taught by professors.

Imagine being taught by someone like Takho-Godi, a professor of ancient Greek literature — that is the level at which they were taught. Everything was explained, everything was discussed.

Even before the war, Jewish children were forbidden to attend schools. From March 1939 onward, they remained at home. They did have teachers — but privately. These were people who had been dismissed from universities and schools. And they taught for very modest pay.

So these children were extraordinarily well educated — and in essential, fundamental areas, not peripheral ones.

 

GREGORY ANTIMONY:
I see. Yes… This is something one has to live with — what you’ve just described — and try to reflect on how it would work in different situations. In any case, it’s something one has to think about.

 

ELENA MAKAROVA:
Well, that’s exactly what I do — I keep thinking about it all the time.

 

GREGORY ANTIMONY:
Well, our time is long over. But this has been extremely interesting and, if one may say so, deeply instructive — even given the nature of the material. I would like to thank you.

We didn’t touch on several topics we had planned, but perhaps we will meet again and continue this conversation.

 

ELENA MAKAROVA:
All right, thank you very much.

 

GREGORY ANTIMONY:
Goodbye, and all the best to you. Until next Saturday.​

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