Tehom Abyss

Photographs and texts frame the narrative of the painful journey of discovery, from Thessaloniki to Auschwitz, of the deaths of Renée Revah’s family members in the concentration camp. Revah promises her grandfather, the sole member of her family to avoid this fate, that her work “Tehom” (a biblical Hebrew word, meaning primordial depth) will eventually ‘bring’ him to the scene of the crime, which he himself had not found the courage to visit in person. Two consecutive trips to the Birkenau and Auschwitz concentration camps will follow. At every step of her journey, she mentally addresses her grandfather, sends him photographs, and shares her thoughts and feelings with him. As a ‘post-witness’ herself, Renée Revah processes the past and transforms the inherited trauma into a purifying path that leads to forgiveness; the abyss of the lake that was the cenotaph of people murdered in concentration camps. FROM THE INTRODUCTION TO A 2019 EXHIBITION: ‘TEHOM—ABYSS’ by RENEE REVAH“On the 15th of March 1943, 75 years ago, at the old Thessaloníki Railway Station, the first death train bound for the concentration camps of Birkenau and Auschwitz in Poland could be heard blowing its whistle. 2,800 Greek Jews were cramped in locked animal transport wagons. By August 2nd that year, 19 shipments, arriving at night and under fog (“Nacht und Nebel”), carried 46,061 Greek Jews to these camps, where most were killed. Amongst them, my great grandmother Sol Venezia, and her children Olga, Lina and Isaac, and other relatives and friends. “Between late 1943 and October 1944 my grandfather Albert Revah, who had escaped from Thessaloniki, lived in a state of fear and anxiety in a small apartment in Athens, surviving with the help of friends. In October 1944, once the Germans left Athens, my grandfather had one single purpose: to organize the homecoming of his family. With loans he bought beds, mattresses, blankets, food, clothes: every day he gathered things that he could find in the ruins of Athens. “[After months of waiting] my grandfather learned that few had returned from the camps; among those was a friend whose life had been spared because, before the war and the rise of the Nazis, he was an employee at the German Consulate in Thessaloniki and spoke fluent German. The Germans had placed him as a secretary at Birkenau and he wrote the lists with the names of all who went to the gas chambers and the crematoria. From this doleful man, my grandfather learned the loss of his entire family.”