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By Donald H. Harrison
 OCEANSIDE, California – Here in this city next door to the large Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base, three dozen evocatively embroidered images from the Holocaust hang in a gallery of the Oceanside Museum of Art. The first thing one notices is that the figures in the panels are not proportional to each other—and for those looking strictly for visually satisfying art, this might have been off-putting. But for those moved by history, the exhibition “Fabric of Survival: The Art of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz” tells a compelling story of two Jewish sisters who survived the Nazi terror, thanks to their ability to pass themselves off as Christians.
The exhibit starts off happily enough, with Krinitz depicting daily life in her village of Mniszek, Poland, in the 1930s. We see her carrying water up the hill to her house, with her brother Reuven standing in a wagon and other members of her family standing by their home. Next we see some children swimming in the Tuchin River, while others tend to the geese. One day Reuven got into a fight with a school mate, and although it had been a matter of self-defense, he knew their mother would be angry with him. So he hid in the horse barn, and after their mother left for work, Esther snuck a bowl of borscht out to him.
There follows a nostalgic look at the Jewish holiday. Shavuot, when Esther walked on stilts through the fields to their grandparents’ house … Rosh Hashanah, conducted in a family’s room denuded of almost all furniture except for a grandfather clock which was probably too heavy to move. Strategically placed curtains transformed a closet into the Aron Kodesh … Passover, when the women of the village gathered at Mottel the shoemaker’s house to knead their dough. Mottel would score the dough and pass it over to another man to bake into matzoh. Esther was of the opinion her mother was the best dough-maker of all, never having to add flour and water to the mixture, which would have rendered them unkosher for Pesach.
With Embroidery number 7, the horror begins. Nazi soldiers arrive in the village, one taunting Esther’s grandfather by cutting off his beard, as her grandmother screams. Soon the boys were put to work digging trenches, oriented in such a way that the Poles knew the Germans expected somedayto fight against the Russians. Esther, a young teenager in pain, had a Polish Gentile friend go with her to the Nazi camp so she could have her aching tooth pulled by a dentist. Thinking his patient was a Gentile girl, the dentist gave Esther chocolates for being so brave. In 1940, her mother took her to a nearby village where she could earn money spreading manure in a farmer’s field. Esther heard her name called from behind barbed wire. She was heart-broken to see that it was her cousin Moshe, now a prisoner.
In 1941, on the day of Erev Pesach, Nazis showed up at the family doorstep and began to beat her father, who was wearing his tefillim. They would have shot him, Esther believed, but for the fact that an assistant commandant called them off. Two months later, while tending cows in a field, Esther and a sister realized that they had strayed near a prison camp where boys were beaten until they could no longer work. , When they became useless, the boys were led to a nearby birch forest and shot. In this simple image we see children carrying logs, working with shovels and wheelbarrows, while meanwhile across the river, girls watch with their cows nearby. All too soon, Reuven was ordered to report to that camp. Esther’s mother pleaded with her husband to take the boy’s place, as Reuven had been ill and surely would not survive. But instead father and son decided to hide out all summer in the forest.
In September 1942, the horror became more intense. Embroidery #14 depicts a dawn raid in which the Gestapo made every member of the family line up in the fields in their nightclothes. Going back into their house to fetch clothes for her family, Esther was clubbed with a soldier’s rifle for not raising her hands quickly enough. Later that day, with the Gestapo believe returning, the family fled temporarily into the woods.
The Nazis eventually ordered all the Jewish families to go to Krasnik, a village served by a railroad that would take many people to concentration camps and their deaths. With their parents' encouragement, Esther and Mania separated from their family—and dressed in Polish clothing, watched their parents and the other villagers depart in wagons for the train station, never to be seen again. Jews in other villages joined the procession.
In the picture atop this article on the left side, titled “Dina,” Esther remembers the winding road filled with families on the forced move. Along the way, Mania and Esther met their cousin Dina, who persuaded Mania she would be better off staying with Esther than going with the rest of the family. The two girls made it to a village where a man named Stefan, a Gentile friend of her father, resided. They asked him to take them in, and he embraced them and said he would help. But within two days, he sent them away – in the rain. The sisters fled to the forest.
After a week or so in the woods, the girls emerged from the forest and found themselves near a Gestapo barracks. When an officer asked them where they were going, they feigned not being able to understand German (although it was similar to Yiddish) so that the Gestapo would believe them to be Polish.
When finally a Polish-speaking officer spoke to them, they told him that they were on their way to their grandma’s house. “The man with a laugh waved them on.
In a town where they tried to find work, the girls were asked to produce birth certificates from the town where they said they lived. Instead of going to that town, they once again hid in the forest, waiting for night fall. This is the other
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embroidery pictured above. The primitive style of this and the other images in the exhibition reminded one Jewish visitor to the Oceanside Museum of Art – Charlotte Moskovitz of San Diego—of “Grandma Moses.”
The girls found their way to the home of a woman who had been their neighbor in Miniszek, with whose daughters they had once played with. However, the woman barred the door, explaining that the Gestapo were looking for the Jews. Finding their way back to a home where Mania had worked temporarily, they were again turned out, told that the Nazis knew that they were in the neighborhood and that they had better run for their lives.
By the next village they arrived at their next village, Mania and Esther had developed a cover story. They said they were Christian girls, Poles, whose family had been scattered by ethnic Germans who said that they—and not the Poles—were entitled to live on their farm. The girls also gave themselves more Christian sounding names. Esther became Josefina, Mania became Maria. And they found work.
While drawing water from a well, Esther was approached by a German soldier who offered to help her. When she said she could do it okay by herself, he clicked his heels in response. On another occasion, German soldiers came to talk with her, but they were driven off by bees whose hives they had disturbed.
The next picture in this exhibition was off Esther’s Zaide, whom she said came to her in a dream in that room with the grandfather clock, with a picture of him and her grandmother hanging on the wall. “Esther,” he told her, “you will cross the river and you will be safe.”
The very next picture depicts liberation, when Russian troops—dressed in brown as opposed to the steel gray uniforms of the Nazis—marched through the town. Villagers lined along the fences wanted to give the Russians water, but their sergeant made them keep walking. After liberation, Esther went to the Majdanek Concentration Camp to see if she could learn of her family—or anyone from her village. Her embroidery depicts an empty camp, save for barracks, gas chambers, crematoria—and cabbage growing on mounds of human ashes.
At that point, Esther joined the Polish Army which accompanied Russian troops on their triumphant march into Germany. Along the way she saw a ghastly road, along which the body of a Nazi officer was hanged from each tree. More dead Nazis were scattered in the fields.
The final embroideries quickly summarize the facts that Esther met her husband at a DP camp in Germany. As he had a cousin in America, they were able to immigrate to this country in 1949. In a final image, life seems to have come full circle.. Although Esther lives in Brooklyn, she has climbed to the high branches of an apple tree and is throwing fruit down to her two daughters, one of whom is Bernice Steinhardt who later would arrange for the exhibition of her mother’s remarkable embroidered memories.
Charlotte Sultan, another Jewish visitor from San Diego, was impressed by the craftsmanship of the late Esther Nisenthal Krinitz. “I do some needlework myself, but nothing like this,” she said. “It is so beautiful – to see the tiny little stitches and the way she puts the fabric together with the needlework, it was wonderful. You could feel the happy times in her work, and then, as you came into the sadder things, it was all there to see."
Asked to define the techniques, she responded:
"It was mixed media, actually. She did embroidery, fabric, collages, and quilting, and there was some knitting there too—little pine cones—and the stitches were so beautiful.”
Sultan wondered if Krinitz had been able to get photographs of her hometown and environs to model her embroidery after —or whether it was all from memory.
“It was probably etched in her mind,” offered her friend, Charlotte Moskovitz.
“Well, “ said Sultan, “if she took poetic license it’s okay, because she gave us the story—the history—so it’s okay if the scenery isn’t exactly real—she made it feel real to me.”
The exhibition, which also includes a 13-minute video featuring an interview with the artist, will be shown at the museum through October 25th. Some special events in connection with the exhibit will include the screening October 1 of Crossing Delancey along with a dinner of kosher-style food. On October 4th, two student produced films on Holocaust subjects will be screened at the museum. On October 8th, Prof. Andrea Liss of California State San Marcos will discuss her book, Trespassing Through Shadows, on the role played by photography in shaping our memories of the Shoah.
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