Surviving

I came across Alicia Adams in a book of memories by Holocaust survivors. Now an artist in London, she was a young girl in a small Polish town, occupied mostly by Jews, when the Nazis began their 'forest clearances' --herding the population into the forest, getting them to dig their own graves, then machine-gunning them. Her account of the 'tender-hearted' German officer who promised not to kill her with the others, moved me to write the poem Poland 1941: see yesterday's post.

Often painting natural scenes and still-lifes, she has a richly colourful style, a testimony to her unquenchable spirit, after such tragedy. I wish I could reproduce the painting 'Self Portrait' --a tree-- referred to in my poem, but 'Flowers in a window', reproduced above from an exhibition catalogue, gives an indication of its richness. It must seem very mysterious to viewers of the painting why she should regard a tree as her self portrait --unless they know what happened to her, her family and her whole town, in her childhood.

On a frigid, sombre-grey, blustery day here in Cornwall, a day when light has scarcely dawned, I find it reviving to look at Alicia Adams' colourful 'flowers, which have grown from such dark soil.