Harriet Bart
Minneapolis, MN
http://www.harrietbart.com
IG: harrietbartstudio

I Saw It
2023
Letterpress
10″ x 6.5″ x 0.5″ in

Artist Statement

In 2022, letterpress printer Phil Gallo, brought me a book titled, I Saw It: Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Shoah, written by Maxim Shrayer. In that book is the poem of that same title. The poem, I Saw It, translated by Maxim Shrayer, was written by Ilya Selvinsky, a poet, journalist, and soldier who, in 1941, witnessed the massacre of thousands of Jews outside the Crimean city of Kerch. Thereafter he wrote and published the poem.

Phil who knew my grandmother was from Ukraine (which at that time part of the Russian Empire) thought it would be of special interest to me, and it was. I was born the year of the massacre at Kerch.

I was close to my maternal grandmother with whom I lived for a brief time when my father was drafted into the US Navy near the end of WWII. At the age of fourteen, my grandmother, her mother and brother escaped the pogroms. Under cover of night, they made their way from Kiev to Odessa, and into steerage of a departing vessel. They emigrated to the US in 1905.

This book was created in memory of my grandmother who survived pogroms, those murdered at the battle of Kerch, those murdered in WWII, and all who continue to suffer ongoing terror and repression in Ukraine.