In 1992 during a visit to Paris, the city was preparing to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of liberation of Paris during World War II. It seemed to me that the story of the liberation from the French point of view was not completely accurate. I knew from first hand experience that the Americans liberated France and thus Paris as well. Also, as a Jew, I knew about the French complicity in rounding up Jewish families and sending them to concentration camps. As of 1992 the French had never admitted that they had any part in it. I remember a book that we had right after the war that shows the French gendarmes marching heroicly down the Champs Elisee on August 25, 1944 after Paris was liberated. The week before they had been rounding up Jews for deportation. The last train to the camps left August 24, 1944.
I decided I would do a set of murals celebrating the Liberation from a Jewish point of view. I wanted to have a show of the murals in the Salle des Fêtes in the Mairie of the 11th arrondisment where my family had lived. The 11th was a Jewish neighborhood that was emptied during the war. The show never happened, but I decided to do the murals anyway
There are seven murals because that’s the number that would have fit in the Salle des Fêtes. They represent what I thought were important events of the war for French Jews.
Philip Orenstein
The Fall of Paris, June 12, 1940
In June of 1940 the German Army occupied Paris. This was a great prize for art-loving Hitler. The mural refers to the time, shortly after the beginning of the occupation, when he visited the city to look over his booty. It represents symbolically his visit to the Louvre Museum to observe the captive Venus de Milo, which here stands for France. Crows or Ravens included in the imagery are a reference to the French Resistance’s anthem, which begins “O friend do you hear the song of the crows on the plain.” The crow in this case is an ominous vision of the danger to come. The image of the man holding a number is a copy of the artist’s father’s identification picture with the number on his German prisoner of war documentation. The word “violin’ appears, representing the profession of his mother. The number 6943 is an art historical reference to a painting by the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni called States of mind: The Farewells, 1911. It represent abstractly the departure of a troop train with that number. That number is used throughout the murals. Trains during World War II moved munitions, soldiers, prisoners of war, and deported Jews.