The South African years: part 2

The Outbreak of World War II

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Just when Herman Wald began to find his artistic roots in South Africa, the Second World War  broke out.  It ushered  in  the darkest hours of European Jewry.  Shocking reports about the deportations and massacres of Jews[i] reached South Africa and with these came the realisation that a genocide was unfolding.  Anxiety about loved-ones abroad and a sense of helplessness shook the Jewish community. Herman Wald experienced an emotional turmoil that affected his creative work.

 

The South African Zionist Federation[ii] organised a United South African Jewish War Appeal to raise funds  for  Jewish refugees who tried to flee the Nazi genocide. Wald had just completed a sculpture  entitled  “The Refugee”,  [iii] which he donated to the Appeal.   The  South African  Jewish Board of Deputies was urged in an open letter[iv]to initiate  a drive for recruits to join the South African Defence Force in the war against Hitler’s Germany[v].  Herman  Wald left his studio and had joined up with many others.  He was first assigned to the Medical Corps and then transferred to the Engineers Camouflage Unit, in which he held the rank of sergeant. But he was not  sent to battle.

 

During this time he  recorded his reminiscences of his formative years in Europe in notes entitled “Carved Thoughts”.  He also composed a collection of aphorisms which he would later enhance with photographs of his sculptures.[vi] In the  army he created  portraits of his superiors. He was commissioned to carry out a group of sixteen figures   entitled “Engineers laying the Nose of a Bridge”[vii], which he executed  in the social realist style.[viii]

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One day on his army leave when he visited his brother in East London,  he  met and fell in love with  Vera Rosenbaum. They were married on the 12th November 1942. In Vera he found an anchor and emotional haven during a time of unspeakable disaster, the time  in which the Jews of Europe were relentlessly slaughtered. He was not  yet fully aware of what was happening, but was gripped with a constant sense of foreboding. The marriage was a  happy  union filled with a profound spiritual understanding.  The cultured Vera  admired Wald’s spontaneity, his musicality, his exquisite  voice, his art and   intellect. She collected all his writings and diligently dated his work.  They had three children, Michael Jeffrey,[ix] Pamela[x] and Louis[xi].  He called her “the love of my  life”,   his “joy and inspiration” and he  respected her opinions  about his art. In his letters he called her “my darling Veriky”.  After his untimely death she worked tirelessly to keep his memory alive.  

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Discharged from the army in 1944, he returned to Johannesburg and to Vera, starting to work in a studio in Parktown North, as she recalls  “at a pace and with a fever pitch of a man famished for his vocation.”[xii] This “fever pitch”, however, also was a symptom of his psychological state. News was seeping in about the Holocaust in Europe. How would he be able to deal with this as an artist who must draw inspiration from his inner being?

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Outwardly Herman Wald resumed his life and  his artistic career. After his discharge  he opened a studio in 44 Pritchard Street, Johannesburg, where he established the Beaux Arts Gallery, the venue of several prominent solo exhibitions.

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As a result of his five  years of  absence in active service Herman Wald was almost forgotten by  the wider public. On the other hand, his Jewish supporters, writing for the Jewish press  regarded him  as “one of the best sculptors we have in South Africa today” [xiii].  

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In this crucial year of 1944, he launched himself into the public. He participated in a group exhibition that included  the sculptors Lippy Lipshitz, Moses Kottler, and Gerard de Leeuw,   held under the auspices of the South African Academy of Science and Art. Wald exhibited  forty sculptures, which he had created prior to his days in the army, and he  managed to sell  nineteen works.[xiv]

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It is surprising  that  no closer relationship developed between Kottler, Lipshitz and Wald, who had so much in common, given their background and world view and the catastrophe that befell  their families and co-religionists in Europe.  Kottler and Wald at a later stage even lived in adjacent suburbs in Johannesburg, Parkview and Parktown North[xv] but  had no contact with each other.

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In the same year, 1944,  he held a most successful  solo exhibition, which was opened by Barnett Potter, sub-editor of The Star.  According to Vera this exhibition was  a “truly great success and established Herman’s name among the first ranking artists in South Africa.”[xvi] He showed thirty-seven sculptures of which he  sold twenty.  

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This great success boosted Herman Wald emotionally and financially. He became a founder member of the Brush and Chisel Club[xvii] which was a society of professional South African painters and sculptors. They exhibited regularly at the Schweickerdt Art Gallery in Pretoria.

 

 

The Impact  of the Holocaust on the art of Herman Wald

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During this time Wald lived in in two different realities. When the war was over, life in South Africa seemed to carry on normally, but  only on  the surface.  For the South African Jews it  was impossible to grasp and to handle the enormity of what had happened to their families and friends  in Europe.[xviii]  The news  had unfolded in stages, even during the time when  Herman Wald was in the army.

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In 1943 the news of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising had reached South Africa. A day of mourning was held on the 7th December, strongly supported by Christian denominations. The gatherings  were dominated by discussions about how to rescue the Jews of Europe. By mid-1944 South Africa and the world had heard of the horrors of Auschwitz.  This was the year in which Wald had tried to launch himself as an artist into the South African art scene.

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Then there was the country of his birth, Hungary. The Holocaust did not reach Hungary until almost the end of World War II, when it was clear that Germany would lose the war. This was one of the most disgraceful chapters in the history of the Holocaust, in which the Hungarian state as well as the Allies are  shamefully implicated by doing nothing to prevent this catastrophe, as they meanwhile were fully aware of the genocide that was taking place in Auschwitz. Although the Jews of Hungary had been continuously harassed by the gendarmerie of the Horthy regime, they believed that somehow they would be spared the gas chambers. Yet their destruction in Auschwitz right at the end of the war had been meticulously planned[xix] by the notorious Sonderkommando, the special mobile units headed by Adolf Eichmann.

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At the end of 1944, the first survivors of the Holocaust arrived in South Africa and related the horrifying fate that had befallen the Jews of Europe[xx]. The reaction was a terrible silence, an inability to articulate the horror  and disbelief which the news had evoked within the Jewish community. A second day of mourning was held throughout South Africa on the 14th March 1945.

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 Herman Wald wrote:

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“…After the war, in 1946, as soon as I was demobilised I had found out for certain that, like so many others, almost my entire family had been wiped out…”[xxi]  

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Among those who perished was his mother, Pearl. Herman Wald was  too shattered to continue working in his previous style.  In his grief he expressed himself through work his genre sculptures,[xxii] which can be seen as  manifestations of his reminiscences of his childhood in Cluj. They  reveal the very essence of his  being.

 

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