BARBARA LOFTUS - a Statement

" In 1938 - it must have been November, it must have been a few days after Kristallnacht - a bell rang and two men came in. They were dressed in the uniform of the Sturmabteilung, the SA.

They entered with a paper which entitled them to remove valuables from Jewish homes. They came into the dining room, where my mother unlocked the cabinets and drawers. Then the two men began to wrap up the porcelain.

They had a box, like a tea-chest, and they carefully took the pieces and wrapped them in a lot of tissue paper and put them into the tea-chest. Then my mother opened the cutlery drawers , and they took all the silver. I cannot remember f they wrapped it up or if they just flung it into the sack. It is not clear in my memory. We were allowed, each member of the family, to keep one set of cutlery.

I don't remember them taking anything else, because my mother had already sold her jewellery. They asked if she had any jewellery, and she showed them some small items, which they couldn't be bothered with; and then hey went away. It was done to most. It was the law. Jews had to hand over their valuables." *

This is how my mother described the confiscation of the porcelain. For most of my life she kept her memories to herself; now, in old age, she began to tell me about the past.

I wanted to take her memories and give them substance so that I could experience them, too. Over the course of two years I produced a series of paintings. Elaborate staging and preparation were necessary. I went to Berlin to see the house where my mother had lived, and visited museums to see porcelain like the pieces that were confiscated.

These paintings have been transposed into a short filmic sequence where I control the pacing and unfolding of the images against the piano music of Schubert which my grandmother liked to play.

[ * Transcript of tape-recording made in 1994 by Hildegard Loftus (nee Basch) ]