Sara Davidmann always knew her father, Manfred, had escaped Nazi Germany as a 14-year-old boy on the Kindertransport in 1939, but the details of his life in Berlin as a Jewish child remained a mystery.
“My father was never able to talk about what had happened to him at all,” says the London-based artist.
“When he was alive, he was a very difficult man to get close to… It was just a chapter of his life that he felt he had to internalize.”
After her father’s death a decade ago, Sara embarked on a journey to uncover the truth about his past.
“We all grew up knowing that there was more, but not what it was,” she reflects. “It was just something you didn’t ask about.”
The catalyst for this exploration came when Sara discovered a family photo album, compiled by her late aunt, Susi, that contained images spanning from 1910 to 1988.
The album, with carefully annotated photos, revealed a family Sara had never known, many of whom lived in Berlin before World War II.
However, as Sara flipped through the pages, she realized something darker—many of the relatives pictured before the war did not appear in the later sections of the album.
Intrigued, Sara began researching at the Wiener Holocaust Library in Bloomsbury and the Arolsen Archives in Germany.
With the help of researchers, she uncovered over 130 historical documents related to her family.
These records told both heartbreaking and remarkable stories about those missing from the photos.
For her great-grandmother Dorothea and great-aunt Marta, Nazi transportation documents revealed they were sent to concentration camps in Auschwitz and Theresienstadt, where neither was ever heard from again.
“To be holding in my hand the same documents that were held by people who were responsible for putting them on this transportation and their deaths, I mean, that was just so chilling,” says Sara.
Other family members survived the war through incredible journeys.
Sara learned that her great-aunt Rosa had escaped to France, endured two different internment camps, and managed to escape.
Some relatives fled to Shanghai, while others found refuge in Israel. Her grandmother, Paulina, survived by hiding in Berlin with false documents.
Sara’s research revealed how Nazi antisemitic laws systematically stripped Jewish people of their rights in Berlin after Hitler’s rise to power.
“From 1933 onwards, over 400 antisemitic laws were passed, which gradually took away everything from Jewish people,” Sara explains.
“It gave me a real insight into my father’s experiences when he was growing up as a young Jewish boy.”
Alongside her research, Sara began creating visceral artworks in response to the devastating truths she uncovered about her family’s past.
These pieces often incorporate materials like hair, blood, and burnt objects, symbolizing the impact of the antisemitic laws enacted by the Nazis.
One artwork, titled My Name is Sara, features a series of photograms showing a plait of Sara’s own hair—hair she had cut off as a child.
The title refers not only to Sara’s name but also to the Nazi law that forced Jewish women to adopt the name “Sara,” a detail revealed through her family’s transport documents.
Another powerful work includes light boxes displaying microscopic blood samples from her living relatives, which have been colored red and green.
These samples were inspired by the Nuremberg race laws, which sought to prevent German Jews from marrying non-Jews, fearing that “Jewish blood” would contaminate the purity of the German race.
For Sara, the light boxes serve as a defiant response, symbolizing her family’s survival.
Through her art, Sara Davidmann honors the lives of her family members lost to the Holocaust while celebrating the resilience and survival of those who endured.
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