Tamar Hirschl

STORY

My art story is inextricable from historical events that shaped my childhood. I was born straight into the Holocaust in Zagreb, Croatia in the winter of 1939. Our life was peaceful and untouched by the war until one day in 1941, when my father was riding a tram that was stopped at the Zagreb city center. Everyone with a yellow armband, including my father, was rounded up and taken to the Croatian- operated Jasenovac concentration camp. Because he was an electrician and therefore considered useful, my father was kept alive for several years before he was killed during an escape attempt in 1943.

My mother decided she didn't want to wear the yellow armband and planned to escape the country with my sister and I. She bribed smugglers to help us cross into Switzerland. We were captured in Hungary and sent to prison. The majority of the Jewish inmates were women and children who were sent from there to Auschwitz, but my mother, sister, and I were released. There were rumors that during our imprisonment, my mother repaired socks for the guards and soldiers in the army. After our release, we walked on foot back to Zagreb. As refugees, we slept where we could, often in stables. We suffered from hunger, and more than once found ourselves forced to beg and eat from the trash. This experience of being a refugee would later shape the themes of my art. When we returned, we hid out in the city until the end of the war. Since we could not venture outside for fear of being caught, my mother encouraged me to draw.

In 1948, my family migrated to Israel. Our living situations were tenuous, and we were relocated to the Atlit tent camp. In those years, we lived under the fear of war and terrorism. I felt very isolated due to the language barrier. I was put in a school where everyone but me spoke Hebrew, for which I was made fun of. The fact that we were too poor for good clothes only made matters worse. Our living situations were tenuous, and we moved from tent to barrack in a refugee camp.

Despite these obstacles, I eventually adjusted to life in Israel. After three years we moved to a small apartment. Meanwhile, my passion for art had grown. As an adolescent, I worked on theatrical sets and designed textiles. I studied at the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem, the Tel Aviv Kalisher School of Art, and the State College of Art in Tel Aviv. My passion was to combine my art with helping people, and so I became an art therapist. My work brought to me the aging, stroke victims, emotionally challenged children, and juvenile offenders. While still living in Israel, I completed my

M.A. at Lesley College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I married and raised two children in Tel Aviv. After fifty years, I moved to New York in 1999. By then, I could already consider myself a professional artist. I continued to work for several more years, applying my skills to the needs of children with AIDS, before retiring from art therapy and pursuing my art full-time.