Peggy Grant

A clown’s chilling stare and an acrobat’s dejected eyes search the back room of Peggy Grant’s home.

The tuba player next to them has his back turned.

The trio, standing before a cloudy backdrop that creeps across their shoulders and arms, was painted on canvas decades ago. The image hangs in Grant’s home, among stacks of portraits, scenes and figure sketches completed by her late husband Adam throughout his lifetime.

Long-time friend and consultant Janet Schroeder said that within every one of Adam’s paintings is a story. Brian Byrn, a curator at the Midwest Museum of American Art in Elkhart, Ind., said many of the paintings evoke an air of mystery.

“The underpinnings of maybe sorrow and sadness is permeating his work,” he said. “[The figures] are suspended in this animation of concern and maybe some would even say, in some cases, dread.”

But this is not hollowed-out doom. The “dread” is tangled with a sense of uplifting strength, as immortalized by the blocky brush strokes that could symbolize building blocks. That could represent rebuilding one’s life, Byrn said.

This conflict — this burden buried within paintings of celebratory figures like acrobats or tuba players — is rooted in Grant’s history.

In the early 1940s, he watched his peers rise in the morning only to slave away. He watched their gnarled hands, thinning by the hour, grasp shovels and hammers and soil. He watched them drop dead.

Adam Grochowski Grant survived the Holocaust because he could paint.

Grant grew up in Warsaw, Poland, in the 1920s and ’30s. His father Anthoni, a physician and a painter, raised him on a steady diet of art history, skill and intellectualism.

Anthoni joined the Polish army when Nazi Germany began to rise but he, along with 14,500 other Polish officers, was executed in 1940 in a forest called Katyn.

Adam struggled to continue his education under the crushing hand of the Nazis. He and his friends’ families and teachers met for “tea parties” or “lunches” to study school material in secret. He continued to dream of becoming a painter. In 1942, Adam’s mother had tuberculosis and was confined to an institution. When he went to visit her, she feared that he would miss too much school and advised him to take the next train home. When he got to the station, he was rounded up with 800 others and taken to a prison in Warsaw called Pawiak.

Adam was 18 years old.

By 1943, the Nazis trucked Adam off to Auschwitz. But the guards soon realized the young man’s talent. They gave him nothing more than watercolors, crayons and paper and ordered him to paint for them.

He later moved to another camp in Austria called Mauthausen — a much-dreaded slave site on a granite quarry where a typical prisoner survived about two weeks. While he was forced to work grueling hours too, he was given lighter duties in exchange for his painting skills. He painted some pieces reflecting worker conditions and hid them in his barracks.

Peggy wonders just how many hundreds of his paintings are scattered across Eastern Europe, handed down after Nazi Germany fell. Her spouse had to paint portraits of guards, scenes of the countryside and sketches of guards’ loved ones from home. He even had to paint a mural depicting bountiful arrangements of food that hung for starved prisoners to see.

Still, Adam could have barely survived another week by the time Americans liberated him in 1945. The U.S. Army’s displaced person camp became his home. He had no one.

“After Adam was liberated, he found that his home was gone, his family was gone, his country was gone,” Peggy said.

Moving to America

Adamant about moving to America, he waited in the camp until he found a stranger to sponsor him so he could leave Europe. He was 25 years old by the time he moved to America. He never went back to Poland — but his artwork would.

Grant settled in Detroit at first. He found a job designing for one of the first paint-by-number companies. His renditions of famous paintings traveled across the country. One of his most well known is the ever-popular “The Last Supper” by Leonardo da Vinci.

“He had a connection to all of us because he designed paint-by-numbers — having translated masters’ works to millions of Americans,” said Schroeder, who has helped Peggy publicize Adam’s work. “The whole point was for people who didn’t have artistic ability to unlock some of that.”

In Detroit, Adam met Peggy. An artist herself, she worked for the paint-by-numbers company. They married a few years later and her outlook on life was forever altered.

“I didn’t know the ramifications of World War II until I met Adam,” she said.

Peggy witnessed Adam’s many stages. There was the depressive stage in which the Holocaust haunted his dreams and dogged his emotions. He painted dark and sinister works to reflect the horror. Even decades later, Adam painted “The Pale Horse,” which is an emaciated white horse standing among rubble and a building shell. The atmosphere is a menacing red hue. Peggy said Adam painted it because “death comes on a white horse.”

But during his other stages, his painting reflected hope. He often focused on the female figure because he saw it as a symbol for rebirth. He painted a series of stark white and black scenes with such fine lines they resemble woodcuts — a collection Peggy calls “The Renewed Hope Series.”

“One could philosophize of seeing the world in black and white and good and evil, and there is a certain surrealism to them,” Byrn said.

His other inspiration was the circus. He painted dancers and costumed characters, acrobats and musicians. Each painting places the subjects in silent interaction with each other, sitting or standing by props portrayed in muted colors.

Peggy and Adam moved to Toledo in 1955 after they were laid off. The company for which they worked had filed for bankruptcy, but the Donofrio brothers of Toledo purchased the business, moved it to Toledo and brought the pair to the new site.

They raised two sons and lived together until Adam’s death in 1992. Peggy has since made it her life’s mission to get Adam recognition for his work.

And she has succeeded. Peggy’s passion combined with Schroeder’s skills at networking and raising money enabled the pair to hang Grant’s work at Jagiellonian University in Poland.

Grant’s work has also been shown at nearly 30 exhibitions in more than five states and a couple of other countries. A room in the Polish embassy in Saudi Arabia is named after him. Art collectors from Ohio to Florida to Virginia and beyond own his work.

For Peggy, who is art director at Toledo’s 20 North Gallery, each exhibit is a chance to walk viewers through a narrative of Adam’s life. She gets to do this again this spring. The Midwest Museum of American Art will host a three-month exhibition of Adam’s work, April 6 through July 8. The museum will display about 40 paintings, which will weave through the different stages of Adam’s life, Byrn said.

The museum has been a longtime fan of Grant’s work, said Director Jane Burns. For both Adam’s mystical style and his compelling story, visitors who have encountered these paintings in the past were hooked instantly, she said.

“We can put ourselves in his place and say, ‘Would I have to guts to do that? Would I have the fortitude to do that with no money and no family either?’” she said. “The Nazis took everything.”

Peggy and her son Mark reminisce about Adam’s fervor for painting in the house where they live today. Only then, during Mark’s childhood, the floors were covered in shag rugs and the walls were draped in turquoise and gold color schemes. “He’d sit right there and make a big mess and the next thing you know pastel dust would be all over,” Mark said, pointing to a chair in the corner of the living room.

Peggy said she always encouraged him to paint more and with new materials, and kept a room designated for his studio.

“He lost all his sadness when he was painting,” she said. “And that made me happy.”

For more information, visit the web sites www.adamgrantart.com and www.midwestmuseum.us. O

Tags: Adam Grant, Holocaust, Midwest Museum of American Art, Peggy Grant

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 31st, 2012 at 5:39 pm and is filed under Exhibits, Featured, Star, Uncategorized.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

“How would you feel, if at age 17, the government removed you from school, evicted you from your home, looted your bank account and stole all your family’s possessions?” asks author Chuck Weinblatt. “How would you feel if ruthless police prevented your parents from working, then deported you and your family to a concentration camp run by the most brutal of taskmasters? How would you feel if you lost contact with everyone you know and love, if you were sent to the most frightening place in history, and you were forced to perform unspeakable acts of horror in order to remain alive?”

Weinblatt takes readers through these historical atrocities in his novel “Jacob’s Courage,” which will be the focus of an Oct. 27 presentation at Monroe County Community College (MCCC).

Weinblatt, 57, a lifelong Toledo-area resident who lives in Sylvania, is a University of Toledo graduate and retired UT administrator. He said health problems forced his retirement six years ago, which provided him an opportunity to research and write.

Weinblatt

“I wanted to write a novel about the Holocaust and dedicate it to my family,” Weinblatt said in an Oct. 19 phone interview. “I had always known that members of my mother’s family disappeared in the Holocaust, but I did not know who they were until I began writing the book. I was sent a family tree that showed almost two entire generations of my family were wiped out in the Holocaust.”

The family tree Weinblatt referred to shows that of Menashe and Fayge Volk’s six children — Hya, Laya, Pesil, Aaron, Hanah and Avrom — all but Avrom died in the Holocaust; eight of the Volk’s grandchildren were also murdered in concentration camps or prisons.

“Avrom lived because he left Kovel, Russia, and came to the United States in 1911,” Weinblatt said. “He settled in Columbus and sent for his family about a year and a half later. That is how my mother and her sisters came here. If I had been born just nine years earlier, in Europe instead of the United States, I most likely also would have been a victim of the Holocaust.”

Weinblatt said he chose to write a love story that followed two adolescents through the Holocaust. While his characters are fictional, they, like the title character in “Forrest Gump,” are exposed to true historical situations.

Volk Family Tree (click to enlarge)

“I decided that the events surrounding my characters, Jacob and Rachel, would be real; everything that happens to them happened to real people,” Weinblatt said.

“Jacob’s Courage” follows the young couple from the forced ghettos to the concentration camps and beyond, with several harrowing twists and turns that allow Weinblatt to illustrate the myriad tragedies Holocaust victims faced.

“The camps were pure torture,” he said. “There was rampant typhus; people survived on a few hundred calories a day. There was no medical attention; people just started dying by the thousands, their corpses piled up like cordwood.”

In the novel, one of Jacob’s terrible dreams becomes a living nightmare when he is forced into a sonderkommando, where in real life, Jewish prisoners were forced to aid in the process of burning the bodies of Jewish victims.

The book contains graphic passages that do not shy away from the worst of the Holocaust atrocities, but Weinblatt said his intent was to demonstrate the resilient nature of mankind.

“I wanted to describe for people the most beautiful moments in life — falling in true love for the first time, making love to one’s soul mate for the first time, all of life’s triumphs that were experienced by the Jews who were prisoners of the Nazis,” Weinblatt said. “But then they experienced the most terrifying, horrifying brutality before they were shot and killed.”

Some of Weinblatt’s first-person research was conducted in Toledo. He said at one point, hundreds of Holocaust survivors lived in the Toledo area. There are now fewer than two dozen. One of those is his friend Philip Markowicz, an Auschwitz survivor. Markowicz was scheduled to appear at MCCC with Weinblatt but has canceled due to family illness. After narrowly escaping a lineup being held against a wall by Nazi machine guns, Markowicz moved to America, settled in Toledo and operated Phil’s TV and Appliances on Sylvania Avenue for almost 40 years. Markowicz wrote of his experiences in the book “My Three Lives.”

“Phil won’t be there, but I will read sections of his book at the presentation,” Weinblatt said. “He was born to a rabbi in Poland, and all he wanted to be was a rabbi. The Nazis sent his family to a concentration camp, and he lost his father to cold and starvation; his mother, sister and a nephew were sent to the gas chambers.

“He survived six different camps, including Auschwitz, and married a woman he met in one of the camps; they were married until she died in 2004.”

Weinblatt said “Jacob’s Courage” will be the focus of the evening, but he will also take audience questions.

“I want people to see that even in moments of terrible desperation, the Jews of these concentration camps lived, loved, observed all of their religious rituals,” Weinblatt said. “They found a way to keep the spirit of humanity alive.”

Weinblatt will appear Oct. 27 at Monroe County Community College at 7 p.m. in Whitman Center Room 4, located at 7777 Lewis Ave., Temperance. The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information on the presentation, contact the Whitman Center at (734) 847-0559.

Michael S. Miller is editor in chief of Toledo Free Press and Toledo Free Press Star. Call him at (419) 241-1700 or e-mail him at mmiller@toledofreepress.com.

Tags: Chuck Weinblatt, Holocaust, Lighting The Fuse, Michael S. Miller, Monroe County Community College

This entry was posted on Friday, October 22nd, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Lighting The Fuse, Opinion.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

“Did you hear Rich Iott was thrown out of the Valentine Theatre last night? He was at ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ and kept yelling, “She’s in the attic!” — Overheard at Oct. 11 debate

Republican Rich Iott should bow out of the race for the District 9 House of Representatives seat.

I say that, not in haste, but after nearly a week of observation and reflection. When I first read the Oct. 8 coverage of Iott’s former hobby, which entailed wearing a German Waffen SS uniform and “re-enacting” the maneuvers of a Nazi division, the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking, I believed Iott would drop out of the race within hours. His admission of participating in the group for several years and the accompanying photographs may as well have been a resignation news release.

But while the local, national and international media have chewed on the story with breathless zeal, Iott has continued to campaign, appearing on TV and radio programs to defend his former role-playing pastime. And every time he opens his mouth on the topic, he brings shame, derision and embarrassment to Northwest Ohio.

“Boy, be careful. You play with fire.” — Nazi officer Kurt Dussander, “Apt Pupil”

There is a compelling novella by Stephen King, “Apt Pupil,” in the collection “Different Seasons.” In the story, a young boy named Todd Bowden becomes obsessed with the Holocaust and Nazi culture after discovering a stack of old war magazines. His interest is at first a fascination with how? How could such an atrocity take place on such an earth-shaking scale? How could so many human beings be destroyed with such cold efficiency? His curiosity evolves into an unhealthy obsession that corrupts his mind, rots his soul and costs him his life.

Is it possible to immerse oneself in the study of the Holocaust and the Nazis and not be impacted by the gravity of the subject? At the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., there are thousands of Holocaust artifacts: prisoner uniforms, weapons, propaganda films, adults-only areas where graphic images reach out like dead hands to squeeze the heart. The museum has a boxcar that was used to transport Jewish victims to Auschwitz; the inside of that train car was colder than any cold I can describe from this side of the grave. I have spoken with Holocaust survivors, heard the stories of loss and ache and pain that were brewed in a hell most rational minds cannot imagine.

How is a person who has an iota of familiarity with the Holocaust able to dress in the uniform of its perpetrators and play war games without giving up a piece of his soul every time he goose-steps into the woods? How does that person compartmentalize the eternal evil from the short-term thrill of a “re-enactment?”

The group Iott used to belong to says it eschews the swastika in its games. That is a weak gesture the group uses to try to separate itself from the Nazis, and it means nothing. It’s like wearing a Ku Klux Klan robe and hood but claiming you don’t endorse the group’s “ideology” because you don’t wear a Confederate flag patch.

How does Iott fail to understand that his former penchant for acting as an SS soldier stains his name, reputation and ability to represent the people of Northwest Ohio?

“Did you know that one of Rich Iott’s ancestors died in the Holocaust? He fell out of a guard tower.” — Overheard in line at Talmadge Road Speedway, Oct. 11.

The offense is just the first level of this issue; Iott’s continuing refusal to show any contrition is arrogant and calls into question his communication skills and judgment in handling controversy. During an Oct. 11 appearance on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360°,” Iott and the host had this exchange:

Cooper: “Do you believe that these men, who in some cases took part in these crimes, were valiant men?”

Iott: “I think that they thought they were fighting for their homeland.”

Cooper: “I’m sure Nazis in the concentration camps thought they were doing a good thing, too, but that doesn’t make it so. I mean, do you think these were valiant men?”

Iott:  “I don’t think we can sit here and judge that today.  We weren’t there at the time they made those decisions. Were there bad people? Oh, absolutely.  And were there atrocities committed? Absolutely there were.”

I can’t decide if Iott’s Waffen waffling is an example of him being disingenuous, naïve or oblivious. Where is the unequivocal condemnation of the Nazis? Why does Iott insist on half-ass defending butchers? I also can’t decide which is worse: if the re-enactment group takes its Nazi playtime too seriously or if it doesn’t take it seriously at all.

Alan Miltich, who is in one of the now-famous pictures with Iott dressed as an SS soldier, told reporter Chris Gautz of the Jackson Citizen-Patriot that, “One of his favorite memories from [re-enactment] conventions is when everyone in full costume dances to ‘Time Warp’ from ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show.’”

Sounds like quite a party, doesn’t it?

“Iott says he re-enacts so we ‘never forget.’ But if he can separate the Nazi uniform from the Nazi mentality, I think he’s forgotten already.” — Alexandra Petri, The Washington Post

There are people in our region so eager to remove Rep. Marcy Kaptur from office, they are willing to downplay Iott’s insurmountable foolishness. Iott spokesman Matt Parker called the original Atlantic article a “non-story.” WSPD radio hosts Fred LeFebvre and Brian Wilson have similarly dismissed the importance of the Iott controversy as they work to keep the focus on removing Kaptur from office. Iott campaign consultant and WSPD host Fritz Wenzel has also worked very hard to downplay the incident; on Oct. 13, he spent a segment on WSPD interviewing a Jewish friend of Iott’s, employing the Archie Bunker “some of my best friends are … ” defense.

If it’s just a re-enactment and no big deal — if it’s a non-story — I challenge Parker, Wilson, LeFebvre, Wenzel and Iott’s Jewish pal to join the Wiking division during its next re-enactment. Let them put on the SS uniforms and march through the woods playing war games, in full view of video and still cameras. If it’s not a big deal — if it’s just a smear engineered by Kaptur, the media and the Democratic National Committee — if it’s not an indictment of character and judgment, they shouldn’t mind dressing up and joining the historical and educational effort, right?

“Annex Pennsylvania!” “SS we can!” “Today Toledo, tomorrow the world!” — suggested Iott campaign slogans from “Real Time with Bill Maher.”

The Prime Minister of Shame, Carty Finkbeiner (retired), has a Hall of Shame wing dedicated to his body of work embarrassing the region, but his string of humiliations looks absolutely helpful next to the searing spotlight Iott has brought to our region through his puzzling former weekend fun runs. More than 1,000 articles have been written about Iott’s re-enactment parties. He has been discussed in The Washington Post, The New York Times and has been a reference point on CNN, “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” “The Colbert Report,” “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” and many others. The BBC and major newspapers around the world are reporting on the Iott controversy.

Iott has become a punch line, but the joke is on Northwest Ohio.

“Don’t judge Rich Iott until you have goose-stepped a mile in his jackboots.” — Overheard Oct. 12 at Table Forty 4

If Iott truly believes in helping the future of Northwest Ohio, he will remove himself from the race. He needs to put the money and time and ego and sycophants aside and think.

Every day that this story survives a news cycle, the national and global repercussions for our region are exponentially deepened. Iott does not have even a slim hope of defeating Kaptur, but imagine the scrutiny if he did; Northwest Ohio would become the new David Duke Louisiana, the new Marion Barry Washington, D.C.; we will have elected an unfathomably inappropriate representative.

I do not believe Rich Iott is a Nazi, or that he in any way supports the heinous villains’ philosophy. But in this age of Google, he is now forever linked with an SS uniform and an arrogant refusal to apologize or show contrition for his poor judgment.He is unable to effectively serve the people of Northwest Ohio, and must understand that his limp to the finish not only further erodes the collective reputation of our region, it hurts his already weak local GOP. Voters disgusted with Iott are not going to suddenly switch for Kaptur; they are going to stay home, and that hurts the efforts of fellow local GOP candidates. Some political websites are negatively linking national GOP figures who have donated to Iott’s campaign. Iott is a liability.

Iott needs to step aside and recognize that if his hobby’s goal was to educate, it failed, because he has apparently failed to learn the lessons of how much damage Hitler and his armies of marching slayers achieved.

The only victory Iott can still salvage — and the only way he can control the endgame of this sad story — is to cede the race and work on rebuilding some important reputations; his, and that of the Northwest Ohio region he purports to care for.

Michael S. Miller is editor in chief of Toledo Free Press. E-mail him at mmiller@toledofreepress.com.

Tags: Brian Wilson, Fred LeFebvre, Fritz Wenzel, Holocaust, Lighting The Fuse, Marcy Kaptur, Michael S. Miller, Nazi controversy, Rich Iott, Stephen King, The Atlantic, United States Holocaust Museum, WSPD

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 14th, 2010 at 6:21 pm and is filed under Lighting The Fuse, Opinion.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.