My work has always on some level been connected to the horrors my family endured during the Second World War. Artistically I would say my work’s very Polish.
Both my parents lost almost their entire families during the Holocaust. My mother was in Auschwitz and before that she was almost four years in the ghetto, so she never spoke about that at all. After my mother lost her father and her sister in the camps, she escaped from Auschwitz before liberation. After the War there somebody called Rabi Morgenstern and he was funding boats to take children under 18, Jew children, to Britain. She was on one of those boats.
Morgenstern discovered that my mother had an uncle in England who lived in Cambridge Heath Road in the East End. She thought she was going to Cambridge University, she thought she was going to Cambridge. She got a taxi and he dropped her in the middle of the East End, a complete slum, it was horrendous, and she said, ‘No, Cambridge, Cambridge…’ He said, ‘This is Cambridge Heath Road,’ and sure enough, she lived in the East End!
She liked London, loved Britain, loved the British people and loved the way they left you alone and didn’t ask you questions about where you came from and just accepted, this sort of quiet acceptance. Both my parents loved Britain and British people, which had given them peace and opportunity.
When I was growing up I definitely felt different, alienated. My English friends their parents just spoke English, whereas there were all these other languages going on in my house, but obviously, there were odd secrets, so when I went to school I didn’t tell people what happened in my house, because they wouldn’t have understood anyway. Being brought up not just as a British person, but being brought up very much to be as British as possible, we were a bit cut off from any kind of Polish roots.
Me being an artist and my background, I felt I needed to do something special and original to express everything that went on that was hidden, I suppose, it’s a way of bringing it into the light without actually spelling it out. The point is that you have to recreate stuff out of the ashes, otherwise what was the point of them all dying, if you’re not going to somehow make good at their experiences and somehow prove that people can live in peace together.
