Razor

Yocheved Weinfeld

1990

Four canvases of varying sizes with a razor on canvas on top left, English text and shadowy object on right, red fabric on middle left, and photograph of a seated woman on bottom left.
Weinfeld, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, produced artworks addressing the question of who she would have been if she had herself been a prisoner in a concentration camp? Would she have been, like most inmates, a murdered victim of brutality and starvation—or a kapo, a prisoner put in charge of other prisoners, reviled as a traitor? Some women received better food than other prisoners in exchange for serving as kapos and/or providing sex to guards. After liberation, women who had slept with Germans sometimes had their heads shaved as punishment. In this artwork, Weinfeld focuses on women who suffered abuse and sexual violence during the Holocaust. One panel has a razor. On another are superimposed the words: “Snow Coal Razor Skull Train War.” The photograph is of Weinfeld as a teenager sitting atop what looks like a pile of garbage.

Credits

Photograph by Steven Kasher. Photograph within the work by Dr. David Darom. Courtesy of the artist.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 10.

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Creator Bio

Yocheved Weinfeld

b. 1947

Yocheved Weinfeld was born in 1947 in Legnica, Poland, and immigrated to Israel as a child. Her works are found in collections of the Israel Museum, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the Hamburg Kunsthalle. Weinfeld lives in New York City, where she is the executive director of the Jewish Children’s Learning Lab.

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