SECOND BREATH
Maurice Blik
contemporary
193 x 138 x 72cm
No. 1 of an edition of 9
Maurice Blik was born in Amsterdam in 1939. The worst possible time and place to be a Jewish baby. One of his earliest memories is of his mother sewing the yellow star on his clothes.
The Bliks heard the ominous bang on the door in 1943, when Maurice was four. Like Anne Frank’s family, discovered a few streets away, they were sent first to the Westerbork concentration camp. From there Maurice’s father was deported to Auschwitz. They never saw him again. Then, in late 1943, with his sister, mother and grandmother, he was sent to Belsen.
Belsen was liberated in April 1945. But by then the Bliks had been moved. “I think the Germans wanted to clear up the evidence”, Blik says. “So two trains left Belsen packed with prisoners. We were on one.” They were locked in for two weeks, people dying all the time, until this nightmare journey ended near Leipzig. “I looked out of the window and saw Russian Cossacks galloping on horseback towards us. That was it. Our liberation.”
This sculpture captures the moment of realisation of having escaped death and awakening to a second chance at life.
To have experienced such horrors at five, and yet be capable of creating sculptures that convey a huge optimism about mankind, this suggests that Blik has a remarkable capacity for detecting glimmers of light in a dark world. “Oh, I’ve always had an optimistic view of the world,” says Blik. “The Holocaust was a terrible event. But the people who came out of it have often gone on to achieve phenomenal things. That’s what I want to show.”
Richard Morrison, The Times