An art exhibition opening later this month at the Dugdale Centre is not entitled Watch Out! for nothing. It will comprise some 20+ paintings by Moshe Galili, a Palmers Green resident and Holocaust survivor, who fears that a neo-Nazi movement currently developing in his native Hungary and elsewhere in the former Soviet bloc could revive some of the horrors that he himself lived through as a young man.
The Gun - one of the paintings in the exhibition. Click on the picture to read the story behind itMr Galili was born in Hungary in 1930. He was a child survivor of the Holocaust, kept alive during the Nazi occupation of Budapest by hiding and by the brave efforts of his mother, who was determined that her four children should live. His father was wounded by gunshot while fighting the Nazis in Budapest and died as a result. His experiences from that period have been adapted from his original story and published in 2001 under the title "The Star Houses" as part of a series for teenagers studying WW2.
Trained as an artist in Israel, Italy, France and the UK, Mr Galili's work as a painter and stained glass artist has been fundamentally influenced not only by his Budapest experiences, but also by his perceptions of growing anti-Semitism from the 1960s on and by his revulsion at racism and intolerance leading to oppression and genocide against many different communities around the world. His work is intended to warn viewers to Watch Out "because the evil in humans is never far below the surface".
The exhibition, organised by the Dugdale Centre in association with the N21.net website, will run from 20 January until 17 February. Supporting the exhibition, on 21 JanuaryTalkies Community Cinema will be screening the film 'Fateless', a critically acclaimed, stunningly beautiful and moving movie about a Hungarian Jewish boy’s experiences in German concentration camps and his attempts to reconcile himself to those experiences after the war.
For more information, see www.n21.net and www.moshegalili.com.
