Harry Bordens portraits of Holocaust survivors
By showing their faces and publishing their words, Harry Borden gives a voice to those once threatened with death
Published on 30 January 2017
Written by Tom Seymour
In Harry Borden’s portrait, Arno Roland is seated at his kitchen table. The photograph, for Borden’s book Survivor: A portrait of the survivors of the Holocaust, published by Cassell Illustrated, shows walls covered in art and Roland looking towards the light that shines into his home in New Jersey, where he settled in the 1960s.
He was 92 at the time of the picture and, although he was active in community theatre and served on the town council, he had remained unmarried and without children all his life. He died just a few months after Borden took his photograph, on 8 August 2015.
In 1938, Roland was 15 years old and his brother Ulli a year younger, when their mother checked into a hotel and took an overdose of barbiturates. The Berlin police report noted that many Jewish women had recently taken their lives in such a way. On Kristallnacht the same year, when Nazis torched synagogues and killed almost 100 Jews, their father was on a business trip to Holland and managed to bring his sons to Eindhoven.
In 1940 the Germans invaded and two years later the boys had to go into hiding to avoid deportation to the camps. One day, Ulli was suddenly arrested on the street and sent to Auschwitz, a fate narrowly avoided by Roland.
http://www.bjp-online.com/2017/01/borden/
