A Philadelphia-area artist explores her mother’s survival in the Holocaust

When she was a child, Bucks County artist Reena Milner Brooks, now 47, would ask how her mother got the tattoo on her arm that read “A-5876.”

“Some bad men put it there,” was all Brooks’s mother was willing to say at the time. The full truth was that in May of 1944, Brooks’s mother (a native of Hungary who later settled in the Northern Liberties neighborhood of Philadelphia) was carted to Auschwitz along with her own mother, father, siblings, and cousins. Brooks’s mother was 15 years old at the time. Herded into a separate line from her mother, brothers, and sisters, she never saw them again.

Now, Brooks presents a special art exhibition, Passages from Dark to Light: Images of my mother’s journey through the Holocaust, which uses abstract works created in a variety of layered media to tell a story of horror and survival. The show is up at Congregation Beth Or in Maple Glen, PA through October 9.

Twenty-four works chart the artist’s vision of that journey, from the Hungarian ghetto of spring 1944 to her family’s harrowing three-day ride in box cars to Auschwitz Concentration Camp, where they arrived on May 21. Other pieces are inspired by Brooks’s mother’s idyllic childhood memories, contrasted with her cruel labor and grief as a teenager, the hunger and cold, the enforced relocations, and her liberation in Denmark about a year later. By then, the 16-year-old girl weighed only 70 pounds.

The show is a unique combination of mixed media monotype and silkscreen prints, stamping, drawing, stenciling, and collage. Elements of the deeply layered images include old dress patterns, with their graphic lines and measurements, real LIFE magazine ads from the era, and sheet music. Short written remembrances about the details of the journey, taken from family journals and memories, accompany the art.

Brooks’s mother recovered from her ordeal in Sweden and went on to settle in the US, where by extraordinary chance, she managed to reunite with the father she lost at Auschwitz. She adopted Brooks and now, at 85, lives with her husband in Dresher, PA and was on hand for an open house at the gallery on September 28.

“She said she felt like a superstar,” Brooks said of her mother’s reaction to the show. “She is an awesome lady.”

Reena Milner Brooks’s “Passages from Dark to Light: Images of my mother’s journey through the Holocaust” is on display at Congregation Beth Or's Olitsky Gallery, 239 Welsh Road, Maple Glen, PA, through October 9, 2014. For more information, call 215-646-5806.

At right: Doom Averted by Reena Brooks, now on display at Beth Or.