In remembrance: SIUE grad and local artist dedicates life’s work to Holocaust survival

That determination was displayed in her artistic dedications to her late grandmother, who was killed in Auschwitz, a Nazi death camp in Oświęcim, Poland. Her grandmother was a rancher living in Slovakia who was caught delivering food to friends in camps according to a family friend. Pal dedicated many of her artwork to her late Grandmother, whom she never knew except as a toddler. Pal created  “Grandmother’s memory:” a silver locket with an encased photo of a one-year-old Agnes her mother and her cousin that also contains a tiny pair of baby shoes, also of silver. The necklace signifies the memory of her grandma purchasing her first pair of shoes.

“I never got to see her or even see a photograph and I so missed her that I had to create my own reflection of her,” Pal said. ”From this one evidence, the photograph, I created a connection with her and that was my attempt making this connection.”

Another piece she dedicated to her grandmother, was a chalice made of silver called “Offering.”

“It was hopefully a lesson that the Holocaust did happen and old people were killed, and how unfair-how terrible it was,” Pal said. “And children were killed because they were disposable. The Nazis had deemed anybody disposable who was not part of the Arian nation that they selected according to their recipe that it should be blue eyed and light skinned and … blonde. It’s a ridiculous presumption that no one else should have rights.”

The Glen Carbon resident dedicated countless hours into her studio work in SIUE’s metals department, first in the former Wagner building and then into what is now Art and Design Building East.

Pal has no studio now. Due to different physical ailments, she struggles walking and lifting heavy items and can no longer make the metallic artwork she was so driven to create during her years at SIUE. She must resort to painting water color portraits in her room at Meridian Village Senior Living in Glen Carbon.  But her love of art remains.

“I hope that they learn a little more about history,” Pal said. “And (get) exposure to different experiences and it will bring history closure to them. I think that learning from history books it becomes quite abstract and I think that learning about what people have gone through would give them a chance to more thoughtful internalization and they could get closer to what happen and utilize that as an experience.”

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