Chaïm Kaliski. « Jim d’Etterbeek »

Exhibition of about a hundred ink drawings extracted from a monumental drawn work about the Occupation in Brussels, consisting of over five thousand drawings by Chaïm-Charles Kaliski (1929-2015), a singular being whose existence was forever marked by the Shoah.

1. A double graphic work by the artist Chaïm Kaliski (1929-2015), Jim d’Etterbeek is the title of this drawn work about the Occupation in Brussels.

   The eldest of four children, Chaïm Kaliski was born in Brussels in 1929 into a Polish Jewish family. His father, Abraham, was a leather craftsman, and his mother, Fradla, a seamstress. The occupation of Belgium in May 1940 turned their lives upside down. After fleeing to France ahead of the Wehrmacht's advance, the Kaliskis returned to the Belgian capital due to lack of resources. A miraculous survival then began, as they escaped controls, denunciations, and the major round-up in the Jewish quarter of Cureghem on 3 September

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3. 9

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5. But Abraham was arrested on 12 February

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7. 9

8. 4

9. Fradla then managed to place her youngest children and hid with Chaïm until the Liberation in September

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11. 9

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13. For Chaïm, life stopped on the day of his father's arrest, a trauma he would relive throughout his existence.

    It was at the age of sixty, in 1989, on the advice of his sister Sarah, herself a painter, that he began to draw their story, to which he dedicated eighteen years, producing thousands of drawings. The line, at first glance childlike, is nonetheless assured: scenes of arrests, of round-ups that obsessed the artist, who remained forever a "hidden child", marked by the fear and anguish linked to the images imprinted on his retina. Essentially drawn in Indian ink, these heartbreaking scenes combine text and image. They consist of "very sonorous" drawings, evoking screams of terror, howls, the sound of truck engines or the clatter of weapons during round-ups, forming a whirlwind to which recurring refrains are added, like obsessive litanies. The reader discovers a Jewish community on the verge of annihilation through conversations between the artist's father and the acquaintances he met during his wanderings.