A project by Maya and Gal Reva, video artists, that brings together testimonies of Holocaust survivors with artists. Twelve testimonies, twelve artists, who translate the testimonies into creative works – painting, writing, sculpture, dance, and music. I worked the testimony of Hanke Drori, a survivor from the Theresienstadt Ghetto.

Hanke was a child during the war and used writing, painting, and imagination to preserve her spirit. More accurately, she clung fiercely with stubbornness while everything around her was collapsing.

She wrote down her inner dialogue in a small hidden notebook. Amid math exercises, poems she wrote, and delicate drawings, she expressed her optimistic belief in absolute goodness and wrote, “Beauty is found in everything.”

That stuck with me. She wrote those words when she was just 12 years old. Why didn’t she lose hope? Her mother disappeared, her father, almost everyone she knew, hunger spoke endlessly, and people reached the pinnacle of cruelty. So where did she find the strength to believe in goodness? To engage in creation?

As part of the project, Days Beyond Time – an artist encounters a testimony, I wanted to explore these questions. I made sketches upon sketches while Hanke’s words resonated in my head. Eventually, I took colors and simply decided to start, discovering along the way…