By Her Hand by Ellen Konar & Steve Goldband

Near the end of WWII, weakened by six years of extreme hunger, slave labor, and Typhus, my mother was liberated from Majdanek, a barbarous Nazi extermination camp where as many as 360,000, mostly fellow Jews, were brutally murdered. She made her way back to her former home in Radom Poland in search of fellow survivors and family. At great risk, she reentered her pre-war family home now occupied by uncooperative Poles, to reclaim a set of candlesticks and a few meters of peach charmeuse fabric from her former livelihood as a lingerie seamstress. With this meager remnant of the past, she fashioned herself a stylish blouse to replace her striped prison garb. That blouse, that today hangs in my closet, was one she might have worn in Radom when she met my father, in Germany after my sister was born, or aboard the refugee ship that brought her, my father and sister to the U.S. in 1949.

In our project, By Her Hand, we’ve combined our recent photographs of that blouse with a precious few surviving family photographs and documents to pay tribute to her and her fellow survivors' incredible resilience. In addition to the full image of her blouse, here covered in broken glass, we have incorporated elements of the blouse much like a protective wrap atop the images of her pre-war family, the refugee ship that brought her to the US, and scenes of her life as a US immigrant and mother in the ‘50’s. Finally, our recent research unearthed archival ghetto ID applications of my mother’s and father’s family members from 1941, just before they were herded into a ghetto. We’ve chain linked those documents on mirrors, and layered an image of my mother seemingly peering through a town map which, thanks to the work of Luke Rothman, and JRI-Poland pinpoints my parents’ homes and those of 14,076 of the some 30,000 fellow Jews in the town and outlines the perimeters of the ghettos to which they were consigned, until the liquidations of 1942. Our photographic series speaks to a time of absolute evil, but also of extraordinary humanity and the tenacity of human life. It brings to life my mother’s chilling mantra that we rarely know our ability to withstand true adversity and hopefully never will.






About Ellen and Steve
Ellen and Steve are life partners and collaborators in the creation of fine art photography. Based in the San Francisco Bay area, they draw inspiration from the local topography, exploring the beauty and complexity of anthropogenic landscapes, revealing both their allure and cultural resonance. Their work highlights the interplay of light and line, rhythm with repetition, the intimate with the monumental, the personal with the communal. Ellen and Steve’s work captures the ethereal elements of their surroundings inspiring a deeper appreciation of the world we share, inviting all to discover both the power and the fragility of the landscapes and narratives that shape our lives.

Their presentations use crafted fiber papers, fabrics, and wax encaustic to forge wabi-sabi compositions that celebrate mystery, imperfection and impermanence.

Steve and Ellen received PhD's in Psychology and were contributors to the emergence of the digital age during their work at tech giants including Apple, IBM, Intel, and Google.
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