Survivor’s artwork reflects frightening images of childhood

Chris Ranes watched Warsaw burn twice.

The first time was during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943. She was 11 years old, hiding out in Mlociny, a village outside Warsaw.

"You could see the smoke, smell the smoke," recalls the Palo Alto artist, now in her late 60s.

A year later, Warsaw burned again at the hands of German troops during the Polish rebellion. That time, Ranes was hiding out in a Warsaw apartment.

"Germans came in with flame-throwers and burned building after building. The entire population was chased out, a repetition of what's happening now in Kosovo.

"We walked through streets where buildings on both sides were on fire. I was numb. I think I was too young to be terrified. You're just numb and you follow the crowd and you don't think of anything except get out, get away."

"Never Again," Ranes' latest exhibit is her artistic representation of that frightening time.

Her mixed media and her oil paintings are on display at the Koret Gallery at the Albert L. Schultz Jewish Community Center in Palo Alto in conjunction with the Varian Fry exhibit.

The fires that Ranes witnessed are a recurring motif in the exhibit, sometimes represented realistically, other times abstractly. In some of the pieces, buildings are burning and people are jumping from windows.

Nancy Gordon, curator of the exhibit, calls Ranes' work "hauntingly beautiful."

"Never Again" is one series out of a dozen that Ranes has created. It is the only one that addresses the Holocaust -- although the Nazis' war of terror consumed her childhood.

In the summer of 1939, Ranes and her mother traveled from their home in Paris to Warsaw to visit Ranes' maternal grandparents. On Sept. 1, war broke out and they were forced to go into hiding. Ranes' father stayed in France. He was later killed in the war.

Franek and Cheslawa Kornacki, friends of the family, hid Ranes and her mother in a two-story villa in Mlociny. The Kornackis hid over 20 people during the war.

"It felt very strange not being able to go outside and show your face," Ranes remembers.

"I'm full of sorrow when I talk about it. It brings up very pointed memories. If you look at the faces of children now in Yugoslavia and Kosovo you see what I was going through."

Ranes was schooled by her mother and read voraciously during those 18 months of hiding. WoitekKornacki, the couple's 14-year-old son, taught her catechism as part of a plan to camouflage Ranes' Judaism.

Ranes and her mother did not go out into the open until the Polish rebellion in 1944, when the German army seized the Mlociny villa. Going outside for the first time in 18 months was "strange but wonderful," Ranes said.

"It felt great to be able to walk the street again. Even though bombs were falling and shrapnel was falling it didn't matter."

Armed with a baptismal certificate, Ranes posed as a Catholic. She also had to pretend that her mother was just a friend.

"She'd say, 'Imagine that you're an actor on a stage and that you're acting out. It's a pretend game.' But after a while, it became more than pretend."

Ranes' ability to believe her role might have saved her life. Months after she and her mother settled in Warsaw, neighbors denounced them to the Gestapo.

When interrogated, Ranes gave an impeccable performance as a Catholic girl.

"I used all my powers of acting. I was the best actress you could imagine. They were trying to intimidate me. They underestimated who they were dealing with. Because I was very little, they thought they could intimidate me.

"By then I had learned some German. I was able to understand them [when they were speaking to each other.] I had time to think about my answers. They asked me if I knew my catechism and I said, 'Yes, do you?'"

After three months of living in Warsaw, she and her mother left for Germany. They wandered for three days, crawling on their bellies through potato fields outside Warsaw until they reached a village called Jelonki where they hid in an attic.

"We had to go out at night and pick up carrots and potatoes. We were hungry. I remember hunger."

Eventually, they ended up in Goorden, Germany, where they worked at a Brandenburg hospital for food and lodging. Her mother, a trained bacteriologist, worked in the lab and Ranes worked in the laundry.

Whenever the allies bombed, everyone went to the hospital cellar except Ranes.

"I said, 'I don't want to go down. Those are American bombs.' I would put two blankets over my head and go back to sleep...I hated the cellar. I was free and open. I didn't want to be hiding again."

In May 1945, they were liberated by the Russians.

"For three days and three nights we walked from Brandenburg to the Elba River." On the other side of the river, American trucks took them to Stendahl, Germany, where they were housed in a hotel.

"That day in Stendahl, all the refugees went out on the street. People took pots and pans and made noises, and sang 'Stars and Stripes Forever.' That's where the war ended for us."

As a 14-year-old when the war ended, Ranes knew she didn't want to stay in Europe. Her mother asked whether she wanted to go to Palestine. Ranes responded, "I can't go there. There's another war there. I can't stand another war. I want to go to the United States."

She and her mother settled in New Jersey, where Ranes went to school and adapted quickly to being an American.

Ranes has lived in Palo Alto for 30 years and attends Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills.

"Some of the memories were so painful that for many years I couldn't acknowledge that I was a survivor. When people asked me where I was during the war I told them I spent the time in Switzerland."

After marrying in the 1950s she began to have recurring nightmares that she was being chased by Germans. In 1963, she wrote her memoirs titled "All I Own I Carry with Me." Never published, the book was part of a personal healing process for her.

"Once I wrote my book the nightmares stopped."

Two years ago, she was contacted by director Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah project. At first she didn't want to tell her story, but her family encouraged her to record it for posterity.

"It was extremely emotional. If you look at the video, I'm blinking my eyes like crazy. I forgot where I was. It was just uncanny to be able to talk about it in my beautiful home in Palo Alto. I'm talking about a war and the sun is shining."

Shortly after, she started the series that would become "Never Again."