JEAN LAMB'S 'STATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUST'

Jean Lamb’s ‘Stations of the Holocaust’

This is a summary of the article in Church Times of 13^th March 2015 which is a review by Pat Ashworth of the fourteen reliefs that comprise ‘Stations of the Holocaust’ which are currently exhibited in Coventry Cathedral until 3^rd April (Good Friday).

‘Stations of the Holocaust’

The Stations comprise fourteen reliefs which were carved in elm wood between 1999 and 2012: they have now been cast in plaster. 

The Stations illustrate Christ’s road to the cross and present a parallel narrative of life and death in Nazi death camps during the Holocaust.  An example of the titles of the Stations is: ‘Jesus takes up his cross: the Jews are made to cart off their dead’. 

The illustrations of Christ and his journey are relatively large: the illustrations of the Holocaust are smaller.  There are ‘terrible cameos’ of ‘gas lorries, the gas chambers, the bloodied death pits…. The snaking railway line is a recurrent motif’.  In one Station, one of the hands of Christ lies above the ghetto as if wanting to protect its inhabitants who are held at gunpoint. 

Jean Lamb is a Church of England priest: her ancestry is German and gentile. 

Sister Mary Michael CHC has written a meditation for each Station based on the Psalms.

In the exhibition catalogue Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg ‘ponders with honesty and some pain on how difficult a work which tells the Jewish story in the context of the Stations of the Cross might be for Jews to contemplate’.  He concludes that ‘while the suffering of one can express the sufferings of many, there can never be an equation with the unquantifiable horrors experienced by any group which has been subject to genocide’.