To the Editor: Re “Can We Really Picture Auschwitz?” (column, April 4): Thank you to Bret Stephens for bringing Buba Weisz Sajovits’s powerful paintings to light.
Such art brings us a bit closer to the ineffable. It captures something of the terror, the horror, the trauma. I am grateful that Buba’s story and that of her husband, Luis Stillmann, are being told.
Such accounts, as Mr. Stephens notes, “restore the human dimension.” Together with statistics, they tell a story. Details need not be numbing; they edify those who want to know.
But the answer to the headline of the column is no. We cannot picture Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen. I’ve tried. Over decades, I’ve conducted research and visited these sites.