Painting Resilience: The Life & Art of Fred Terna

Mayer, Julia

Painting Resilience is Julia Mayer’s vivid personal exploration of the role Fred Terna’s art played in surviving four concentration camps; his post-WWII marriage to his emotionally scarred childhood sweetheart — a fellow survivor; their escape to France, Canada, and the United States; their divorce; and his subsequent happy marriage to a daughter of survivors and the family they created.

Included in are reproductions of more than two dozen of Terna’s works, along with personal photos captured by Fred’s son, photographer Daniel Terna. Terna’s art is held by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Vienna’s Albertina Collection, and Israel’s Yad Vashem, among others.

Terna says that living through the Holocaust was luck but living with it takes skill. Mayer wanted to discover what those skills are, record how Terna acquired them, and illuminate the manner in which his art gave rise to Terna’s “example that painful and destructive memories do not exclude a happy and productive life,” as he puts it.