"Privilege" and Trauma: Sieg Maandag's Climb Upwards

Abstract:How has "privilege" been represented and incorporated in the study and understanding of the Holocaust, especially through accounts of those who survived? The prolific Dutch Jewish painter and ceramicist, Sieg Maandag, was among the few surviving orphaned children of Amsterdam's so-called Diamond group of prisoners. For a time, they and their families formed part of a "privileged" group of prisoners held in Bergen-Belsen. This essay will consider Maandag's oeuvre as a vehicle for the development of a language of self-expression related to his own trauma and sense of his "privilege", demonstrating how former "privileged" persecutees endured periods of alternating or simultaneous expectation, uncertainty, waiting, hope, and fear connected specifically to the capricious status of exemption that they shared, and how knowledge of their "privileged" status was later assimilated into narratives of survival. Maandag's allusive work demonstrates recurring expressions of the psychological terrain of "privilege" and trauma, which are inextricably bound together due to the trajectory and fate of his family during the Holocaust.