This breathtaking glowing red work of art portrays the brutal acts of the Nazis in thirty four German university cities as they burned thousands of books, mainly by Jewish authors but not only, on the 10th of May 1933.

I have personal connection to this dreadful event as my father's poetry work was thrown into the flames by the Nazi thugs and students in Berlin. This is one of the reasons why the artist Heidi Bayer-Wech engaged me to try to find a buyer for her painting and to make a film about her and her work.

As in my film "Sefarad, The Expulsion of Jews from Spain 1492" where my mother's family members were persecuted by the Inquisition, some were burned in public. All over Europe Jewish Holy Bible books, the Talmud and other literary, theological and scientific writings were thrown in the flames. In my film I quoted the most famous German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856):

"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned" (Heinrich Heine, 1821)

Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz, where the Nazis gased and burned millions of people, relates that inferno to that of Dante's, the large fire that is dangerously out of control, the hell. One could see the red flames that came out of the ovens there. Exactly this red color depicting fire and blood we see in Bayer-Wech's painting titled "Books Burning".

I lost big part of my family members to the German Holocaust, including a half-brother.

While the word "Holocaust", with a meaning of a burnt sacrificial offering, the Hebrew word Shoah meaning "Catastrophy" is taken from the Old Testament, denoting the catastrophic destruction of European Jewry during World War II. The term is used in Israel, and the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament) on April 21th 1951, has designated an official day, called "Yom ha-Shoah", or fully "Yom haZikaron laShoah veLaGvura" (Hebrew יום הזיכרון לשואה ולגבורה) as a day of commemorating the Shoah or Holocaust. Since then it was commemorated only in Israel and in Jewish Centers world-wide. Therefore back in 1993-1996 I initiated the "Memorial Day to the Victims of the Nazis" in Germany, which was later declared by the UN as the "International Memorial Day to The Holocaust", commemorated in 140 countries on each January 27th !

One of the best depictions to that catastrophy is Heidi Bayer-Wech Oil on Canvas painting created with love and emotional feeling in many unique techniques "Books Burning" which is one picture made of nine parts, 420 x 360 cm, from 1999/ 2000.

Emanuel Aronson Rund