Invisible Faces Haunt Artist's Work

Carolyn Manosevitz's art studio alongside her modernist home on Missouri Heights commands a sweeping view of Mount Sopris and the Roaring Fork Valley. But her paintings depict a different landscape — one of death, hate and healing.

Nearly all of her artwork deals with the Holocaust and its aftermath, or as she prefers to call it, the Shoah, a Hebrew word meaning catastrophe.

They carry titles as striking as their subjects. “Listen to the voices from the ashes.” “The eternal presence of absence.” “We who are the remnants.”

Her artwork combines paintings and photographs with materials that seem to wrap around the dead she depicts. Many of the photographs are of her father and mother, Ukrainian immigrants who arrived here long before the Holocaust.

Others are of the town they left behind, where the Jewish population, and those of surrounding towns who fled there seeking safety, were lined up along the road — the road her grandmother once lived on. Jews were forced to strip naked, then shot and tossed into open pits.