The War Game and other photographs on this site (her website is not operational at this time).

Five years ago I ventured to the almost forgotten region of my early childhood to retrace routes my family traversed as refugees in 1945. I was born in Romania in 1941 and swept up by the tidal wave of war to become part of the ‘huddled masses’ seeking refuge in a new world. My early memories are of trains, not places. Years later when I became a sophisticated teenager in New York City I would wave my hand and say “oh we used to travel a lot” to abbreviate a past too charged with suffering and too complicated to remember.

Return is about memory and identity. It is a self-portrait and a journey, a quest for remnants of history erased by war. The irony in my title is that there is no return, or that my precise destination is not as obvious as it might seem. I come from a region known as the Bucovina, its former capital Czernowitz, which was once under Austria, then Romania, and now in the Ukraine.There are no family hearths to go back to there. I grew up identifying as Romanian, though my first language was German, and as a Jew I have a dark and frightening history to dredge up.

The leit-motifs in Return are images of trains and of my hand holding a small photo that was once affixed to my displaced persons papers, circa 1947. It is a journey in present time interspersed with self referential images – as it were, a series of flashbacks to counterpoint present reality. My aim is to explore my own history in the context of present social realities of the region, to examine the layers of identity that make up our being, and ponder the lines of destiny that propel us from one point to another.

Sylvia de Swaan