Israel. My Jewish brothers and sisters. My daughters. I was born and raised Catholic but as I grew up I became more involved with all things Jewish. I can't explain why. Apparently in our family DNA we found out that we're 2% Jewish. It probably came from my German grandmother on my mother's side. But I am, or strive to be, a universal human being. A man who considers everyone as a member of his family. These are two paintings that I made about thirty years ago, and they still hang in my studio. The woman, the girl, is Sophie Scholl. A famous German anti-Hitlerite and founding member of the White Rose group. She was executed, guillotined, for her protests against the depraved government. I love her. The other is a small painting. A silkscreened evil word. I planned on making a very large piece covered with the same word, but haven't gotten around to it. The repeated word Auschwitz reminds me off the finely detailed pages of Nazi crimes filed away with Teutonic thoroughness. They still survive in spite of the efforts to incinerate them all, along with their victims. Murders are messy, and the Holocaust is the messiest one in history. When the war in Israel is plastered across the daily news I keep thinking of how we got there in the first place. These paintings are a big part of today's story.