The art produced secretly by prisoners in the camps and ghettos is one of the substantial documentary records of victim experience. Around 30,000 individual works have been recovered and catalogued in the post-war collections, the substantial majority held at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland, the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and the Ghetto Fighters’ House in Israel. The works were produced at substantial personal risk: discovery could mean punishment up to and including death, the materials had to be obtained through theft or barter, and the finished works had to be hidden in conditions where any private possession could be confiscated.
The principal sites of production
The substantial bodies of surviving secret art come from a small number of sites where the conditions had permitted sustained production. Theresienstadt produced the largest single body of surviving works, around 5,000 individual pieces, because the camp’s propaganda function had given the authorities reason to permit some artistic activity (the camp had a formally-recognised technical drawing office that produced architectural and engineering work for the SS, and the artists working there had access to materials they could divert to private work). The Warsaw ghetto produced a substantial body, much of it documented through the Oneg Shabbat archive. Auschwitz produced a smaller but documentary body, including the work of Yehuda Bacon, Józef Szajna, David Olère and others; some of this was produced openly in the camp’s portrait studio (which the SS had established for its own purposes and which produced commissioned work) and some clandestinely. The other substantial bodies come from Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Westerbork and the various Polish ghettos.
The principal artists
Several substantial artistic careers were begun, conducted and ended in the camps. Felix Nussbaum, the German-Jewish painter, produced substantial work in hiding in Brussels from 1942 to 1944 before his discovery and deportation to Auschwitz, where he was killed in 1944; his Brussels work was hidden by his landlord and recovered after the war. Charlotte Salomon, the German-Jewish artist who escaped to Vichy France in 1940, produced her substantial autobiographical work Life? or Theatre? (around 769 individual gouaches) in Villefranche-sur-Mer between 1940 and 1942 before her arrest and deportation to Auschwitz, where she was killed in October 1943; the work was preserved and is now held at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam. Bedřich Fritta, the Czech-Jewish artist who was sent to Theresienstadt in 1941 and ran the camp’s technical drawing office, produced substantial documentary work on conditions in the camp; he was deported to Auschwitz in October 1944 with his wife and son and killed there. His son Tomáš was hidden by friends and survived. The book Fritta had made for his son’s third birthday, hidden in the technical drawing office at Theresienstadt and recovered after the war, is one of the central documents of the camp.
David Olère, the Polish-French Jewish artist deported to Auschwitz in March 1943, was assigned to the Sonderkommando at the Birkenau crematoria. He survived the war, returned to Paris and produced from the late 1940s onwards a substantial body of documentary work on what he had seen at the crematoria; the work is one of the principal visual records of the gassing operations from inside the Sonderkommando experience. Yehuda Bacon, the Czech artist deported to Auschwitz as a child, survived the war, emigrated to Israel and produced substantial work on Holocaust subjects through a long subsequent career. Józef Szajna, the Polish-Catholic artist also imprisoned at Auschwitz, produced documentary work after the war that has been substantially exhibited.
What the works show
The surviving body of secret camp art is documentary in a specific sense. It records what the photographic record cannot or does not: the inside of the barracks, the work columns from the prisoner perspective, the selections at the ramp, the queues for food, the medical experiments, the gas chambers and crematoria from the perspective of those forced to work in them. The Sonderkommando works of David Olère are the principal visual record of the killing process from inside it; the photographic record from inside the gas chambers and crematoria is, with the limited exception of the four Sonderkommando photographs taken at Birkenau in August 1944, almost non-existent.
The substantial body of Theresienstadt work has additional documentary value as a record of the conditions the SS had attempted to conceal during the camp’s propaganda use. The Fritta drawings, the Otto Ungar drawings, the Leo Haas drawings and the substantial body of work by other artists in the camp showed the actual conditions (the overcrowding, the disease, the substantial mortality, the deportations) against the visual presentation the SS had built for the 1944 Red Cross visit. The principal artists of the Theresienstadt documentary group were arrested in July 1944 (the so-called Painters’ Affair, in which the SS discovered substantial documentary drawings being smuggled out to neutral countries) and were deported to the small fortress at Theresienstadt where most were tortured to death.
The post-war recovery and study
The substantial post-war recovery of the art has been the work of the museums named above and of individual scholars including Mary S. Costanza, Janet Blatter, Pnina Rosenberg and Glenn Sujo. The principal exhibitions have included Spiritual Resistance (Israeli Museum, 1981, with substantial subsequent international tours), Witness and Legacy (Minnesota Museum of Art, 1995), and the 2011 Imperial War Museum exhibition Forbidden Art. The art is now substantially established as a documentary historical source on victim experience, on the same level as the diaries and the surviving photographic record.
See also
- The Sonderkommando
- Vichy France
- Yad Vashem Jerusalem
- Imperial War Museum Holocaust Galleries
- Yiddish Culture and Language
- Art and Literature of the Holocaust
- Poetry from the Camps
Sources
- Mary S. Costanza, The Living Witness: Art in the Concentration Camps and Ghettos, Free Press, 1982
- Janet Blatter and Sybil Milton, Art of the Holocaust, Rutledge Press, 1981
- Glenn Sujo, Legacies of Silence: The Visual Arts and Holocaust Memory, Imperial War Museum / Philip Wilson, 2001
- Pnina Rosenberg, Salon des Refusés: The Drawings of Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and Bedřich Fritta, Ben Uri Gallery, 2010
- Charlotte Salomon, Life? or Theatre?, edited by Judith C. E. Belinfante and Evelyn Benesch, Royal Academy / Waanders, 1998
- Pavel Friedmann, Inge Auerbacher and others, I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezín 1942-1944, Schocken, 1993
- Yad Vashem Art Museum, https://www.yadvashem.org/museum/art
- Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Art Collection, https://www.auschwitz.org