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Because I Was a Painter Art that Survived Nazi Camps

From an interview with Zoran Music Dachau survivor

INTERVIEWER: (IN FRENCH)) "I dare not say.

"I shall not say.

"For a painter, it was incredibly beautiful.

"It was beautiful, because we felt all this pain inside

"these people's suffering.

"I wanted to do something specific.

"Because one who dies that way suffered until the very last second.

"His fingers' shape indicated his cause of death, the pain he felt until he died.

"It showed in the corpse itself.

"He died in extreme pain,

"and it showed in every move, every position of the body.

"It explains why his eyes are that way, how he died.

"And all these colors: white, blueish.

"I drew all this because I was a painter. It was an inner necessity.

"Anyway, I couldn't have done less. I was a painter. I am a painter.

"I didn't necessarily want to testify, but it was just so enormous,

"I dare not use the word 'enormous, '

"it was monumental, of an atrocious, terrible beauty.

"It was something incredibly, tremendously tragic,

"beyond understanding.

"To be confronted with a landscape of death,

"a landscape like that...

"What else can a painter do? The details of the hands, of the heads,

"all the gaping mouths, the thousands of skeletons,

"the thousands of corpses, strewn in every direction.

"I cannot find the words.

"It was an absolute necessity to illustrate it,

to represent it, to preserve it for the future."

Walter Spitzer

Survivor of Blechhammer, Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald

Those are the words of a painter,

an accomplished painter.

I wasn't like that. I was only a little over 17.

I was just trying to get through it.

But actually,

I know his work.

It's true, his paintings of the corpses exude beauty.

But this beauty comes from the painter, not the corpses.

Zoran Music, Bodies. Dachau - 1945

INTERVIEWER: "It was something incredibly, tremendously tragic...

"beyond understanding.

"To be confronted with a landscape of death,

"a landscape like that...

"What else can a painter do? The details of the hands, of the heads,

"all the gaping mouths, the thousands of skeletons,

"the thousands of corpses, strewn in every direction.

"I cannot find the words.

"A painter cannot remain... At the risk of being discovered...

José Fosty Buchenwald survivor

"He cannot... I'm not saying he has to testify, not at all...

"But it was an absolute necessity

"to illustrate it, to represent it."

And you? Was it similar?

Yes, it's true.

It's always...

Basically, it's an atavistic need.

It was his trade. People don't forget their skills.

Their hands are still functional.

They have eyes and bodies.

It's a fact.

It's also important to say

that for the first time in history, almost,

a painter confronted the view of heaps of dead human bodies.

In the end,

I brought back two or three little piles of bodies.

But...

It was at the end.

But every day, a wagon went around,

around the whole camp,

to pick up the dead.

And it was piled with bodies!

It was incredible.

It was a sight...

A sight you'd never expect to see.

The dead are respected.

Everyone has seen one.

Even children end up seeing a dead person someday.

One dead person.

But heaps of dead people?

It's terrible.

And yet it fascinates you

when you're in the trade of colors and drawing.

You're fascinated by the lines, by the colors.

Because it's incredible.

You have all these dead bodies, totally drained of color!

It's a symphony of grays.

Grays...

From dark to light.

It's an unforgettable sight.

You never do forget it. You live with it.

Samuel Willenberg Treblinka survivor

Michal Gans Historian

GANS: (SPEAKING HEBREW) You often speak of the piles of clothing

as if they were landscapes.

Would you say that these landscapes

possessed a certain form of beauty?

Or is it impossible,

to speak of the camp in these terms?

(SPEAKING HEBREW) Beauty...

If I draw the body of a man who is standing up...

That is beauty.

Beauty, when you see dead people in different shapes...

And fire inside...

Right here, on this spot, a fire burned

in the camp,

in the "lazaret."

So it's difficult to say

that one can seek beauty in death.

Beauty in the form...

Sometimes people speak of the beauty of war,

of heroes falling...

Here, there were no heroes.

There was a revolt...

People revolted. They were killed.

What beauty?

What beauty?

When a human being, even a prisoner,

has to cross the whole camp

and come here to be shot,

knowing where he's going, what is beautiful about that?

There is no beauty.

It was... Devoid of beauty.

It's difficult to explain.

How could I say that there was an infinitesimal amount of beauty?

No, I can't.

(WOMEN SPEAKING HEBREW)

WOMAN 1: There are 18 drawings?

WOMAN 2: Yes.

Evelin Akherman Museum Director

Kochi Levy Art Conservator

WOMAN 1: All these drawings by Joseph Richter

were done in 1943.

Probably, at some point, he joined the Polish Resistance,

and he or one of his comrades from the Resistance

smuggled out the drawings

and gave them to someone

who lived in Chelm.

In Hebrew, we say Chelem.

Nothing is known of Joseph Richter.

(CLICKING)

First, we'll show the writing on it,

and then we'll show the piece.

So, next to his drawing, he wrote a caption,

"A vent in the train car.

"They ask for water.

"The guards are watching us.

"We're sitting in the train across from them.

"I am slowly drawing on a piece of newspaper."

Not one extra word.

The very scene he is drawing,

to dispel any doubt,

is described in words.

The accuracy... This effort to be as accurate as he can,

to report the experience,

as if he were photographing it with words.

That's how I understand it.

WOMAN 2: Let's go on.

Sobibor is next.

We know that no photographs were ever taken inside Sobibor.

There's only one, of the outside,

with the sign, "Sobibor."

So this drawing is the only evidence

of what happened inside the camp.

In this case, as well,

Richter made a note on the back.

It says, "Sobibor Camp."

"A high fence made of dry branches

"hides the gas chambers."

WOMAN 2: You can see it clearly, behind the wall of sticks.

You see the smoke.

WOMAN 1: Yes, exactly.

"The track runs behind the wall.

"Half of the train is hidden by the wall.

"The transport has to be separated in two.

"Twenty minutes to unload."

You must understand

that "unload" means unloading Jews.

The description is visual,

as if it were a photo.

"Not only do I draw,

"but I write a description, so there will be no doubt."

He was an eyewitness.

Like a camera.

Yehuda Bacon

Survivor of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Mauthausen

Ah.

(SPEAKING HEBREW) I will tell you the story.

It's a drawing of what I saw.

I was in the "family camp,"

and this is "A camp," the quarantine camp.

You can see the difference.

We had two rows of barracks,

and in "A camp," there was only one row.

We children were really horrified by the sight

of the dead people

being carried out on a board.

Their arms hung down.

This is a typical sight:

the dangling arms of the dead.

This is pretty realistic. Here's the barracks

they built for horses,

and the SS watchtower.

WOMAN: And here we see...

It's in ink.

WOMAN: I see pencil.

Underneath.

I may have sketched something.

Do you want to show them?

- Should I lift it up? - Mmm-mmm.

No, it's better flat.

And that...

BACON: It's after the war, in 1945.

WOMAN: It's another language.

BACON: Yes, it's not charcoal.

It's ink.

It's very realistic: A daily site for us.

WOMAN: It's a living memory:

what the artist saw.

(BACON SIGHS)

I think we can go on.

Birkenau "The family camp"

BACON: (IN ENGLISH) I remember the subjects I drew

in the family camp, mainly in the children's block.

I drew, of course, what we saw, the barbed wire,

which was very typical, with the lightning and so on.

- And this kind of... - INTERVIEWER: Watchtower.

Watchtowers...

And what I like to do is always the fate, I didn't know what is fate.

But I made a kind of terrible hand over us.

Like this terrible fate.

And in the background, the chimneys of the crematoria.

So that was for me as if... A sense of Auschwitz.

There was a lot of these drawings, and of course,

I continued to draw my friends as before.

In Theresienstadt, I made their drawings.

When the time came, when they had to annihilate the Czech camp,

the SS changed the policy, they needed working power.

And suddenly, they took out a group of 89 boys

between about 12 and 16,

and they put us in another camp.

Our neighbors were the Sonderkommando.

And we came in a special block which was called Straf-Kommando.

"Sonderkommando" Barracks (squads assigned to gas-chamber duty)

We got a special job, instead of horses,

20 boys had to carry such a wagon.

We were the horses. And we could go

with the wagons all over, even to Auschwitz 1.

So we had a very good look into all the camps. All the camps.

Even the crematoria. Why the crematoria?

We had to take the wood, which was for burning

people in pits.

And sometimes when we finished our job,

of course we could only go in when there was no people to be gassed.

And the kapo was in a good mood, he said,

"Children, you can go warm yourselves in the gas chambers."

Some were afraid, but three, four went in, and I was between them.

And then I met my friends

and I asked them, "Please explain to me what it was."

Like if your friend's in a museum, you want to know better,

and I wanted to know, and so...

Everything, how it's done, and all these explanations, and so on...

So anyhow I took from them all the secrets,

I saw the place where Mengele did the vivisections,

how it looks and so on.

And then I made events of the war exact as the drawings from my memory.

And then these were used in the process in Canada.

INTERVIEWER: In the camp, you don't try to draw the gas chamber?

BACON: Yes, I have done, but all this was very dangerous and I had to destroy it.

I had to draw in my mind.

INTERVIEWER: How did you draw in your mind?

You look at the form, you look at the color?

No, I was only interested in how it looked.

What I have seen. How looks the number where they had to put the hook

where they had to put their clothes.

So I knew exactly it wasn't a hook, it was from wood.

A kind of Stöpsel-like wood with number.

And things like that. How it's looking, the chair...

I mean, there was eine Pritsche. A piece of wood.

And all this I knew exactly.

Undressing Room, Crematorium III

Drawn in Prague - 1945

10:10 PM, July 26th, 1944. I witness my father's death.

(INDISTINCT CONVERSATIONS)

(PEOPLE CHATTERING)

The Sketchbook from Auschwitz MM - artist unknown - 1943

Agnieszka Sieradzka Curator, Art Collections

(SPEAKING POLISH)

SIERADZKA: It's an extraordinary work.

It is the one piece

in the museum's collection of drawings

that shows what happened

to the Jews deported to Auschwitz.

It starts with their arrival on the ramp.

Then comes "selection"...

One group is sent to the gas chambers.

This drawing shows the Crematoria operating.

There are no other pieces in the collection

that show this annihilation.

It is a valuable document in our picture archive.

It's interesting to note that the drawings

related to extermination

are designated by capital letters,

a feature the other drawings lack.

The notebook presents Auschwitz

as both a concentration camp

and an annihilation camp.

The drawings show how the camp operated

in both ways, simultaneously,

as it did in reality.

These drawings had been hidden

in the foundations of a barracks

in the last section of Birkenau,

the hospital sector,

located near Crematoriums IV and V.

(SPEAKING FRENCH)

INTERVIEWER: It's like a story in pictures.

Because there are two panels within the same image,

as if they told a story.

SIERADZKA: (IN POLISH) Each drawing stands alone.

The page

shows two scenes.

In one, a kapo is beating an inmate.

In the other, an inmate is working.

But they are not a sequence or series of events.

INTERVIEWER: (IN FRENCH) The drawing style is characteristic

of graphic novels, though.

The clear outline...

Perhaps this inmate used to be a cartoonist or something like that.

He can draw perspectives. You can tell he's had training.

SIERADZKA: Maybe he chose to present the events

like a journalist, reporting the facts.

Very technically.

After all, these events were unprecedented.

They imposed their own language.

(RAIN FALLING)

Birkenau "Camp Hospital" of the "Women's Camp"

(THUNDER RUMBLING)

(WATER RUNNING)

Ash Pond Crematoriums IV and V

(WIND WHOOSHING)

Wiktor Siminski, In the Gas Chamber.

Sachsenhausen - 1944

(SPEAKING FRENCH)

INTERVIEWER: (IN FRENCH) It's the only drawing made in any camp

showing an execution from inside a gas chamber.

How could Wiktor Siminski draw such a scene?

How did he know what happened in there?

Günter Morsch

Director of the Memorials at Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück

MORSCH: (IN GERMAN) Siminski was a Polish resistance fighter

who was arrested as soon as war broke out.

After going through two transition camps,

he arrived at Sachsenhausen very early, in February 1940,

and stayed until 1945.

The whole time, he considered himself the camp cartoonist.

Of course, he did not witness this scene.

That's impossible.

The "executions" or "death actions"

in the gas chambers

were never seen by inmates assigned to crematorium duty.

Only the SS watched.

Other methods of mass murder

were different, because inmates or kapos were used.

But not for gas.

But enough Krema inmates

knew about the gas chambers.

And naturally, the gassing

of so many women in a men's camp did not go unnoticed.

The clothing, especially.

The clothing the women had worn attracted attention.

So Siminski must have learned about the gassing

from an inmate on Crematorium duty

who'd seen it from afar.

The gas chamber was quite small.

I find the proportions in his drawing too big, compared to a real chamber.

In this action,

30 or 40 women were gassed

in a room measuring about 10 by 20 feet.

The proportions must be wrong.

But the shower nozzles are right,

like the door with its window.

All that is exact.

INTERVIEWER: (IN FRENCH) Can you confirm the SS were watching?

MORSCH: Yes.

Of course.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think the curves of the women's bodies

are disturbingly sensual?

It's a man's drawing of nude women.

MORSCH: (IN GERMAN) I really don't know.

There is no description

of how the bodies lay in the gas chamber.

We do know this, and the drawing shows it,

the gas was heavier than air, so it sank.

In other words, people who were choking

climbed on the bodies of the dead

seeking fresh air.

Also, although he didn't draw it,

because it was on this side,

there was a window.

It was a frosted glass window, reinforced with wire.

People may have tried to escape that way.

The impression he gives here,

of one victim climbing on another, climbing on bodies,

probably corresponds to the way things really happened.

INTERVIEWER: (IN FRENCH) And so the original is lost?

MORSCH: (IN GERMAN) We don't know where it is.

We know that various parts of Siminski's archives

are still scattered.

We don't know where.

We wish we did have the original of this drawing.

We have other originals.

(BOTH SPEAKING FRENCH)

- INTERVIEWER: Like this? - Lower it. Good.

Here's what I meant about composition.

I'll show you.

First, there's the closed space.

It's called the "Picasso space."

It means to show that these people were trapped.

They're cornered, with no way out. That's the "Picasso space."

Francis Bacon adopted it later,

to frame his characters.

At the top...

There are horizontal spaces at the top and bottom.

That's what they call

academic art education.

You have diagonals, here...

You see the diagonal.

A diagonal intersecting it.

Here, here and here.

The lines form an X,

creating tension in the composition, so it's not banal.

Another thing,

this woman, who looks surprised, is pregnant.

She's a normal person, so she has no idea

that she's about to be gassed,

that she'll suffer, and that she will be burnt.

You'd have to be insane to imagine that.

She's surprised.

It's a series of drawings of the same woman.

First, the surprise...

Then despair...

Panic...

And then collapse, when it's over.

When she's horizontal, she's dead.

It's all the same woman.

Why did you pick such a confined space?

There weren't any gas chambers this small.

I've never been in a gas chamber.

I know they were big, to fit dozens of people.

But I'm not making a movie.

I'm painting a picture of a woman

going through various psychological phases.

I needed a closed space to show that.

No need to spread it on a large canvas.

I'm not a reporter. I'm a painter. There's a difference.

I'm not snapping a picture.

This is premeditated and thought out.

INTERVIEWER: There is a sensuality in this woman's body.

Why did you give her such a beautiful body, for this event?

SPITZER: The event doesn't make the body. The body makes the event.

I painted a naked woman, because I like women.

Female nudes were a normal subject for a painting.

I was academically trained. I painted this in 1962, let's not forget.

INTERVIEWER: Do you want people to think the painting is beautiful?

SPITZER: Yes, that often happens.

"Oh, beautiful!"

People who have seen Guernica

admire the beauty first.

Next, they see what's happening.

They discover it's a tragedy about to happen.

But beauty strikes them first.

That's a painter's key to success.

Don't you find it shocking

when people find beauty in a painting depicting a gas chamber?

If people aren't attracted by beauty, they won't look.

In my opinion, anyway.

You can paint the most tragic thing,

but it must be beautiful.

If it is esthetically balanced,

you can make the statement you want to make,

transmit your idea.

If it's ugly,

the viewer will turn around and walk away.

Why look at ugly things?

Artists have always depicted tragedy with beauty.

Goya's Disasters of War

were a great inspiration to me,

for my prints about the camps.

Their beauty is striking, first.

It's tragic, and beautiful.

The Dos de Mayo at the Prado

shows people being shot, but it's beautiful.

The painter creates beauty.

Isn't the annihilation of the Jews in the gas chambers an exception?

No.

It's an exceptional event in history, of course.

But when an artist makes a painting,

he has to obey laws of art

decreeing that beauty is primordial.

I think so.

Because it's fairly easy

to make an ugly painting.

Samuel Willenberg, Treblinka made in 1970

(SPEAKING HEBREW)

GANS: Why did you choose to draw

in black and white, instead of color?

WILLENBERG: I simply couldn't do color.

The original was in color.

But I couldn't do Treblinka in color.

GANS: Why didn't you show the Totenlager,

the death camp?

WILLENBERG: Because I wasn't there.

It would have been a fantasy.

I was never there. That was my luck!

One day in the camp, I made friends with the painter.

I always had a connection to painting.

He had a little corner of the barracks.

He'd set up an easel,

and he painted portraits

of the Germans' children.

Here's a statue I made.

I needed someone to talk about art with.

People thought I was crazy.

"Schmolik, don't you know the important thing is eating?"

So sometimes we'd sit and talk,

on Sunday maybe, when we didn't work.

We talked about Impressionism,

Cubism,

and the Realist period.

Those were the themes of our conversation.

It was a place

where I felt at home.

Because of the turpentine...

(VOICE BREAKING) And linseed oil.

That place...

Reminded me of home.

Just a little.

The smell, because Papa painted.

There was the same smell at home.

WILLENBERG: One day, he says to me,

"Look what they want me to do.

"They're asking me to do signs.

"First class, second class, third class,

"waiting room...

"I don't know why."

He started to paint.

A clock.

You see,

"Second class,

"bound for Bialystok, Wolkowysz,

"Treblinka..."

(COUGHS)

We didn't know why.

One day,

the SS men collected all the signs.

They put all that he had painted,

all that he had drawn,

"First, second, third class,"

on the building over there,

at the entrance to Treblinka, where the trains arrive.

They set it all up,

with the clock on the wall,

"Cashier..."

They made the building

a mock train station.

After the war, I noticed

that it looked like a typical Polish train station.

Dinah Gottliebova Babbitt Portraits of Gypsies

Piotr Cywinski Director, Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum

CYWINSKI: (IN FRENCH) It all goes back to Josef Mengele's experiments,

the infamous Nazi physician.

One of the many so-called research projects he undertook

involved Romani prisoners.

He took living people,

killed them, did tests on them.

He was driven by a desire to identify racial features.

He needed scientific illustrations.

He made photographs, but at the time, photography was not clear enough.

He couldn't get the effect he wanted.

He realized that one of the prisoners,

a young woman, was a professional artist, and he put her to work.

She had to illustrate his macabre study of Gypsies.

Dinah Gottliebova was a Czech Jew. She'd been at Theresienstadt.

The work she did for Mengele enabled her to survive.

She bargained with him for her mother's life, too.

These documents, her drawings,

are the last portraits of these people

while they were alive,

right before they were put to death.

The Sinti and Roma Pavilion

INTERVIEWER: When Dinah Gottliebova learned that seven drawings

had been recovered after the war,

she demanded their return.

Why did the Auschwitz Museum refuse categorically?

Author's rights

are not the same as property rights, necessarily.

There are different types of rights.

Dinah Gottliebova has every right to take credit for the drawings.

We cannot say the works are by an unknown artist.

And there are rights related to ownership.

It is impossible to confuse

the two types of rights.

These are not private drawings.

They are a part...

Perhaps they are the only large part that remains

of Dr. Josef Mengele's archives.

INTERVIEWER: So these paintings have two dimensions:

they are documents and they are works of art.

The Memorial sees them as historical documents.

CYWINSKI: Absolutely.

I don't think the artistic side had anything to do with these paintings.

These are not portraits of beauty.

An hour or two after they posed, they were killed,

just so that Mengele could test and measure their insides.

Jozef Szajna

The Roll Call Lasted Very Long, My Feet Hurt a Lot

Buchenwald - 1944

Jozef Szajna, Our Curriculum Vitae Buchenwald - 1944

(SPEAKING POLISH)

We have recovered 114 portraits by Franciszek Jazwiecki.

They were all done in the four concentration camps

where he was a prisoner:

Auschwitz, Buchenwald,

Sachsenhausen, and Gross-Rosen.

Jazwiecki didn't know if he'd survive the camp,

or if the people he was drawing would survive.

That's why, on most of the portraits,

he noted the camp number.

These are portraits of real people,

victims of Nazi concentration camps.

Franciszek Jazwiecki 114 Portraits - 1943-1945

Agnieszka Sieradzka Curator, Art Collections

He started drawing at the outset.

That fact proves

that for him, drawing was a mission.

He was quite aware

that his drawings would be meaningful after the war.

(SPEAKING FRENCH) There are different types of paper.

Does the type of paper depend on the camp? Is that a way to sort the drawings?

Were all these yellow ones done in the same camp?

Or were there various types of paper at each camp?

(SPEAKING POLISH)

Jazwiecki scavenged paper from various sources.

There are different types.

Sometimes he used

forms from the SS offices.

Sometimes he salvaged paper from a workshop.

There's package paper.

He cut all the papers to the same dimensions.

He kept all the drawings in a notebook,

instead of giving them away.

Even for a piece of bread.

That proves he intended for his drawings

to go down in history,

as he wrote in his memoirs, after the war.

(SPEAKING FRENCH)

INTERVIEWER: The portraits look as though the subjects posed for a long time.

Obviously, the artist was stubbornly creating an overall work.

Did he ever say when he drew, and how long his subjects posed?

Looking at the series, it's amazing

he was able to do such a precise work in several camps.

FEMALE CURATOR: He wrote down the place where he made the drawing.

He drew after evening roll call, in the barracks,

but also in the workshops he was assigned to,

during breaks.

He drew in various parts of the camp,

even during marches,

when prisoners moved to other camps.

His drawings served as historical documentation,

but they were also a way of escaping from the reality of the camp.

In these people's eyes,

he was looking for something beyond what he saw every day.

Franciszek Jazwiecki Self-Portrait - Auschwitz 1943

Franciszek Jazwiecki Self-Portrait - Sachsenhausen 1944

Franciszek Jazwiecki Self-Portrait - Buchenwald 1945

(SPEAKING FRENCH)

SPITZER: This paper is almost the same color,

but it's a little thinner.

It was a four-ply bag.

I always wanted a big piece like this for my drawing.

About this big.

It's a little wrinkled. There wasn't any plastic lining.

- INTERVIEWER: Was it wrinkled like that? - No.

They emptied the sacks completely, and put them aside.

This one has traveled. It gives you an idea,

but not a very good one.

There was no plastic. The paper had four layers and was much thicker.

I loved the color of the paper.

Memory of a portrait of a guard

done in exchange for bread and sausage

at Blechhammer in 1944

(SPEAKING HEBREW) These are the first drawings I made.

I probably wanted to draw someone's face.

Maybe Kalmin's face, or someone else.

It's not really Kalmin,

the Sonderkommando guy,

the "Mussulman."

The expression on the face of an Auschwitz prisoner,

marked by some horrible job.

Kalmin is a story in himself.

It'll take too long to tell.

This is a portrait...

Yes, it is a portrait done from the memory of a real face.

From the memory of a person,

Kalmin Furman.

I still know his camp number: 80810.

He was born in Lunna, near Grodno.

May I turn it this way, so I can see it better?

I didn't want to make his portrait,

I wanted to portray his soul.

An expression of suffering and despair.

That's what I was after.

Not a picture of Kalmin himself,

but of all the stories behind him.

And something of what they called "the Mussulman,"

a man who has lost the will to live.

It's a mixture of all these characters.

They're the beginnings.

You can see a lot of mistakes,

but I didn't care.

I wanted the man's eyes to express

his inner suffering.

What do you express, in art?

I wanted to express inner suffering,

the inner experience.

That's what was important to me.

I thought that if I succeeded in showing

what these people had been through,

the people who saw it would behave more kindly.

It was a childlike belief.

I thought I was taking two types of action:

first, telling a story.

But no one spoke or reacted to it,

and it didn't work.

So, I thought, "I'll draw,"

because people weren't reacting.

Yehuda Bacon, Self Portraits done upon return in 1945

From La Peinture à Dora by François Le Lionnais

Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora survivor

INTERVIEWER: (IN FRENCH) "We were thousands of inmates

"waiting on the roll-call ground

"during a general search.

"My eyes were instinctively drawn to the hill by the infirmary.

"The trees suddenly melted on me and took me away.

"Dora's Hell turned into a Breughel of which I was the host.

"Favored by the weakened physical and psychological state we were in,

"exaltation took over me.

"The feeling of escaping,

"just like smoke, under the eyes of the stupid guards.

"I then felt the call of an ancient passion.

"I had become acquainted with two or three women, but I seldom saw them.

"I preferred to discuss this with my best friend at the camp,

"a young man to whom I grew attached

"in a way that only occurs in such exceptional circumstances.

"He didn't make it out alive of this horrible journey.

"Together, we'd spend our free time remembering human knowledge,

"a sort of inventory of civilizations' accomplishments.

"On the day of the painting,

"Jean asked me to tell him what I knew and thought on this subject.

"Unfortunately, I couldn't show him the artworks or even reproductions.

"I described the artworks in detail

"during the never-ending wait on the roll-call ground.

"We thusly contemplated, with the eyes of the mind,

"The Virgin of Chancellor Rolin by Van Eyck,

"the tragic diagonals in St. Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata

"by Giotto touched him.

"We traveled in Bosch's Temptation of St. Anthony,

"in Da Vinci's Virgins of the Rocks,

"in Lucas Van Leyden's Lot and his Daughters,

"and in Dürer's Melancholia,

"from which we reconstituted the magical square,

"remembering the date of its creation, 1514.

"Stone by stone, we were building the world's most magnificent museum."

Léon Delarbre

Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Mittelbau-Dora, Bergen-Belsen survivor

Ink sketches and drawings of the roll-call ground

Mittelbau-Dora - 1945

(DISTANT CLANGING)

Stencils Artist Unknown

Work ordered by the SS commandant of the Mittelbau-Dora Crematorium

(BIRDS CHIRPING)

(WOMAN READING IN POLISH)

"To be confronted with a landscape of death,

"a landscape like that...

"It was an incredibly tragic sight,

"a baffling sight.

"What else can a painter do?

"The details of the hands,

"of the heads,

"all the gaping mouths,

"the thousands of skeletons,

"thousands of corpses,

"strewn in every direction.

"Illustrate it,

"represent it.

"It was an absolute necessity

"to preserve it for the future."

(SPEAKING POLISH) I was not an artist. I was a child.

How could I have drawn such things!

Krystyna Zaorska Ravensbrück survivor

Her daughter, Katarzyna Recht

Monika Herzog Curator of the Memorial

ZAORSKA: This is me, going up to my "third floor."

(SPEAKING FRENCH)

INTERVIEWER: Is this where she used to draw, at the top of the stairs?

ZAORSKA: (IN POLISH) We would sit on the bed,

with children all around.

I used to draw and tell stories.

First, in the morning,

there was a roll call that lasted for two hours.

Then they stood for another two-hour "work call."

The duty commandos would line up,

and since we couldn't go work,

we were supposed to run away and hide in the barracks.

Like rabbits hiding from hunters.

Because the police matrons and kapos and so on

tried to catch us, to give us tasks to do.

Not daily chores, just occasional jobs.

At the age of fourteen, we were big enough.

So we'd scamper away like rabbits into the barracks.

While the commandos were working, we had to stay inside.

So we sat up there.

They told me what to draw.

That's when I started to draw what the others wanted.

I didn't make drawings related to the camp.

God forbid!

I chose much happier subjects.

She sleeps in her little cradle, on her soft pink pillow.

The kitten walks along the wall.

Hush! Little Dorothy is already asleep.

Maria Hiszpanska-Neumann made 400 drawings at Ravensbrück

while interned there from April 1942 to April 1945.

Most of them have been lost.

(SPEAKING FRENCH)

It's fading away.

"Head...

"Brown...

"Purplish brown.

"The foot...

"Yellow," I think.

"Purple.

"Chest..."

No, no. "Part hidden by clothing."

I see. It's this part, here.

"Blue shirt.

"Brown... Dirty brown."

(INDISTINCT CHATTER)

FOSTY: When you draw,

it's as though you stop thinking.

You draw!

I can't say for sure,

but I must have lost over 200 drawings

in the bombing.

And I lost from 50 to 100 of them in Belgium.

What I have left...

I still have about 150 drawings, something like that.

So I must have done about 500 drawings

in the time I was there.

The drawings are all mixed together.

They aren't arranged in any order.

They'd be hard to sort out.

This is the cart loaded with stones

from the quarry.

It wasn't done from life.

I drew an impression from memory, just after returning to the barracks.

INTERVIEWER: (IN FRENCH) It looks like it was done from life,

it was sketched so quickly.

FOSTY: No, no.

I just made a quick note, to remember.

In plain sight of the SS guards,

drawing was unthinkable.

This was done afterwards.

The cart of the dead looked the same.

I saw it go by right in front of me.

But I didn't follow it to draw it.

It's just an impression.

All I know is it had rubber tires.

It wasn't a normal cart.

It was really...

Always an impression.

Did you draw this one in the barracks, too?

Not in front?

It was in front of a barracks.

Basically, they were all the same.

You were looking at it, as you drew?

While it was going by.

You had to draw fast.

No, all it takes is a glimpse, and you have an idea

of the overall look of the thing.

I might have added something,

I don't know, stripes on their pants, or something.

But I had no time.

You always had to sneak.

You had to sneak the work.

Generally,

the most striking sketches

are when you do nothing.

It all goes back to what Delacroix said

about drawing a guy falling off the roof of a building.

You have to draw him before he hits the ground!

Paul Goyard

Preparatory sketches for a Buchenwald diorama

(a three-dimensional miniature) May 1944 - April 1945

(SCRIBBLING)

Portrait of Paul Goyard by Boris Taslitzky

Portrait of José Fosty by René Salme

Portrait of René Salme by José Fosty

Portrait of Boris Taslitzky by Roman Jefimenko

(INTERVIEWER READING IN FRENCH)

"Interpret it as you may, I've never had such

"a revelation of beauty

"than when I discovered the Hell that was the little camp."

From Tambour battant

by Boris Taslitzky, Buchenwald survivor

"What predominated over any other feeling

"was the pressing need to draw,

"to rip from the terrifying reality of this never-ending sight

"some of its touching aspects,

"and constantly recreate, as though the fate that brought us together

"was reveling in the complex invention of something impossible

"lost in time, like in an infinite kaleidoscope."

Buchenwald The "small camp"

Boris Taslitzky The "small camp" in February 1945

(SPEAKING HEBREW) I wanted to evoke an event

that only lasted for minutes: the revolt in the camp,

leading to my escape and that of my buddies.

You see the anti-tank defenses here.

They formed a series of barriers, crisscrossed like this.

The guys in the first group

were cut down by the machine guns.

We were in the second group.

So we were able to leap over our own dead,

because their bodies protected us from the barbed wire.

Léon Delarbre

A dead buddy by the roadside 9 April, Bergen-Belsen