A survivor’s story

Content warning: this post references the Holocaust.

The Galicia Jewish Museum` is sited in Kazimierz, part of the city of Krakow with a strong, centuries-long association with the Jewish population. The history of the Jews of Krakow, some 56000 at time of the Nazi invasion, is documented in the Holocaust Encyclopedia.

Briefly, most Jews were expelled from Kracow, except, by 1941, around 15000 providing forced labour in a walled off ghetto in the neighbouring district of Podgorze. The ghetto was forcibly emptied, “liquidated” in March 1943, by shooting, transport of survivors to Auschwitz-Birkenau and transfer of workers to the Plaszow forced-labour camp further out from the city. There, further systematic mass-murders took place and survivors were moved to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The museum currently hosts an exhibition built round extensive photographs and testimony from three generations starting with Richard Ores. I drew him in wash and pen while watching a video of him describing his experience in the ghetto.

Ores had been a teenager when the ghetto was established. He was thrown a white coat by a doctor who then called to him and thus he obtained the Kennkarten, the documentation allowing him to remain in the ghetto working in the clinic. He was separated from his sister and mother who did not survive.

In his testimony, he described twice meeting Amon Göth, the brutal, sadistic and murderous commandant 1943 to 1944. One of these events I jotted down. He was sent to bring Göth medication for a cough. Göth asked how long before this would relieve the cough and told him to wait in the kitchen. If the cough was no better in half an hour, he would shoot Ores. The cook told Ores to make himself scarce and not wait: Göth would shoot him anyway, cough or no cough. He also described how a survivor of a mass-shooting of a wedding party was treated in the clinic for a bullet wound in the leg. The SS came and shot him. Ores remembers him asking “Sirs, how can you shoot me without trial?” In another video, Ores walks the building that housed the clinic, pointing out each room where a doctor was gunned down. I guess this must have been in 1943 when the ghetto was liquidated. Ores himself was moved to Plaszow and thence to Auschwitz-Birkenau where he witnessed the explosive destruction of the gas chambers and crematoria by the retreating SS. Ores trained in medicine in Switzerland and settled in Manhattan where he died in 2011. He and his family frequently returned to Poland.

Ores loved Poland, but would tell his children, do not laugh or smile here, this whole place is a memorial. A separate exhibition in the museum reminds us that 90% of Poland’s 3.3 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. A succession of contemporary photographs was displayed: “synagogues open to the sky … with bushes growing out from the floor … propped up with scaffolding or with only the central pillars still standing … vanished completely or deteriorated into nothingness …”. The sketch below is of the town of Biecz 100 miles south of Krakow. This square “would have been full of Yiddish speaking Jewish traders. Today the sound of Yiddish is gone”.

The picture is absence

Content warning. This post references the Holocaust.

“A photograph of a boy in the rain, a boy unknown to you or me … the image conjures up the vivid presence of the unknown boy. To his father it would define the boy’s absence”. John Berger and Jean Mohr, A Seventh Man, Pelican Books, 1975.

This is a binary: the stranger and the family member look on the same portrait image differently: one sees a person, the other feels their absence.

Genocide creates another dynamic altogether.

In these pictures, drawn of the exhibits at the Auschwitz Memorial Museum, I have drawn samples of the huge collection of things taken from people, mostly Jews, before they were murdered, remnants of very personal and intimate plunder.

These are examples of what is exhibited at the Memorial under the heading “Evidence of Crimes”.

In Block 4 of the Auschwitz I camp is displayed a huge quantity of human hair cut from the inmates, before or after death. Some has been woven into cloth. Photographs are not permitted and I did not draw these human remains. These can be seen on the link above.

My drawings do not bring to us the “vivid presence” of unknown people. To whom did these many spectacles, this plethora of orthopaedic aids, belong? Who was each child who wore each pair of shoes? Who were the men who wore the Tallit, the prayer shawls?

This is what genocide is. It is not just killing. It is eradication. These images, these many objects, do not make their owners present to us, strangers in a future time. Their family, who even generations later might have felt their absence, they too were wiped out in this conflagration.

A small sample of many thousands of spectacles taken from murdered people

A Jewish prayer shawl: the Talit

These were at the front of a huge pile of shoes taken from murdered children

Back braces and prosthetic limbs

On the study tour earlier that day, I was disconnected from the reality of this camp of slaughter, even standing at the wall where families were shot, or looking down into the unroofed chamber where people undressed before being crammed into the gas chamber. However, I wept while drawing these images, and do so again posting them here.

Follow @AuschwitzMuseum on Twitter. Daily, the museum posts photographs of Auschwitz inmates with what little we know of them and their fate. These photographs of individuals bring their presence to us who are strangers.

Oświęcim

(content warning – this post is about the Holocaust)

exterior of the Auschwitz I concentration camp from the bank of the Sota river

The remnants of the former Nazi concentration and death camp at Oświęcim, Poland are now preserved as a museum. The history, layout and functioning are described on this link. Last week, I joined a six hour study tour of the Auschwitz I and II (Birkenau) sites. There was no time to draw as we walked (the hurried sketch below was the only one during that tour). I returned without a guide at the end of that day and the next to get a few drawings.

Auschwitz I concentration camp – tourists walking the spaces between the blocks that housed horrors

I had thought it would be hard to walk this site without tears, but the reality was a surreal dissociation. The sheer scale of the camp defies emotional connection. We were not seeing the people here, but the remnants of the infrastructure designed and built on the orders of the Nazis (though on reflection, here are the remnants of the work of the inmates).

Foundations of multiple barracks at Birkenau (Auschwitz II) concentration and death camp

As for the site itself, these were my impressions. The scale is immense, as large as a town, Birkenau itself divided in to long strips of semi-autonomous camps . Its functioning was complex, with different categories of prisoners. None the less, the overall purpose was death. Slow death for slave workers over weeks or months in the concentration camp, deprived of the essentials for survival, above all nutrition and protection from the cold. Immediate death for those selected as unfit for work: the unknowing walk from the train to the purpose built units comprising a room to undress, gas chamber and crematorium. The rate limiting step was the disposal of the bodies. Death as punishment including at the infamous Block 11.

The end of the railway in the Birkenau concentration and death camp. On the left is the memorial built by the Polish government. On the right is the rubble from the gas chamber and crematorium destroyed by the retreating SS at the liquidation of the camp.

The other purpose was the ruthless expropriation of value from prisoners: belongings, gold teeth, hair, labour. A huge warehouse complex at one end of Birkenau, called Kanada, housed plundered goods to be sorted and sent to the Reich. This was already on fire when the camp was liberated. Each year archaeological work turns up more remnants of the items taken from prisoners. The Auschwitz complex supplied slave labour to the I.G. Farbenindustrie chemical industrial plants. Four Jewish women were murdered by hanging for stealing explosive material from the Union-Werke armaments factory where they worked. We were told they carried the material bit by bit under their finger nails. The Sonderkommando, who operated the crematoria, mutinied on October 7 1944, destroying one crematorium, breaking out, killing three SS men. Around 250 Jews were killed in a knowingly futile fight without weapons, their hoped for reward, we were told, “three lines in the history books”.

into this

(content warning: this post relates to the Holocaust)

“It is said that science will dehumanise people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.” Jacob Bronowski 1973

Jacob Bronowski was a mathematician, poet and philosopher who fronted a television series called The Ascent of Man documenting the development of scientific thought. I watched this when I was 12 and it profoundly influenced what became my identity as a clinician-scientist. Episode 11 included the sequence filmed by the gas chambers and crematoria at the far end of the huge Birkenau concentration and death camp complex. In my late teens, I wrote out his words and drew his face over them.

His voice saying these words have played and replayed in my mind for 48 years. As he speaks, he walks out, in his best shoes and suit, into the water, stoops and takes a handful of the mud. “We have to touch people” he says.

My journey last week to the Polish town of Oświęcim (German version, Auschwitz) was, I suppose, a kind of pilgrimage. I stood and drew, with my evening shadow stretched out across those waters that had been made the final resting place for a murdered population. I had come to honour the dead.

grey pens

Wawel Cathedral, Krakow

Before setting off for Poland, I asked fellow art blogger, Outside Authority, what they would take as a lightweight art kit. Their advice included “something you can make quick bold lines/shapes with (e.g. sharpie/gel pen/ink pen), something to make smudgy lines/forms/shadows with (e.g. soft pencils/ink with water, conte)”.

Inside the courtyard, Wawel Castle, Krakow

They also reminded me to match my drawing equipment to the size of the paper. I had selected a moleskine watercolour pad 13x21cm that neatly fitted my coat pocket, to minimise what I was carrying. Separately I had a carry case with A3 paper in various tones.

Bastion and cobbled walkway, Wawel Castle

So before leaving I bought a pack of double ended fine marker/brush pens in shades of grey from very light to black. My plan was to use these to make the bold lines, and, as they are very water soluble, also to use these in washes.

Statue of random dignitary, Krakow

I supplemented these with my india ink fountain pen and water brush. I used the first day in Krakow to experiment with these tools, and also get my eye and hand back into drawing.

stone image of the crucifix, St Mary’s Basilica

The interior of St Mary’s Basilica, incorporating a millennium of evolving building styles and with fantastic painted inner surfaces, overwhelmed me. I didn’t know where to even start (I should have remembered, “bold lines, smudgy shapes”). I ended up sketching the crucified Christ, but even this went awry with the arms out of alignment.

I doodled another version later.

Façade of St Mary’s Basilica across rooftops, evening

I developed an approach that built the sketch mainly in grey tones, only at the end putting in selected detail with black fine pen, or the tip of the brush. It worked better for some sketches than others.

I finished this day’s drawing by the Vistula, with the city’s iconic dragon, and went back to collect my rucksack to get the train to Oświęcim.

Castle trees

Out drawing with OutsideAuthority at Newark (and earlier in the day Southwell Minster). Here we were looking across the river, through trees on the near bank, to the castle. I am trying to get something of these twigs that cascade down from the main branches.

I look back at stuff I have done before and it almost feels like i have forgotten how to do this.

In this next one, I am looking at the pub (longingly). The idea was roofline, toned paper against grey sky, tree, white front to buildings, stop. I have put in too much. OA was there, and wondered why I threw in so many lines at the end.

Next time we draw together, hopefully early March, we are considering an landscape exercise based on the structure of 90 minute life drawing sessions: use a timer, do sketches in rapid sequence 2 mins, 2 mins, 5, mins, 10 mins, 10mins, 20mins x3.

Daunted by grandeur

Daunted by the scale and beauty of Southwell Minster, I concentrated on smaller things; a painted window and a representation of the shrouded Christ carved on a plank of fine-grained wood.