One drew the agonized face of an emaciated man using only a black stone and a piece of tattered paper torn from a note pad.
One recorded an evening execution in which men were hanged from lampposts, using a pencil stub and an envelope painstakingly stripped of its glue and unfolded.
Another made a doll from bits of tattered clothing, a stocking and strands of her own hair. Still another fashioned chess pieces out of stale black bread.
They drew with coal and food dyes and even rust ground up in stagnant water. They drew on wood and brick and empty cement sacks.
In the terrifying darkness of places like Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen, they found enough light to see clearly and enough freedom in the midst of captivity to create.
Remarkably, hundreds of drawings, paintings and other artifacts produced by prisoners in Nazi concentration camps survived the war, even though many of those who created the works did not.
With the help of the French government, art works from the Holocaust have been collected from museums and private collections in Europe and are being exhibited in Los Angeles at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance. Twenty of the 245 works, which also include poetry and musical scores, were made available by the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington.
“The Enduring Spirit: Art of the Holocaust” provides a unique, sometimes painfully realistic look at daily life inside the barbed wire as viewed by those who labored, suffered and died there.
“Usually images from the camps come from the perspective of those in charge, or from some individual who was permitted inside,” said Gerald Margolis, director of the Museum of Tolerance. “This is all from the perspective of the victims.”
Some of those perspectives are perspectives on horror.
Scenes of exhausted women collapsing beside piles of corpses and of men stoically lining up outside the door of a crematorium seem sadly familiar to anyone even passingly aware of what went on during the early 1940s in Germany, Poland, France, Yugoslavia and elsewhere.
But these images somehow evoke even greater horror. For one thing, they represent eyewitness testimony. Even more chillingly, they represent what came to be daily routine for millions.
There are also many fine works of art that stand on their own, almost detached from the setting in which they were created. Some even offer glimpses of hope and beauty.
Many of those who produced the work were trained artists–like Boris Taslitsky, who studied with French sculptor Jacques Lipchitz before the war–who wound up in the camps for their political beliefs or because they were Jews.
Beyond the stories the works themselves tell, are the stories of those who created them and of how the art survived.
Anne Garcin-Mayade was a member of the French Resistance and a Communist. Living in the same apartment building in Montmartre as French painter Maurice Utrillo, she was arrested and sent to a camp called Ravensbruk in 1942.
Inside Ravensbruk, Garcin-Mayade drew tortured figures of laboring women with ghostlike faces reminiscent of the work of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. One drawing shows a group of women toiling at their daily chores inside the camp’s morgue.
Another, signed by Garcin-Mayade only with her prisoner number, depicts a group of women collapsed, exhausted, in a row of crudely fashioned wooden bunks.
“The very fact that someone would sit down under such conditions and capture these images speaks to a part of us that we have to consider to be a higher moral and human ideal,” Margolis said.
Garcin-Mayade survived the war, but her original work did not. When she was liberated from Ravensbruk, all of the drawings and paintings she had done over the years were destroyed by Allied soldiers who were worried that they might be contaminated with typhus.
The artist spent the following years painstakingly reproducing her work from memory.
France Hamelin, a Protestant Resistance figure, was arrested with her lover in August 1943. She was pregnant at the time and gave birth to a son in a camp called Les Tourelles in Nazi-occupied France.
This camp was for female prisoners only and a place were the regimen was less harsh than in others. Hamelin was permitted packages from her family, who sent her art supplies. Using primarily charcoal, Hamelin chronicled daily life, mainly through portraits of her fellow prisoners.
In May 1944, Hamelin escaped, taking her son and some of her artwork. She hid for the rest of the war with the help of the Resistance and now lives in Paris. She is 78.
The poetry included in the exhibition and the accompanying catalog contains a poignant mix of emotions from works that talk of the future to those that dwell on the sad realities of the present.
One poem, by Andre Verdet, a prisoner in Buchenwald, is a tender but chilling monologue called “You Used to Say”:
You used to say: My wife is as beautiful as the dawn
That rises over the sea on the Capri coast
You used to say: My wife is as sweet as water
That sprinkles over the half-closed eyes of the slumbering doe
You used to say: My wife is as fresh as the grass
Crushed under the stars on the first date
You used to say: My wife is as pure as she
Who lost her slipper and gained her happiness
You used to say: My wife is as good as the wing
That Musset praised in his “Night of Spring”
You used to tell me, too: My wife is more of a mystery
Than was the maiden fleeing behind her whiteness
Yielding nothing to her lover but a charming phantom
You used to tell me, too: I want to write to her
There’s not a single dawn that I don’t think of her
Her image trembles in the hollow of my hand
And then you used to say: I want to go back
To her, as a surprise, on some dark night
When she is dreaming that I am no more
You’re dead my friend
Atrociously
And as they tortured you
Your mouth smiled with your fairy-tale love
Many of the artists represented in the Los Angeles exhibition lived to carry their work out of the camps. Others, primarily those who were shipped off to death camps, left their work with other prisoners in the hope that it would survive. A large trove of art was discovered hidden in the camps after they were liberated.
Some of the pieces on display belong to private collectors, many of whom were reluctant to allow them to be brought to the United States. That is why the exhibition will not tour the country.
Margolis said he was working with Polish officials putting together a retrospective on life in the Warsaw ghetto before the war that would include photographs reproduced from glass negatives taken by German officials before the ghetto was destroyed.
That exhibition, Margolis said, would tour the United States and include stops in Chicago and New York.
