Art at Auschwitz

The transcript of the podcast

The Auschwitz Memorial and Museum is in possession of the largest collection of art related to the Auschwitz camp. This collection is unique on a world scale. The artworks created in conditions of extreme danger are an extraordinary document of history and time that still stir the emotions to this day.

They enable one to discover the feelings and emotions, difficult to reconstruct today, that accompanied the inmates on a daily basis. It is because of this huge historical and emotional value that camp art is extremely precious and provides a universal message which can be understood by every recipient.

Teresa Wontor-Cichy, historian from the Research Center and Agnieszka Sieradzka, curator of the Collections, discuss the art created at Auschwitz.

When researching the Auschwitz camp's history, we find information on how prisoners coped with the cruelty. One of these was art.

The collections of the Auschwitz Museum currently hold about two thousand works of art made by prisoners in the camp. One might be surprised to hear that art was created behind the barbed wires of the largest concentration and extermination camp. One could express the view that there is no room for any artistic activity at the site of the crematoria. Nonetheless, art was present there almost from the very beginning and played a unique role. The Germans did all they could to deprive people of their dignity, human value and feelings. Humiliation was one of the primary forms of terror. Under such conditions, art became a powerful force of resistance and saved the prisoners from complete animalisation. Art saved the remnants of human dignity, the remnants of humanity in the dehumanised world of the camp. This humiliated and maltreated prisoner still had hope and feelings; he was still a human being who risked his life to create, and never before had art played such an essential role in saving human dignity, content so profoundly human. Aside from that, art also had the power to save a prisoner's health and life. For a well-crafted portrait or greeting card for an SS man or functionary prisoner, a prisoner could receive an extra portion of soup and bread or avoid harsh punishment.

Artistic talent made getting a job under the roof easier, a better job that offered a chance of surviving the camp. But art not only saved the prisoners physically, it also salvaged their endangered psyche. It was such an escape from the camp reality into some other, better world. It helped maintain mental agility and balance, essential in the struggle for survival under such extreme conditions. And finally, art was the realisation of the ordinary human need for beauty, dictated by human sensitivity, in the camp’s dirty, stinking, grey, and hideous world. This bit of beauty was of great significance. Art was also an expression of the intense emotions that gripped the prisoners as they came into daily contact with human suffering and death. It was an expression of intense and destructive emotions and often a manifestation of man's overwhelming need to leave a trace of himself. The prisoners hoped that even if they died, the drawing would survive and testify to their suffering. Yet, in speaking of the invaluable role art played in the lives of the prisoners, it must also be emphasised that art also exposed the prisoner to great danger. It was officially forbidden in the camp to the extent that one SS man could commission some work, and another could kill him for doing so.

Looking at the artworks preserved in the Collections, reading the accounts of survivors, and hearing their tales, one may conclude that there is a certain concern or dichotomy; on the one hand, art was perceived as a danger, and on the other hand, we know that the SS, headed by the camp commandant and the functionary prisoners permitted artistic activity to some limited extent. Of course, it had to be linked to the needs of the camp, for example the prisoner's work for the camp.

Yes, almost all German Nazi concentration camps produced art. The best chances of creation were for prisoners assigned to work in the craft workshops and camp offices because they were expected to do all sorts of official work on orders from the SS. As we know, many of the Polish intelligentsia were incarcerated in Auschwitz. These included representatives of various professions, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and artists, who provided the foundation for the camp's artistic creation, and the Germans utilised not only the physical strength of these people but also their talent and skills. A large proportion of these prisoners were put to work in the craft workshops created in the camp from the outset, that is from 1940, such as the carpentry or locksmith workshops, but also in the camp offices, such as the prisoners' clerks rooms, prisoners' employment office and the construction offices. The prisoners at the camp created instructional drawings, posters, models, and mock-ups depicting plans for the camp's construction and expansion. They also produced artwork documenting the course of illnesses and medical experiments conducted by SS physicians. Aside from these official works, the prisoners also began to create artworks for themselves, illegally and covertly, using the same materials.

Naturally, it involved risks, as the prisoner could not use material from the SS offices for their private purposes. This could have been treated as sabotage, such as destruction of Third Reich property, and severely punished. But despite this danger, such works were produced almost from the very beginning. However, it must also be stressed that artworks were created in other places in the camp as well: in the camp hospital, the prisoners' blocks, and the camp's bunks. Any material suitable for the purpose was used: drawings were made on wrapping paper, on the margins of newspapers and letter forms, and even on cigarette papers; carvings were made on pieces of stick, toothbrush handles, and modelled in bread. From 1942, representatives of the art world were deported to Auschwitz in successive transports, predominantly Jews from various occupied European countries. Undoubtedly, the latter had far fewer possibilities of creating, as the camp authorities treated the Jews ruthlessly and cruelly until the camp's termination. Although the living and working conditions of the Jews were far worse, some still produced art in the camp, and some of these artworks have survived to this day.

The camp had a defined structure, divided into departments dealing with various matters relating to the prisoners' incarceration and, above all, the effective use of the prisoners in work for the Third Reich. It may therefore come as a surprise to those interested in the history of Auschwitz that there was such a thing as a Lagermuseum - a camp museum - at the camp.

True, given the concentration camp conditions, the Lagermuseum occupies an unusual position. This special work unit was unique and somewhat paradoxical, as the prisoners were afforded the opportunity for creative work. Generally, a few prisoners worked there, usually visual artists, graduates of the Academy of Fine Arts, and various artists at various times who were tasked with producing artwork for the private use of the SS men. This place also acted as a museum, where the camp authorities accumulated various objects related to the culture and religion of those incarcerated and murdered here, including artworks created by the prisoners and workers of this work unit. It is hard to fathom or elucidate the rationale behind the existence of a lagermuseum in a death camp. It is downright ludicrous since it was founded in the largest death camp. It is difficult to reconcile the enormity of the crimes committed at Auschwitz with the fact that a work squad of artists were commissioned to create art by the SS. Nevertheless, this is where we grapple with the full complexity of Auschwitz, which was also a centre for the servitude of prisoners utilised by the SS for diverse motives, including those that did not entirely comply with the regulations. So, on the one hand, the museum is a product of SS functionaries' penchant for beautiful objects. The place was primarily a source of satisfaction for their artistic and aesthetic needs. It appears that it was also used for propaganda purposes. It was meant to prove that the prisoners were assigned work in the camp appropriate to their education and worked in satisfactory conditions per their preferences. For this reason, the facility was a vital visit point for German dignitaries and official delegations. On the other hand, it was a kind of museum where different objects associated with the culture and religion of the people deported, detained and murdered here were collected, not to be admired or appreciated but to provide further evidence of the inferiority of these races. Museums were also established in other German concentration camps, such as Dachau, Mauthausen and Buchenwald, but it must be emphasised that these were institutions of a different nature. They collected exhibits of an anthropological nature, like human skins, skulls, plaster casts of faces or whole figures. However, no anthropological exhibits were collected at Auschwitz. The religious objects, folk costumes, and historical relics gathered were meant for the moral ridicule and humiliation of the people sent to the camp, and these objects were related to the Jewish religion and Polish culture.

However, it is also relevant to emphasise what role the Lagermuseum played for the prisoners who worked there. The Lagermuseum was a lifeline for many of them, a chance to escape the oppressive conditions of the camp. It gave them refuge from the cold, beating, and humiliation they faced. Additionally, the solidarity and willingness to support each other meant that even those less skilled or needing care could work there. And finally, thanks to the existence of this place, artists had access to painting materials, which resulted in the creation of numerous artistic works, including illegal ones, at Auschwitz.

Speaking of materials the prisoners could use for their creative work - as mentioned, it was virtually everything from paper, forms, newspapers or cigarette papers. The prisoners usually found these materials in their workplaces, and the need to draw was also linked to the need to document the events they witnessed. And these were often crimes committed in the camp. Here, speaking of this so-called legal art, like art commissioned by the camp staff, these were paintings or sculptures that had some aesthetic value in the decorative sense of an interior, some room or other room of the camp office. We know that Commandant Rudolf Hoess also had such objects in his office. However, as I mentioned earlier, the second need was to illustrate and document the cruelty and crimes committed in the camp. This is what we might call illegal art, and these works were never meant to be in the hands of the camp staff.

Assuredly, it was the most dangerous work, and only a few such pieces are in the Museum's Collection. The reason was apparent; producing such a drawing involved tremendous risk. This was because it could not reveal what was happening in the camp. One of Rudolf Höss' first decrees was to forbid SS members from taking any photographs in the camp, even private ones, thus prohibiting even SS men from documenting the camp's reality. So, these photographs were mainly taken for the construction department and did not portray the whole truth about the camp. The prisoners shown in them are well-dressed and well-treated, which makes the surviving drawings of artist prisoners even more valuable, showing us the story from the inside, from the prisoner's perspective. These sketches, most often produced hastily, in secret, are mostly a record of shocking facts and camp events. Executing them meant detention, beatings, punishment of others or even death for the prisoner. Therefore, prisoners who did this type of work had only two choices: either to hide these drawings somewhere deep inside the camp, bury them underground, hide them between the logs of the barracks, or somewhere in the attics, cellars or under the floorboards, or to smuggle them outside the wire immediately after they were completed or ship them out of the camp. We know today that most of these works, buried in the ground or hidden in the nooks and crannies of the barracks, have been lost forever. Most of what survived were works prisoners managed to take out of the camp. We were only able to find individual works of art after the war.

One of a select few works is a unique collection of drawings by an unknown author with the initials MM, also known as the 'Sketchbook from Auschwitz'. This is the only work where the extermination of the Jews deported to Auschwitz is depicted, from the moment of selection on the ramp to the killing of the selected people in the gas chambers, as well as showing the extermination of the sick and emaciated prisoners of the camp. For this reason, it is a unique historical document and the most important camp art piece in our Collections. This sketchbook was found two years after the war, in 1947, on the site of the former Birkenau camp, in section BIIf, which served as the camp men’s hospital and was located near crematoria IV and V. It contains a whole lot of detail to identify the places and scenes depicted in the drawings, and, as I said, it is one of the very few single works found on the camp premises after its liberation.

Most surviving works are those that were smuggled out of the camp secretly. The prisoners here were assisted by civilian workers, residents of the town of Oświęcim and the surrounding area. Drawings with risky content were smuggled away in tractor pipes, tucked in the bicycle frames, secured with plasters on their legs or under their armpits, or in mounds of dirty underwear. Employing various dangerous means, they tried to smuggle these drawings out of the camp as soon as they were completed, which is why some survived.

These drawings were crafted with the intent that these materials would persist and serve as undeniable evidence of the crimes perpetrated at Auschwitz, even if their authors did not survive. The sketches of Polish prisoners are among the few produced despite the enormous risks involved. Włodzimierz Siwierski and Mieczysław Kościelniak portray hunger in the camp, the suffering of the prisoners, and work beyond their strength. Similar drawings were also created in the women's camp. They were produced, among others, by the Polish prisoner Janina Tollik and the female prisoners of Jewish descent Lily Berman and Halina Ołomucka. Unfortunately, most of these drawings do not survive. Many of the works were irretrievably lost, destroyed by SS men or prisoners afraid to keep such dangerous documents.

It is a unique collection illustrating camp life. In the case of the Sketchbook, its immense worth in revealing the crime is still exceptionally significant, both as proof of the crime and, I believe, as a conundrum as to the identity of the author, the identity of MM. So far, It has been a challenge to figure out, but many puzzles have been solved in different situations, so we will likely come up with the answer eventually. There is quite an extensive collection of portraits in the Collections. It is unique and can be contrasted with another collection created legally during registration in the camp. Photographs of prisoners were taken in the initial years up to the spring of '43, and many of them were also destroyed during the eradication of proof of the crimes. Nevertheless, the surviving photographs give us a glimpse of what the male and female prisoners looked like when they were registered at the camp. This is, as I mentioned, official documentation. Wilhelm Brasse, a prisoner in the same department, who took these pictures, always stressed that prisoners had to be clean-shaven, neat-looking and without any bruises or wounds on their faces when they were brought in to be photographed. If a prisoner had an injury, they were sent away and recalled again after some time; they just had to look good. Exactly, but these portraits are somewhat different....

Yes, that's right. The Collections has a massive catalogue of portraits made by prisoners in the camp, thus making it the most popular topic. Despite the risk involved in producing the portrait, as it exposed both the model and the author, it was still executed. Nevertheless, the craving to have one's likeness was greater than the fear as it was a physical indication and sign that one was still there, that one still existed. And it also seems that for a person reduced to a mere number, deprived of their dignity and individual traits, the illicit portrait became a way of preserving their fragile memory of themselves. The Collections include images of prisoners created on any material, including letter forms, postcards, paper fragments, and cardboard, with a variety of depictions, from authentic or veristic portraits to embellished, idealised ones, from portraits of specific people, known by their first and last names, to those that are entirely anonymous, universal or even completely abstract. These realistic portraits, precisely depicting the actual appearance of the prisoners, are a highly significant historical document today. Compared to camp pictures, they show the magnitude of destruction the camp inflicted on these people. One can contrast a photograph of a prisoner taken just after admission to the camp with a portrait taken two or three years later and see the changes in such a person, all the illnesses and fatigue. These portraits also show the degree of psychological changes that have taken place in these people, as the prisoner artists also attempted on several occasions to capture the prisoners' state of mind. Today, we can see different emotions in these portraits: fear, helplessness, fatigue, sickness, and the will to fight or hope. Additionally, compared to the camp pictures, this collection of portraits speaks volumes about the human experience in Auschwitz.

Of all the portraits made by a single author at Auschwitz, the most extensive set was created by professional prisoner-artists Franciszek Jaźwiecki, Stanisław Gutkiewicz and Marian Ruzamski, inmates of the main camp. All three only created portraits in the camp. The last two perished in the camps; however, their drawings survived and are today a precious document. How were these portraits salvaged? Stanislaw Gutkiewicz created portraits at the behest and request of the camp resistance movement. Unfortunately, he was shot at the Death Wall, but his drawings were relayed outside to the Home Army soldiers by the camp resistance movement, thus enabling their survival. The second prisoner, Marian Ruzamski, died of exhaustion, starvation and disease in Bergen-Belsen after the evacuation of Auschwitz. He also managed to save his collection of portraits because he took them with him on the Death March. He hid them under his camp clothes and, just before his death, handed them over to another trusted prisoner from France.

Besides the main camp, prisoner-artists in Birkenau, at Buna, and in many sub-camps also crafted portraits, and some of these created by Jewish prisoners survived, including those by Francis Reisz, Jean Bartischan, David Friedmann, Jacques de Metz and Jacques Markiel. For the most part, these are single portraits; however, in the case of Jacques Markiel, or rather Jan Markiel, a Polish Jew who lived in France just before his arrest, more of his works survived here: among others, two portraits - beautiful, colourful portraits made for residents of Jawiszowice, a village near Oświęcim, who provided aid to prisoners. Both were smuggled out of the camp and given to the addressees. And the paintings are distinguished by their meticulous artistry and the use of materials that were difficult to obtain in the camp, such as oil or watercolour paints, which demonstrates the importance the prisoners attached to the works they created in gratitude for the help they received.

There is a very moving story behind the portrait of a young boy, Geza Schein, also by Markiel. The miniature portrait was given to another Jawiszowice resident, Emilia Klimczyk, a civilian worker in the kitchen of the coal mine where prisoners worked, including teenage boys like Geza Schein. She helped them by providing extra portions of food. And when she donated the portrait to the museum in 1960, she did not know the name of the boy in the portrait; all she recalled was that it was given to her by a Hungarian Jewish teenager, who, when presenting the painting, said - "Thank you, I love you, Mummy", in broken Polish. He had learned these few words from Polish prisoners. Years later, Geza Schein recognised himself in the portrait published in a Hungarian magazine and visited the museum in 1975, declaring: "I am the one in this portrait. My name is Geza Schein, and this woman helped me." And thanks to this, the portrait from the Museum Collection is no longer anonymous.

As we have stated much of the artwork, expressed gratitude for the aid and commitment. Residents of the neighbouring towns and villages showed outstanding commitment, despite the risks of arrest, incarceration and execution. This made the prisoners all the more appreciative that they delivered food to them. The camp inmates did not know if they would ever be liberated or released, so camp life took on a completely different rhythm. They had to accept the routine of everyday life but wanted to highlight elements close to them, such as holidays, someone's name day or birthday. This is also very evident in the art that was produced in the camp.

One would have thought that the physical destruction of life and the accompanying desecration of human dignity and individuality would induce a state of utter stupefaction and mental depletion, thus expunging any will to act in these people. Meanwhile, alongside the brutal camp existence, there was a hidden life for the prisoners, utterly detached from their surrounding reality, which played a significant role in many prisoners' survival and mental balance. It was one of those forms of activity by prisoners to introduce elements of ordinary life into the irrational reality of the camp: to occupy their thoughts with something, to soothe their nerves, to escape, if only for a moment, to a time of freedom, to the beauty of nature and life of carefree living. The collections of the Auschwitz Museum, for example, contain an extensive collection of greeting cards made by prisoners for their camp mates on the occasion of birthdays, name days or holidays, and are such tangible proof that people in the camp, despite the cruelty around them, did not think only of themselves, but also saw the needs of others. In the camp reality, even the smallest gesture of kindness assumed augmented significance: making a name card out of hard-to-come-by materials, often stolen from the SS stores, exposed the prisoner to harsh consequences, but the prisoners needed it. In the women's camp, for instance, female prisoners made miniature sculptures, medallions and other small objects for their fellow women from whatever materials they had available. Among other things, they used a nail honed on a stone to carve, and wood from the leg of a stool in the washroom or fragments of the bristles of their combs as materials. The women handed out these minuscule masterworks, animals, elephants, hedgehogs and crucifixes to each other on various occasions, providing each other with much-needed joy in the brutal world of the camp, and then kept them as their most prized treasures.

The works of art, which were a reprieve from the reality of the camp, were usually created during the designated rest periods: they painted landscapes, vistas of their family home, and portraits of loved ones taken from memory or photographs. Genre scenes, flowers and even humorous pictures brought at least temporary relaxation and thus had a therapeutic and calming effect. Art moved, cheered, satisfied aesthetic hunger, strengthened bonds between people and mobilised spiritual forces.

Today, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum has a department - Collections that gathers, preserves, and protects camp relics. One might assume that collecting art is a foregone process; meanwhile, learning about the testimonies of crimes donated by former prisoner-artists is also the work of Museum’s experts.

The collections of the Auschwitz Museum currently hold about two thousand works of art created by prisoners in the camp. We do not know the exact number of works produced at Auschwitz. Most of them were dispersed; some works were taken by the SS into the Third Reich or destroyed, and some were lost during the camp’s evacuation and in the first months after liberation. Upon the creation of the Auschwitz Museum in 1947, Tadeusz Wąsowicz, the director of the Museum, stated in an interview with Radio Katowice that only one fascinating and priceless painting had survived. The survivors who returned here to organise the Museum started recovering lost works almost immediately, primarily by contacting other survivors they thought might have such works. As no documentation from this period had survived, it can only be presumed that some works were discovered within the camp and in private houses in and around Auschwitz occupied by SS men during the war. Some were returned by people who could have taken them after the camp's liberation. Appeals were sent to the survivors, inhabitants of Oświęcim and the Polish Red Cross personnel who worked here immediately after the liberation, convincing them that the place of these works of art is where they were created. As a result of these measures, in 1949, the Museum's collection acquired 119 artworks created by inmates in the camp. Today, we have nearly two thousand works of art. We still receive works of art created in the camp during the war; we continuously search for these works. If anyone listening to us right now has any of these items, we would be very grateful if they could donate them to the Museum, where they will be given the appropriate care.