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You Were Not Saved in Order to Go on Living. Time Is Short—You Must Bear Witness...
A temporary exhibition of drawings by former Auschwitz Concentration Camp prisoner Marian Kołodziej has opened in Block no. 12 at the site of the Auschwitz I Main Camp.
In 1945, Kołodziej created a cycle of 56 pencil drawings that realistically present the things he experienced in the camp: roll call assemblies that lasted for hours, exhausting hard labor, the camp punishment system, and the death of fellow prisoners. The drawings were first shown at the Szołajski Muzeum in Cracow in 1947. These same drawings, now in the Museum's collections, can be viewed through September this year.
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Biography
Marian Kołodziej, former Auschwitz Concentration Camp prisoner (camp number 432). Born in Raszków on December 6, 1921. As a young patriot, he joined the ZWZ (Union of Armed Struggle) during the war, while also preparing to cross the Polish border illegally. Arrested in Cracow on May 14. 1940, imprisoned in Montelupich, and then transferred to the prison in Tarnów. He was transferred to Auschwitz Concentration Camp in the first transport, on June 14, 1940. In the camp, he was assigned to various labor details: the Abbruchkommando, Kiesgrubekommando, Strassenkommando, and Industriehof II-Bauhof.
After falling ill in the Wasserkommando, he was transferred to the Blechhammer sub-camp in Świętochłowice, where he made clandestine copies of blueprints of the armaments factory for the resistance movement. He was sentenced to death for this, transferred back to the Auschwitz I Main Camp and confined in the Block no. 11 Bunker.
He survived in Auschwitz until the end of 1944, when he was transferred to Gross-Rosen as part of the evacuation. He was subsequently transferred to Buchenwald and, in February, 1945, to Mauthausen, where he was liberated on May 6, 1945. Returning to Poland, he enrolled as a student of painting at the Fine Arts Academy in Cracow and graduated in 1945 with a degree in stage design.
As his artistic career developed, he went to work at the "Coast" theatre in Gdańsk as a stage designer. He also designed for other theatres in Poland and abroad, and for films. He never returned to his camp experiences in either his stage designs or his painting. Only after the passage of almost half a century and after falling seriously ill did he turn back to his dramatic youthful years in the concentration camps, and begin working on the cycle presented in the Images from Memory exhibition, which was first presented to the public in the chancel of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Gdańsk in 1995, and was shown in Essen, Germany, the following year. The new cycle made use of themes from Kołodziej's 1945 drawings. Since January 1998, these memoirs in artistic form have been placed, as a permanent exhibition, downstairs Maximilian Kolbe Center Church at the Franciscan fathers' monastery in Harmęże, outside Oświęcim.
