Holocaust Literature - Visual Arts

Visual Arts

Art inside the Nazi concentration camps and ghettos was punishable; if found, the person who created it could be killed. However, many people painted, sketched, and also made literary pieces of art. Many of the artist's pieces were found by the Nazis before they could complete them. The ghettos were a very dreary place. Jews needed a way to bring life into the ghettos, and bring out their human need to create and be creative. The Nazis branded art that portrayed their regime poorly as “horror propaganda”.

German internment camps were much less strict with art. A black, Jewish artist named Josef Nassy created over 200 drawings and paintings while he was at the Laufen and Tittmoning camps in Bavaria.

While inside the Łódź ghetto, Mendel Grossman took over 10,000 photos of the monstrosities inside. Grossman secretly took these photos from inside his raincoat using the statistics department for the materials needed to make the photographs. He was moved to a labor camp and died in 1945, but the negatives of his photos were discovered and were put into the book, With a Camera in the Ghetto. The photos illustrate the sad reality of how the Germans dealt with the Jews.

The art, and photographs, that have survived World War II best illustrates the suffering and horror of those inside the ghettos, camps, and prisons.

Other survivors presented their memories of the Holocaust in various forms of art. Alice Lok Cahana(1929- ), a Hungarian Holocaust survivor is well known for her artwork dealing with her experiences in Auchwtiz and Bergen Belsen as a teenage inmate. Her piece "No Names" was installed in the Vatican Museum's Collection of Modern Religious Art. Esther Nisenthal Krinitz (1927–2001), a Polish survivor untrained in art told her story in a series of 36 fabric art pictures that are at once both beautiful and shocking. Memories of Survival (2005) displays her art along with a narrative by her daughter, Bernice Steinhardt. In Israel, many artists have dealt with the subject of the Holocaust, including Yigal Tumarkin, Moshe Gershuni, Joseph (Yoske) Levy and others. Children of survivors have also expressed their personal family stories through various forms of visual art, such as quilting. An exhibition held at Yad Vashem in 2011 Virtues of Memory highlighted six decades of Holocaust survivors' creativity.

A number of artists produced pictures of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in the months following its liberation including Leslie Cole, Mary Kessell, Sargeant Eric Taylor (one of the camp's liberators), Mervyn Peake and Doris Zinkeisen.

The Pop Art painter Dan Groover produced several paintings on the Shoah theme presented in an exhibition in Emek Refaim street in Jerusalem. Paintings on Shoah by the artist.