Encore Archive

Welcome to Encore, the place where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on topics of the moment. Each week you will find something new and (hopefully) engaging here!

To access the CLAL Encore Archive, click here.

To join the conversation at CLAL Encore Talk, click here.

The Art of the Concentration Camps

Lawrence L. Langer (Sh'ma 8/159, September 29, 1978)

If the purpose of art is to enhance life, what are we to make of an art inspired by the constant threat of meaningless death? When art records what Leo Haas, one of the surviving painters of Theresienstadt, has called "an existence unworthy of human beings," how are we to identify it with a form of spiritual resistance - as it is often described? The challenge, though not futile, is certainly strenuous, since we are asked to connect the humiliation of man, which is the subject of so many of these paintings, with an attitude that somehow transcends that humiliation. We look at sketches of starving Jews, of crowds waiting to be deported to death camps, of desolate children, of executions, and we search for terms other than "beauty" or "form" to describe what no pen or brush should ever have been inspired to commit to paper or canvas.

The imagination contending with the Holocaust is never free to create an independent reality. It is circumscribed by the literal event, by the history of the horror, by the sheer mass of anonymous dead who impose a special responsibility on the writer's or painter's talent. The viewer is given little chance for emotional release or synthesis: the theme excludes pleasure, frustrates joy, intensifies pain, generates remorse, melancholy and despair. The art has a quality of inevitability that paralyzes our imagination with a boundless grief. The process of recognition that gradually liberates in us a creative response to the created work, a process that unfolds when we contemplate most art, does not operate here. Where in our own imaginative life are we to record and absorb such documentary materials, as Leo Haas liked to call the efforts of concentration camp artists? Perhaps future generations more accustomed to atrocity than we, will have an easier time of it; for them, the shock of recognition may not be so disabling. But if the day arrives when art can celebrate such truth with ease, and audiences can appreciate it with a casual response, maybe we should be grateful to wrestle now with our pain.

A Painting Shows People With No Hope

One of the paintings left behind by Haas represents a crowd of gaunt men and women in an attic in a house in Theresienstadt. They are leaning against walls or lying down; dozing, sleeping, or simply staring. They are weary and forlorn, but most of all, they seem to be waiting. We do not know exactly for what, but the painting is called "Expecting the Worst," and we deduce that they are soon to be deported to the East. Although they are a crowd, no one seems to be in contact with anyone else. Each human being is alone with his or her fate, exhausted in body and spirit, without hope. If we cannot celebrate such existence, at least we can empathize with it, and before we condemn the victim for consenting to such fate, we can try to imagine what such life, bereft of supports that we take for granted, must have been like. These paintings speak with a silent eloquence of existence shorn of its roots, surrounded by a physical oppression so debilitating that we can only marvel at how the will to endure survived as long as it did.

Kantor Painted to Preserve Himself

Alfred Kantor, who made hundreds of sketches and drawings in Theresienstadt, Schwarzheide, and even in Auschwitz (according to his own testimony), then destroyed most of them for fear of being discovered, reconstructed them from memory in the weeks following his liberation, and 25 years later published them as The Book of Alfred Kantor. It would be tempting to say that Kantor's work as an artist during his years of incarceration enabled him to retain his sense of dignity and kept him alive. But we must make some very careful distinctions about the role of creative activity during the Holocaust, lest we sentimentalize the ordeal and underestimate the withering effect of physical punishment on the human body. Looking back, Kantor speaks of the psychological value of his secret artistic activity: "my commitment to drawing came out of a deep instinct of self-preservation and undoubtedly helped me to deny the unimaginable horrors of that time. By taking on the role of an "observer" I could at least for a few moments detach myself from what war going on in Auschwitz and was therefore better able to hold together the threads of sanity." Paradoxically, Kantor's work forces us to confront the unimaginable horrors of that time, and indeed constitutes a vital part of the visual record of atrocity that is our heritage from those years.

Holocaust Art Reflects the Need to Testify

But Kantor is unequivocal about his own capacity to endure. Sketching may have nourished the spirit, but it did not feed his wasting body. Of the one thousand men transported with him from Auschwitz to Schwarzheide, eight hundred were dead by the day of liberation. Kantor had the uncanny good fortune to have a sister in Prague who was untouched during the war because she was married to a non-Jew. She sent him packages in Auschwitz, and unaccountably some of them were passed through by the SS. He was able to smuggle out a letter to her from Schwarzheide, and soon he was receiving weekly packages there. "Even more than in Auschwitz," he says, "these packages were crucial to my survival. Without this extra nourishment, I could not have endured the months of hard labor at the factory."

The major painters of Theresienstadt suffered a far worse fate - beatings, torture, maiming, and for all but Leo Haas, eventual death. Their work should not be seen as evidence of the human will to endure - since it helped few of them to survive - but of the human need to testify, to bequeath to the world concrete images of the worst that man can do to man. Their paintings are an appeal to us to look, to see, a seeing that precedes insight, and. then perhaps excludes it. They seek not to celebrate human resistance to the ordeal of atrocity, but to commemorate the victims of that period of history we call the Holocaust. And let us be honest about this, to ourselves and with each other: an art of commemoration does not acknowledge heroic lives, but mourns melancholy deaths. Few victims, through no fault of their own, transcended their destinies, as tragic figures in literature do, to leave behind a heritage of man transforming his physical fate into a triumph of spiritual defiance. Their murderers made sure of that.

We Are Shown the Ordeal of the Dying

So we must beware of using these paintings, and indeed any literature of the Holocaust, for the purpose of spiritually over-reading, as it were, the literal texts of Auschwitz and the other camps. One has only to compare the withered human form here with, say, Michelangelo's splendid statue of David to recognize what the Holocaust has done to the Renaissance image of man. The goal of the Nazis was to extinguish that image, and anyone familiar with the physical condition of most survivors on the day of liberation will understand that survival was in no way a triumph of the human form. Of the dead (except for those not yet disposed of) nothing - literally nothing - remained: which is why visual representations of their ordeal are so vital to us. They help us to imagine the unimaginable - always the major challenge of Holocaust art - and in so doing they dramatize the reality of our post-Holocaust universe, one diminished and mutilated by the disappearance of so many victims.

Among the drawings left by Karel Fleishman, both doctor and artist at Theresienstadt, are two called "The Torah Reading on the Sabbath" and "Mortuary." One longs to glorify the devotion to piety that inspired these candidates for extermination, even within the walls of the camp; but the expressions of grief on the faces of the Torah readers suggest that they had few illusions about their fate. Fleishman, who died in Auschwitz, had none at all, as the rows of corpses and coffins in the drawing "Mortuary" confirms. Even though some of the paintings depict more normal scenes - the cafe in Theresienstadt, the theater, musical performances - the scenes are gray rather than joyous, temporary reprieves from the ever-present specter of annihilation. In the midst of life they were shrouded by death; and insofar as we have the courage to confront their destiny, we are unavoidably shrouded by death too.

Hope Must Overcome Death

This does not necessarily represent a counsel of despair, though each of us will have to determine the implications of that confrontation in the privacy of his own soul. But it does suggest that any reaffirmation of the human emerging from the Holocaust must include the mounds of corpses strewn across the landscape of our century. A word like "hope" means nothing today if it cannot surmount these images of death. The Holocaust has added language itself to the many other qualities of experience that men must learn to mistrust if they would regain a luminous vision of human possibility. But to mistrust is to proceed with caution, not to reject. The literature and painting of the concentration camps appeal to the imagination with a tentative plasticity: we must do some of the molding ourselves. Art plays a crucial role in exploring what portion of the future remains available after such unspeakable slaughter.