from Fragments of Memory, Art As Evidence Gefen,1998 Permission by Hana Greenfield
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Unique evidence in Holocaust history are five paintings, drawn by different artists on the same day, depicting the procession of the Bialystok children walking through Terezin. Unaware of each other, these artists drew the children’s arrival, each recording this unusual event in his own style.
One is by Ernest Morgan, a lawyer living in Australia who was a Ghetto Wachrann in Terezin. Repainted out of a need to record, and never painted again. Immediately after the liberation, Morgan reconstructed and painted all the impressions he had drawn in Terezin and which were later lost in Auschwitz. All of this he donated to the Yad Vashem Art Museum in Jerusalem. His portrayal is of tired looking children in oversized old clothing, accompanied by Czech policemen and a few Ghetto Wachmanner, with stars on their coats. In the background we see a blocked street with people standing and watching the transport pass by, while all the windows in all the houses are closed tight.
Otto Unger was a professional painter, a well known artist and an art teacher in Brno prior to the war He was seized for painting the gradual degradation of the inmates of the ghetto and was sent to the Small Fortress, Gestapo Headquarters, where his wife and daughter were also interned under terrible conditions. Unger died from typhus and exhaustion in Buchenwald, a month after liberation.
According to Leo Haas, his paintings were found buried under the floor in one of the barracks in Terezin. Other paintings by Fritta, Fleishman and Unger, hidden between two walls in Terezin, were also found after the war, unharmed.
Unger’s painting depicts the ghetto walls, the children carrying small packages, and a nurse in a white uniform leading the column, while a policeman is marching alongside.
The third painting is by Pavel Fantel, doctor and a former major in the Czech army, who because of his expertise in bacteriology became the head of Sokolovna Children’s isolation hospital for typhus patients, immediately upon his arrival in Terezin. Dr. Fantel was shot on a death march in Hirschberg, Silesia, in January 1945. Fantel was a talented amateur satirist and a caricaturist. Painting was his hobby.
Fantel’s paintings were smuggled out from Terezin prior to his deportation to Auschwitz in October 1944 and hidden in Prague. They are today part of the Yad Vashem art collection in Israel.
His painting is of dark, misty figures, hardly discernible. Only the children’s faces, without features, are like small lights shining in the night. The street is deserted, the column is headed by a Ghetto Wachmann, followed by an S.S. man whose 5.5. cap is prominent.
The drawing by Leo Haas I discovered in a catalogue of the Sotheby auction house in Israel, in 1997, a drawing that had not been seen before in public and was untitled. It was sold with three other drawings from Terezfn by Leo Haas, to an anonymous collector
The drawing shows the Terezin style barracks, a tree without leaves in the background, many faces looking at the children’s transport from behind closed windows. It depicts the large figure of a soldier with a gun towering over a group of tiny children in oversized clothing, being led by a person from the disinfection department, clad in a white overall.
The fifth, childish drawing is by Helga Hoskova, made on the 24th of August 1943 on her third floor bunkbed, from where she could see the children walking in the street accompanied by a policeman, while a Ghetto Wachmarin, arms spread out, with a yellow star and Wachmann’s hat, is preventing people behind him coming closer to the children walking by. Especially touching is 14 year old Olga’s portrayal of an older boy holding a little girl’s hand protectively, probably his younger sister.
The horror that strikes us from all five paintings is how heavily guarded were these parentless, frightened children.
As a result of my research into the fate of the Bialystok children I was able to identify these paintings. Today Morgan’s and Fantel’s paintings of the Bialystok children are exhibited at Yad Vashem, while Otto Unger’s is in my private collection.
These paintings are the unique material evidence of the Bialystok children’s fate in the history of the Holocaust.
Otla Kafka-David Otla Kafka-David was the sister of the famous Czech writer Franz Kafka. Otla David volunteered at Theresenstdt as a caretaker of the Bialystok children and was gassed together with them at Auschwitz on Erev Yom Kippur in early October, 1943.
According to Hana Greenfield in "Fragments of Memory":
"After the velvet revolution in Prague, when my book was published in Czech, I received a call from the daughters of Otilia David, sister of Franz Kafka, the famous Czech writer.
Henlena Rumpoldova and Vera Soudkova were two other children who didn't know their mother's fate. Otla David insisted on divorcing her non-Jewish husband, so that he would save their two daughters Helena and Vera, from deportation to Terezin. Otla David became one of the accompanying nurses of the Bialystok children's transport."
Honor Their Memory!
