The term “camp art” may seem out of place, as concentration and extermination camps were designed to reduce human beings to numbers — to dehumanise them. And yet, in defiance of the logic of the system, drawings, paintings, poems, songs, and even theatrical performances were created there. This artistic output constitutes one of the most powerful testimonies of the twentieth century and stands as evidence that culture can become the last form of freedom.
Art created in concentration camps includes both works produced on commission for the Schutzstaffel (SS) and displayed in the Lagermuseum established by the Germans, as well as illegal works that prisoners created secretly, in hiding. In this context, art is understood both as an expression of intense emotions and as a strategy of survival. A significant number of these works were created anonymously; nevertheless, the names of some artists are known. Among them are, for example, Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz, Maria Hiszpańska-Neumann, Maja Berezowska, Imre Holló, as well as Esther Lurie and Dinah Gottliebová-Babbitt.
The origins of camp art
There were many reasons for the development of camp art, and it emerged along multiple paths. This artistic production did not arise as an organised artistic movement; rather, it grew out of three overlapping sources.
The first was a powerful need to bear witness and to document crimes. Many prisoners wanted to “leave a trace” — to describe a reality the outside world might not believe. Not all illegal artistic activity had a documentary purpose, however. Many works were created out of the prisoners’ own psychological and emotional needs.
The second reason was psychological survival, as artistic creation could serve as a means of preserving one’s identity. It functioned as a remedy for dehumanisation and as a form of escape from everyday camp reality. This can be understood as a need for emotional regulation, symbolisation, and the recovery of a sense of agency.
The third cause of the development of camp art was coercion and its use as an instrument of power. In many cases, artworks were produced on commission or under the supervision of the perpetrators. Workshops existed in the camps (for example, for technical drawings, charts, or signage), and artistic talent could become a form of currency, offering extra bread, lighter work, or a chance of survival — at the cost of dependence and profound moral dilemmas.
Why did they create? Motives and functions of camp art
Camp art constitutes a distinct phenomenon and can be attributed multiple functions. Above all, thanks to camp artists, it was possible to document everyday life in the camps. After the end of the Second World War, these works became a basis for indictments and for proving the guilt of the perpetrators. Drawings depicting selections, roll calls, barracks, physical exhaustion, and the “everyday reality” of violence serve as visual testimonies to brutality. They were often created in hiding, on scraps of paper, sometimes using makeshift tools. Many camp artists devoted themselves with particular care to creating portraits of loved ones or landscapes. This group of works also includes religious motifs and memories of the family home. This strand of artistic production was intended to preserve the memory of the world “before” the Second World War.
Yet this was not all. Songs, satires, and short performances fostered a sense of connection and contributed to the rebuilding of community — something the camp systemically sought to destroy. Undoubtedly, art also functioned as a tool of survival, understood not only metaphorically but quite literally: in exchange for a portrait, a decorative card, a sign, or a drawing, one could receive bread, soup, or shoes. Thus, “barter exchange” flourished. In accordance with the camp economy, artworks became resources that carried a certain value and functioned as a form of currency.
It should also be remembered that camp authorities tolerated or commissioned certain forms of artistic production—decorations, posters, and performances intended to mask reality or to organise camp life in a manner deemed desirable. In some places, prisoners were forced to create works for the SS, which exploited their artistic skills for a variety of purposes. These included instructional drawings, scale models of planned camp expansions, as well as documentation of diseases and medical experiments. Prisoners also produced works for the private use of SS men, such as portraits, landscapes, greeting cards, and decorative objects (including platters and wooden caskets), often adorned with symbols of the Third Reich. They likewise created decorations for camp authorities, for example paintings and sculptures used to furnish SS offices and living quarters (including the offices of Commandant Rudolf Höss). At this point, it is worth mentioning the Lagermuseum at Auschwitz, established in the autumn of 1941 on the initiative of Commandant Höss. It represented the most striking manifestation of this system. The Lagermuseum fulfilled a triple, macabre function: as an artistic workshop commissioning works from a group of several talented prisoners; as a storehouse and “gallery,” where both commissioned works and items looted from deportees (such as Jewish prayer books, tallitot, and coins) were collected; and as a tool of propaganda.
The Lagermuseum was intended to demonstrate that prisoners were performing work “appropriate to their education” and was occasionally shown to official delegations. Artists involved in its activities included, among others, Franciszek Targosz, Władysław Baworski, Józef Putka, Stanisław Korwin-Pawłowski, Stefan Didyk, and Bronisław Czech, as well as Jan Komski, Moses Blum, and Aaron Brün. Cooperation with Targosz was refused by, among others, Ksawery Dunikowski, Mieczysław Kościelniak, and Wincenty Gawron.
Similar institutions existed in other camps (such as Dachau and Buchenwald), although they often assumed a pseudo-anthropological character, involving, for example, the collection of plaster casts or “exhibits” made from human skin.
Dina Gottliebova-Babbitt
An example of “official” camp art is the work of Dina Gottliebová-Babbitt (1923–2009). She was a Czech-American artist of Jewish origin. In January 1942, she and her mother, Jana, were arrested and deported to Theresienstadt, where they spent nearly eighteen months before being imprisoned in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. The artist’s camp experience related to painting differs from the biographies discussed earlier. Dina had demonstrated artistic talent from an early age, later confirmed by her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in what was then Czechoslovak Brno. After arriving in Auschwitz, she painted a mural on the wall of the children’s barrack depicting a scene from the popular Disney fairy tale Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
The mural attracted the attention of Josef Mengele, the SS physician known as the “Angel of Death.” He commissioned her to paint watercolour portraits of Roma people, whom he used in his pseudoscientific experiments. He reportedly insisted that she emphasise physical features that differed from those deemed “Aryan,” which was central to racial theory. Dina worked deliberately slowly, aware that haste could accelerate the extermination of the people she was portraying. Moreover, she tried to help them by sharing her bread.
Her cooperation with Mengele saved her from death in the camp. Furthermore, she managed to ensure the survival of her mother, who had been sent to Auschwitz with her in 1943. Dina painted the Roma portraits in watercolour, using an improvised easel made from a chair. As she herself stated in a recording (Oral History Interview with Dina Babbitt) made available by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, her talent made her “useful,” and thus she and her mother “were placed on the list to be spared”. After the end of the Second World War, she emigrated to the United States, where she married Arthur Babbitt (1907–1992), an animator who worked for the Walt Disney studios and was responsible, among other things, for creating the character Goofy.The modus operandi of camp artists: how was camp art created?
The fact that artistic production emerged in the camps does not mean that its creators had free access to materials, which were in fact an almost unattainable luxury. Those engaged in artistic work used literally anything available: scraps of paper taken from the margins of forms, packaging, and sometimes even cement sacks. Tools for creation included, among others, pencils, charcoal, improvised ink, and paints. Finished works, if not produced on commission for the Germans, were concealed.
Camp artists demonstrated remarkable ingenuity and skill, both in their artistic practice and in hiding completed works. Artworks were concealed, for example, in false bottoms, in mattresses, within walls, and were sometimes passed clandestinely to others. Not all works, like many of their creators, survived the hell of the camps. The surviving examples represent only a small fragment of a much larger whole. Many were destroyed, burned, or discarded. What remains today is merely a partial legacy. As Barbara Czarnecka observes: “Paradoxically—since one must acknowledge that under such dramatic circumstances every act of creation was an exception—FKL Ravensbrück became a fertile ground for the artistic work of several exceptional women artists. Seen from another perspective, it is precisely in connection with this camp, which ‘received’ numerous transports of educated women, including those trained in the arts, that one should seek the roots of women’s camp art.”.
Associated with this camp is the work of, among others, Éliane Jeannin-Garreau, Nina Jirsíková, Jeannette L’Herminier, Violette Rougier-Lecoq, Maja Berezowska, Maria Hiszpańska, and Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz.
Adam Franciszek Jaźwiecki (alias “Sandor”)
In the history of concentration camps, there exists a distinct category of testimony: drawings created in defiance of the logic of the extermination system. They were not meant to decorate or soften reality, but to preserve it. One of the most important Polish creators of such a visual record was Franciszek Jaźwiecki (1900–1946)—a prisoner of KL Auschwitz, a draftsman, and a witness who, at the risk of his life, recorded what was meant to disappear without a trace. He possessed solid training in drawing and painting, having studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków under masters such as Fryderyk Pautsch and Teodor Axentowicz. This very talent—which under normal circumstances would have offered a path of artistic development—became in the camp reality both a tool of survival and a means of testimony. During the First World War, Franciszek Jaźwiecki served as a legionnaire; during the Second World War, he was active in the underground resistance.
In 1942, he was arrested and imprisoned in Auschwitz. There, Jaźwiecki found himself among prisoners whose artistic skills were exploited by the camp administration. He produced, among other things, technical drawings, charts, and utilitarian works—activities that could mean lighter labour and a greater chance of survival. At the same time, however, the artist made a decision of far greater significance: he began to secretly document camp reality. Some of his works he hid, others he passed on to fellow prisoners or smuggled out in fragments. Only a small number survived—but enough to form today one of the most important collections of visual testimonies of Auschwitz created by an eyewitness.
Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz
Among the artists who documented the Holocaust, many were women. One of them was Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz (1906–1955)—a painter, draughtswoman, and graphic artist. After completing a girls’ secondary school, she trained under Adam Rychtarski at the private Konrad Krzyżanowski School of Painting and Drawing in Warsaw, and subsequently studied at the Academy of Fine Arts under Tadeusz Pruszkowski and Władysław Skoczylas. She actively participated in Warsaw’s artistic life and received numerous awards for her work.
After the outbreak of the Second World War, she joined the underground resistance. In 1941, she shared the fate of many Poles when she was arrested and imprisoned in the Pawiak prison. Already there, she began documenting prison life, creating, among other works, portraits of fellow inmates, including Karolina Olszyńska and Zofia Kwiecińska. She used coloured pencils and drew on wrapping paper. In September of the same year, she was transferred to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. There, she worked in the so-called Kunstgewerbe, where she was involved, among other tasks, in painting wooden toys. At the same time, she secretly recorded events unfolding in the camp and portrayed victims of Nazi medical experiments, including works such as “Babcia Belawender,” “Maria Grabowska — experimentally operated on in Ravensbrück,” “Hospital Sister from Oświęcim,” and “Ukrainian Women at Work.”.
Interestingly, portraits were also commissioned from her by female guards. Not all of her works survived the war. Some were smuggled out of the camp, while others remained hidden in her bedding. The works from the first group were transported to Warsaw but were destroyed during the Warsaw Uprising; those from the second group survived. When, on 25 April 1945, she was able to leave the camp and travel to Sweden with the assistance of the Swedish Red Cross, she took with her the drawn documentation of the crimes committed in Ravensbrück. After leaving the site of her ordeal, she created the series “Visions from the Camp.”.
Maria Hiszpańska-Neumann
Maria Hiszpańska-Neumann (1917–1980) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in the 1930s. During the Second World War, she demonstrated remarkable courage and commitment through her involvement in the Union of Armed Struggle (Związek Walki Zbrojnej). A native of Warsaw, she was arrested in 1941. She was initially imprisoned in Radom and later transferred to Pińczów, from where, on 10 April 1942, she was deported to the Ravensbrück–Neubrandenburg camp. As prisoner no. 10219, she created approximately 400 drawings during her imprisonment, becoming— as Renata Osiewała writes — “a chronicler of human suffering and humiliation.”
She survived. After returning to Warsaw, she worked as a graphic artist and painter, designing ration cards and city coats of arms. She also illustrated books and created drawings for poems by, among others, Maria Konopnicka (“I miasto i wioska to jeden nasz świat”), Kazimiera Jeżewska (“O Kacperku Warszawiaku”), and Maria Kownacka (“Kwiatki Małgorzatki”). She never forgot the hell of the camp. For years, she continued to create drawings depicting scenes that reflected the reality she had faced in Ravensbrück.
Many of her works were donated to the local museum as well as to the Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej). They have been made available at the IPN Educational Centre Przystanek Historia in Warsaw. As Renata Osiewała recalls, works from the “Camp Cycle,” created both during imprisonment and after liberation, were published in Kazimierz Jaworski’s 1959 book “Hearts Behind the Wire: Memories from Sachsenhausen” and also illustrated the poetry volume “Ravensbrück: Camp Poems”, published in 1961.
Mieczysław Kościelniak
Mieczysław Kościelniak (1912–1993) also made a significant contribution to documenting camp life and conveying the truth about German crimes to the world. He was a painter and illustrator from Kalisz who studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków in the studio of Józef Mehoffer. His biography also includes a military chapter: between 1933 and 1935, he completed his compulsory military service in an artillery unit in Września, and after the outbreak of the Second World War he took part in the September Campaign of 1939. Fighting in the ranks of the 70th Infantry Regiment, he participated, among other engagements, in the Battle of the Bzura.
After his arrest in 1941, he was imprisoned in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. There, he became involved in the underground activities of the Union of Armed Struggle (Związek Walki Zbrojnej). He was entrusted with the task of documenting events, which he recorded in drawings. In total, he created more than 300 works, which were later transferred to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim. After the end of the Second World War, he was commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and Art to help establish the museum in Oświęcim, created on the site of the former death camp. In 1955, his work received official recognition when he was awarded the Gold Cross of Merit for his artistic work during his imprisonment in the concentration camps.
Esther Lurie
Esther Lurie (1913–1998) was a painter of Latvian origin, a graduate of theatrical set design and drawing studies in Belgium. While visiting her sister in Kaunas, the war broke out. In 1941, both women were confined to the Kaunas Ghetto. It was there that Lurie began her documentary work. She soon attracted the attention of the Judenrat (Jewish Council), whose envoys commissioned her to officially document life in the ghetto for a secret archive, which afforded her a measure of protection.
Two years later, anticipating the impending liquidation of the ghetto, she buried more than 200 of her works in ceramic jars beneath her sister’s house. This liquidation indeed took place in July 1944. Lurie was then transported to the Stutthof concentration camp and later to its subcamp Ľubica, where she continued to draw, often exchanging portraits for a slice of bread.
The works created by Lurie documenting life in the concentration camp fulfilled their documentary purpose. They were used during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a war criminal convicted of genocide, as evidence of the crimes committed. She donated her drawings to institutions of memory such as Yad Vashem and the Ghetto Fighters’ House.
Maja Berezowska
Maja Berezowska (1892/3–1978) turned art into an act of resistance and a tool of survival during the Second World War. Born in Baranovichi, in what is today western Belarus, the painter and caricaturist was already a recognised artist before the war, known for her subtle, erotic graphics published in widely read magazines. A turning point in her life came in 1935, when she published a series of caricatures of Adolf Hitler entitled “The Amorous Adventures of Sweet Adolf” in the French magazine “Ici Paris”. The mocking and sexually provocative drawings caused a scandal and led to a court case in Paris, and Hitler himself reportedly never forgot the insult. These drawings are believed to have been the reason she was deliberately located and arrested by the Gestapo in Warsaw in January 1942.
She was first imprisoned in Pawiak prison and, a few months later, after receiving an official death sentence for “insulting Hitler,” she was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women. With the help of fellow prisoners, who smuggled drawing materials to her, she recorded everyday camp life. She portrayed women from her cell and the camp, deliberately departing from realistic documentary representation. She gave her subjects rosy cheeks, enhanced their beauty and physical presence, and portrayed them as “radiant with health.” This beautification of fellow prisoners was not intended to erase the truth, but rather constituted an act of psychological resistance and care, meant to give courage both to the women portrayed and to their families.
A second strand of her camp work focused on depicting genre scenes such as roll calls, labour, and preparations for clandestinely organised cultural events, including a camp New Year’s nativity play. Her artistic practice was not merely a form of record-keeping, but an activity that sustained humanity—her own and that of others. Maja Berezowska survived the camp. After the liberation of Ravensbrück in 1945, she travelled to Sweden to recover, and in 1946 she returned to Poland, where she worked as an illustrator and scenographer until the end of her life.
Albin Maria Boniecki
Through his art, Albin Maria Boniecki (1908–1995) also offered comfort and hope to fellow prisoners. A sculptor trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, a soldier of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa), and a prisoner of the Majdanek concentration camp (KL Lublin), he transformed his artistic practice into an act of resistance and a means of assistance to others. His most important works were created under the inhumane conditions of the concentration camp.
Taking advantage of the SS authorities’ permission to “beautify” the camp grounds ahead of a visit by the Red Cross, Boniecki created sculptures with double, concealed meanings that conveyed hope and provided tangible help to prisoners. The first was “The Frog”, which, according to Boniecki’s plan, served as a pretext for building a water reservoir. As Irena Siwińska noted: “The ruse succeeded: in Camp Field III the SS agreed to create such a reservoir.” He then created “The Tortoise”, a sculpture referring to the slogan of so-called “minor sabotage,” which read “Work slowly.” The piece was intended to provoke a smile and to remind prisoners of resistance through deliberately slow labour. Next came The Lizard, an allusion to the underground Lizard Union (Związek Jaszczurczy). Worth mentioning as well is the “Column of the Three Eagles”, symbolising freedom, brotherhood, and victory. Work on the column protected exhausted prisoners from death by offering them lighter tasks and a moment of respite.
Imre Holló
Not all documentarians of the Holocaust were trained artists. Imre Holló (1898–1967) was a qualified dentist who ran a dental practice in Sátoraljaújhely. During the First World War, he fought in the ranks of the Hungarian army and was taken prisoner by Russian forces. After the outbreak of the Second World War, he was confined in the Budapest Ghetto. From there, in June 1944, he was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp and subsequently transferred to the AL Riese Dörnhau labour camp in the Owl Mountains, a subcamp of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. The camp was located on the premises of a carpet factory in Dörnhau (today Kolce near Głuszyca).
Holló secretly created a unique series of drawings depicting everyday life in the Dörnhau camp. He documented living conditions, the forced labour of prisoners, roll calls, scenes of guards abusing inmates, beatings, and executions. He made his drawings in black and blue ink on pieces of cardboard taken from advertising brochures. He then hid the drawings in mattress covers, deliberately choosing beds used by prisoners suffering from typhus. As a result, the works were not destroyed.
In the 1950s, he donated 49 drawings to the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest. His works are also held in the collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. It is worth noting that they can also be seen in Poland: in December 2018, a permanent exhibition of Holló’s graphic works created during his imprisonment in the camps was opened at the Walim Tunnels. These are copies of the works donated by the artist to the National Museum in Budapest.
Conclusion
Taking into account the examples of activity by prisoners of concentration camps discussed above, one may conclude that camp art reminds us both of the scale of violence exercised by the modern state—capable of organising death on an industrial level—and of the human capacity to preserve meaning even when everything was meant to be rendered meaningless. Camp art, whether official or created illegally, in all its tragic and complex spectrum, remains one of the most important testimonies of the era of the Holocaust. These objects speak not only of crimes, but above all of an indestructible need for beauty, dignity, and spiritual resistance.
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Editorial note
This article was produced in cooperation between the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity and the historical portal Histmag.org as part of a campaign marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed on 27 January.
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