Art can be a powerful medium when expressing emotions or illustrating life as experienced. Artist Bedřich Fritta who was born Fritz Taussig expressed his experiences of the Holocaust via art.
Fritta was captured and deported on 4 December 1941 to the Theresienstadt ghetto. His wife and son followed in 1942. Fritta and other illustrators in the ghetto worked as technical artists. Because of their access to the tools, they illegally drew expressionist sketches of life in the overcrowded ghetto. Leo Haas, Otto Ungar and Ferdinand Bloch were arrested and interrogated. The artists hid their drawings before the arrest.
The Gestapo convicted Bedřich Fritta and his colleagues Leo Haas, Otto Ungar, and Ferdinand Bloch of atrocity propaganda. 17 July, the artists and their families were delivered and incarcerated in the Small Fortress—the Gestapo Jail. Soon after, Fritta’s wife, Johanna, died of typhus in February 1945. Next stop, Bedřich Fritta and Leo Haas went to Auschwitz. Fritta died of exhaustion there in November 1944. Leo Haas survived the war, and he and his wife, Ema, adopted Fritta’s son Tomáš.
From there, trains went to the death camps in the East. Starting in June 1943, rail tracks reached directly into the ghetto.
For his son, Tomáš’s third birthday, Fritta had made an album of colour drawings. Cheerfully illustrated moments of the little boy’s life inside Terezín in a more dynamic and pleasant as well as colourful style.
To me, the drawings below are the most heartbreaking because it is about a father desperately trying to keep his son happy and to try to create a level of normality in a crazy world.
sources
https://www.jmberlin.de/en/exhibition-bedrich-fritta
https://www.jmberlin.de/fritta/en/schlaglichter.php
https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/art/fritta.asp
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