A collection of children's drawings made from 1943 to 1944 as part of drawing classes taught by FRIEDL DICKER-BRANDEIS in the Terezín Ghetto. All children was made to sign the paintings with their own names.
[Courtesy of Jewish Museum in Prague's archives - click here for each drawing's details]
Note on context:
"I remember thinking in school how I would grow up and would protect my students from unpleasant impressions, from uncertainty, from scrappy learning," Friedl Dicker-Brandeis wrote to a friend in 1940. "Today only one thing seems important -- to rouse the desire towards creative work, to make it a habit, and to teach how to overcome difficulties that are insignificant in comparison with the goal to which you are striving."When she composed that letter, Dicker-Brandeis, a Bauhaus-trained artist and a Viennese Jew, had fled Nazi-occupied Austria and had been living in the Czech countryside for two years. The artistic world in which she had thrived had been decimated by a new political order that had no room for Jews or Bauhaus utopian notions. In 1942 she was incarcerated at Theresienstadt, a concentration camp built in the town of Terezin, not far from Prague. There she persisted in pursuing her goal -- "to rouse the desire towards creative work." Dicker-Brandeis, the subject of a show opening at the Jewish Museum today, spent the last two years of her life convincing children at Theresienstadt that art could help them withstand, if not overcome, unfathomable misery. As they waited for early death, she taught them to draw. She treated this not as a distraction but as a calling. She graded their work in several areas (dimension, color) and provided rigorous instruction.
from Keeping creativity alive, even in hell, written by Julie Salamon for the New York Times, September 10th 2004
