Paintings from an Auschwitz survivor depicting the hells and horrors of the concentration camp, its punishments, pains and deaths, have been donated to the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum.
The 19 harrowing paintings were created after the war by Edith Birkin née Hofmann, a Czech jew who was sent to the camp in 1944 and who moved to England after she was liberated. She died last year at the age of 91.
Two of the paintings portray the notorious railway entrance to the extermination camp which saw more than a million people die though mass extermination, starvation or disease.
People are seen with faces full of anguish, their eyes are wide with fear and their mouths are open in terror, reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s The Scream painting.
The sky above the camp is daubed in furious fire-reds and yellows as ominous black smoke fills the sky; as part of the Nazi’s grim procedure, hundreds of bodies were burned in crematoriums after the victims had been gassed.
One of the paintings shows a crowd waiting by the train tracks, divided into two groups, awaiting selection for the gas chambers, while another shows the vast area almost entirely desolate, save for bags of luggage and children’s toys strewn about on the floor, abandoned by the victims.
One of the paintings shows a crowd waiting by the train tracks, divided into two groups, awaiting selection for the gas chambers, the notorious railway entrance to the camp is seen in the background and the sky is filled with angry reddish colours and black smoke – it was painted by former inmate Edith Birkin née Hofmann, a Czech jew who was sent to the camp in 1944
One of the paintings shows a smaller gaunt figure, perhaps a woman or child, collapsed on the ground in another’s arms (left), many of the prisoners died from undernourished, being worked to the death deliberately, and in another an elderly woman (right), a shawl around her head and a Star of David emblazoned on her chest, stands with her hands folded, looking exhaustively through the barbed wire fence.
Another image shows a sallow prisoner collapsed on a barbed wire fence, with a smoking chimney from the extermination camp spewing forth in the background.
Born in 1927 in Prague, in 1941, artist Edith Birkin née Hofmann and her family were deported to the Litzmannstadt Ghetto in what is now the city of Lodz in Poland
One of the paintings shows a smaller gaunt figure, perhaps a woman or child, collapsed on the ground in another’s arms, many of the prisoners died from undernourished, being worked to the death deliberately.
Throughout many of these and other works by Birkin, who also wrote poetry about her experiences, the people she painted are depicted in vivid colours.
She said of her work: ‘How many people stop to think that the six million dead were individual human beings with dreams of their own, each with a story to tell, each wanting to live? This is why the people in my paintings are depicted in different colours.’
In one of the works an elderly woman, a shawl around her head and a Star of David emblazoned on her chest, stands with her hands folded, looking exhaustively through the barbed wire fence.
Agnieszka Sieradzka from the museum’s art collection department, said the works present life in the camp, punishments, deaths during escape attempts, marches of death and recollections and portraits of people the artist remembered.
She said: ‘The bright colours and wildly deformed characters provoke anxiety and fear. They are a metaphor for the pain and suffering through which the artist must have gone.
‘In conjunction with the poems that accompany them, the pictures represent the extremely personal witness account of a woman who went through the hell of the concentration camps.’
Another image of the infamous central entrance shows the area almost entirely desolate, save for bags of luggage and children’s toys strewn about on the floor, abandoned by the victims
This Birkin painting shows a sallow prisoner collapsed on a barbed wire fence, with a smoking chimney from the extermination camp spewing forth in the background
Born in 1927 in Prague, in 1941, artist Edith Birkin and her family were deported to the Litzmannstadt Ghetto in what is now the city of Lodz in Poland.
In 1944 she was deported to Auschwitz II-Birkenau before being transferred to the Gross-Rosen sub-camp in Germany over 170 miles away in what became known as a Death March.
She was later liberated by British troops and after the war, returned to Prague before settling in the UK where she taught English.
The 19 harrowing paintings were created after the war by former inmate Edith Birkin née Hofmann and have been donated to the Auschwitz museum in Poland following her death last year
In the 1970s Edith Birkin began to study art and exhibiting her collections.
Her daughter Amanada Steart said: ‘Art for my mother was a way to fight the trauma she suffered after the war.
‘My mother wanted to pass on the paintings to future generations so that things like Auschwitz would never happen again so that people would not have any prejudices because towards a different faith or race.’
Birkin died in 2018 at the age of 91.