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The documentary value of the sketches and paintings of David Olère is tremendous. No actual photographs were taken of what went on within the crematoriums; only the hands and eyes of David Olère reproduce the horrible reality. David Olère did not sketch for pleasure. He sketched in testimony to all those who never came back. The lone witness (Olère himself) is often present. The ghostly face observes with pain the inhuman scenes that cannot be erased from his photographic memory.
The book, David Olère--The Eyes of a Witness, published by The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation in Paris in 1989, contains a three page summary of David Olère's life and one hundred pages of his artwork. All of the text appears in both English and French. Olère's pencil sketches and color paintings capture the everyday events in the concentration camps during the Holocaust. There are also portraits of some of the Nazi soldiers and layouts of the crematoriums.

A more recent book, Witness: Images of Auschwitz, combines Olère's artwork with text by his son, Alexandre Oler. Olère's artistry is truly one of the best and most important representations of the atrocities of the Holocaust.

This short biography will contribute to an understanding of Olère's work.

Click on a thumbnail image to view the full photograph.

Their Last Steps / Leurs derniers pas
1946, 33x41 cm, Olère Family.
Three Muselmänner support each other as they falter toward the gas chamber. Muselmann was the camp term for those whose physical and mental exhaustion made them candidates for "selection."

Their Last Steps / Leurs derniers pas
73x54 cm, Ghetto Fighters House, Israel.

Selection for Gas Chambers / Sélection pour le gaz
1947, 41x51 cm, Ghetto Fighters House, Israel.

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Produced by the Florida Center for Instructional Technology, A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust

College of Education, University of South Florida © 2005.

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The documentary value of the sketches and paintings of David Olère is tremendous. No actual photographs were taken of what went on within the crematoriums; only the hands and eyes of David Olère reproduce the horrible reality. David Olère did not sketch for pleasure. He sketched in testimony to all those who never came back.

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When David Olere returned home in June 1945, "little was left of him other than his eyes", wrote his son Alexandre. He was quite exhausted and emaciated. He was unable to eat, and unable to say what he had experienced. When he tried to tell his wife what he had seen in the Auschwitz crematoria, she was sure he had lost his mind. "He did not have the words to describe it, though he spoke five languages". Instead he drew. He produced drawings and plans with virtually photographic precision. All his later life he devoted to giving testimony, to drawing and painting what he had experienced in Auschwitz. Shortly after the war, he produced a series of around 70 drawings, which later served as model for shocking oil paintings.

Olère's works show every stage of the horror: disembarking on the ramp, selection, death in the gas chambers and cremation of the corpses, scenes no one could have photographed or filmed. His determination to reveal every detail is today appreciated by historians, who use his sketches to help find answers to various questions concerning that particular process of mass extermination.

In later years, Olère transferred particular scenes in the drawings onto canvass, creating new images filtered through his emotions. Giant, screaming images, bearing the mark of traumatic experiences. In addition, due to injuries incurred in the camp, towards the end of his life, he began to lose his eyesight. The less he could see, the larger the paintings became. His son, Alexandre, recalled: "Life was not easy in our small, modest home in a suburb of Paris. The living room, like all the other rooms in the house, was also a studio, and all the walls, up to the ceiling, were covered with designs, sketches and wet canvasses. He remained behind the barbed wire, and we, on the outside, could not reach out through that barbed wire to him". Appearing on his paintings are those who did not survive, sometimes as the ghostly faces of witnesses observing the depicted scenes, and sometimes as the main subject of the painting.

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David Olère, art as an act of Remembrance of the Holocaust - Auschwitz

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When David Olere returned home in June 1945, "little was left of him other than his eyes", wrote his son Alexandre. He was quite exhausted and emaciated. He was unable to eat, and unable to say what he had experienced.

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AFP - The Auschwitz museum unveiled Tuesday its largest-ever exhibition of the art of David Olere, a survivor of the World War II Nazi death camp who detailed his experiences in the gas chambers on canvas after the conflict.

"His work is exceptional because without him (Olere), we wouldn't know what was going on inside the crematoria," Serge Klarsfeld, president of Sons and Daughters of Jewish deportees of France, told AFP at the opening.

"We wouldn't even know what the gas chambers looked like," he said at the site of the former death camp set up by Nazi Germany in the southern city of Oswiecim in then occupied Poland.

"This exhibition comes a few days after the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre. Anti-Semitism is still active, perhaps more than ever," Klarsfeld added, referring to the murder of 11 Jewish people in the US city on Saturday.

Titled "David Olère. The One Who Survived Crematorium III," the exhibition comprises 19 paintings from the museum's own collection and over 60 other works loaned from Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, among others.

Born in 1902 in the Polish capital Warsaw to Jewish parents, Olere studied art there before moving to Berlin in 1918 and later settling in Paris.

There he belonged to the so-called School of Paris which included Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Amadeo Modigliani and Henri Matisse and earned a living creating set designs, costumes and advertising posters for film studios including Paramount Pictures, Fox and Gaumont.

Deported by the Nazis from France to Auschwitz in 1943, he was forced to work in the camp's so-called Sonderkommando, a special unit that assisted in the operation of the crematoria and gas chambers.

'Disturbing' ideologies

In January 1945, Olere was among Auschwitz prisoners evacuated by the Nazis to the Third Reich where he was liberated by American troops in May 1945.

Dozens of drawings and paintings he later created show the life and death of prisoners in raw and disturbing detail.

"This unique collection of works is... the only iconographic source of those events, performed from the perspective of a first-hand witness," said Agnieszka Sieradzka, an art historian in charge of the museum's collection.

Olere's grandson expressed hope the exhibition would serve as a warning.

"Currently there is a very disturbing rise of nationalism and populism in Europe," Marc Olere told AFP at the unveiling.

"I hope that this exhibition will help to inform the younger generation of the dangers of these kind of ideologies and that it will contribute to protect them (younger generation)."

Olere died in Paris in 1985.

Auschwitz-Birkenau has become a symbol of Nazi Germany's genocide of European Jews, with one million killed at the camp between 1940 and 1945.

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Auschwitz exhibits Jewish ex-prisoner's depictions of the camp

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AFP - The Auschwitz museum unveiled Tuesday its largest-ever exhibition of the art of David Olere, a survivor of the World War II Nazi death camp who detailed his experiences in the gas chambers on canvas after the conflict.

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A Day In The Worst Nazi Concentration Camp | Auschwitz–Birkenau

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Antisemitism | past and present | Explained | Anne Frank House

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The Unspeakable Things That Happened During The Romanian Holocaust In WW2

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Brit MP Compare Covid to Holocaust Argumentative???

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Brit MP Compare Covid to Holocaust Argumentative???

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Tory MP Andrew Bridgen who lost whip after comparing COVID vaccines to Holocaust defends remarks

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Andrew Bridgen has issued his first statement since losing the Conservative whip for comparing the COVID vaccine rollout to the Holocaust.

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Ansel Adams, Family, and Friends, Books & Articles, News and Events

Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans is a book by Ansel Adams containing photographs from the internment camp then named Manzanar War Relocation Center in Owens Valley, Inyo County, California. The book was published in 1944 by U.S. Camera in New York.

The reprinted book is a collaborative effort among Eastern Sierra Interpretive Association, Manzanar National Historic Site, CityFiles Press, The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, The Fund for People in Parks, and Alan Ross Photography (Julie Ross), and was limited to 3,000 copies.

Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans can be purchased directly from Eastern Sierra Interpretive Association. Each purchased copy includes a string of origami cranes handmade by George Oda, who was incarcerated in Manzanar as a young man. We have a limited supply of the handmade origami cranes.
Click Here to Purchase

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Born Free and Equal by Ansel Adams - The Ansel Adams Gallery

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Ansel Adams, Family, and Friends, Books & Articles, News and Events Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans is a book by Ansel Adams containing photographs from the internment camp then named Manzanar War Relocation Center in Owens Valley, Inyo County, California. The book was published in 1944 by U.S.

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Manzanar: The Wartime Photographs of Ansel Adams
February 19, 2022 - September 11, 2022
Exhibition EXTENDED!

Manzanar: The Wartime Photographs of Ansel Adams features over fifty little-known photographs by Ansel Adams (1902-1984) that depict how Japanese Americans bore their treatment at the Manzanar incarceration camp in central California. Taken during World War II, the black and white images were originally published in Adams' book Born Free and Equal (1944) in which he protested what he called the "enforced exodus" of American citizens within their own country.

The exhibition opens on the 80 th anniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 authorizing the Secretary of War to "exclude" any residents from certain West Coast military areas for "protection against espionage and sabotage." Pressured by the fear, prejudice and escalating racism sweeping the nation after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the government of the United States forced the incarceration of entire families totaling to about 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent, the majority of whom were native-born Americans or legal residents.

In the exhibition, Adams's portfolio is complemented by the work of other photographers, including Dorothea Lange. Also on view are documents, publications, propaganda materials, artifacts, and artwork detailing life and conditions at the camp.

Working closely with the Sonoma County chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League, the Museum also presents a selection of stories, objects, and images related to the experience of Sonoma County residents who faced forced incarceration in camps like Manzanar during the war.

Manzanar: The Wartime Photographs of Ansel Adams offers insight into a racially unjust period in California and American history and bears witness to the resilience of the Japanese American community. Adams' intent was to create an important historical document and have it be "put to good use." Even as anti-Asian racism has made the news in recent years with the emergence of the Stop Asian Hate movement, its roots run deep in the history of the United States. This exhibition is an important lesson about the past injustice done to a community because of their national origin and race, delivered 80 years after one of America's most horrific decisions.

The exhibition is presented in Memory of Shizuo Tsujihara, and organized and generously supported by Photographic Traveling Exhibitions Los Angeles, CA.

Additional support comes from the Sonoma County Japanese American Citizens League.

Pictured (left to right): Roy Takeno outside Free Press Office, 1943; Mr. and Mrs. Henry J. Tsurutani and baby Bruce, 1943; Manzanar Street Scene, Spring, 1943

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Manzanar: The Wartime Photographs of Ansel Adams - Museum of Sonoma County | Art · History

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Manzanar: The Wartime Photographs of Ansel Adams February 19, 2022 - September 11, 2022 Exhibition EXTENDED! Manzanar: The Wartime Photographs of Ansel Adams features over fifty little-known photographs by Ansel Adams (1902-1984) that depict how Japanese Americans bore their treatment at the Manzanar incarceration camp in central California.

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The Auschwitz Album- Visual Evidence of the Process Leading to the Mass Murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau

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uth Barnett, 83, was born in 1935, in a Germany that was already descending into Nazi tyranny. Her Jewish father was a judge who had been deprived of his post and frogmarched out of his court by the SS in 1933; her non-Jewish mother ran a cinema-advertising business in Berlin. "We had a brilliant future in front of us until the Nazis came to power," she says.

Barnett's father was in hiding for much of the next six years. But the fact that he was blacklisted and his life was in danger may have helped his two children - Ruth had a brother, Martin, who was three years older than her - get on the list for a Kindertransport to the UK in February 1939. Though only four years old at the time, she recalls the journey from Berlin. "I thought it was a holiday trip," she says. Her mother, who had a short-term visa, accompanied the two children, left them with a foster family in England and then disappeared. "Neither my brother nor I remember her saying goodbye," says Barnett.

Ruth and Martin stayed together throughout the war - "which is why we were able to survive psychologically", she says. Her arrival in the UK had been sponsored by the Quakers, who kept an eye on her throughout the war, moving her from the first foster mother, who was cruel and beat Ruth for wetting the bed. She ended up on a farm in Sussex, where she stayed after the war ended. "Four years later, when I was 14," she recalls, "my mother appeared out of nowhere, a total stranger. I didn't recognise her; she didn't speak any English; I didn't speak any German. I was told she had come to take me to Germany; I refused to go."

Her brother went to Cambridge University to study physics, but Barnett was eventually forced to return to Germany. Her father had survived the war by escaping to Shanghai, and was now back working as a judge in Mainz in post-Nazi West Germany. He pursued legal means to reclaim his daughter, though she only stayed a year before returning to the UK, marrying, working as a teacher and then retraining as a psychotherapist.

Only when she was in her 50s did she learn the full story of the Kindertransport. "I was gobsmacked to learn there were 10,000 of us," she says. "I realised I had got my confidence back by then with a stable marriage, three teenagers and a career in teaching, and I was ready to face the past. Until then, I just avoided anything to do with the past."

She says many of the survivors of the Holocaust "never reached a stage of being ready to process what had happened to them, which meant that the transmission of trauma went across to their children". Her own mother, she says, had been deeply traumatised by the war and refused to talk about it. "If you make that taboo, you can only have a superficial relationship," says Barnett.

Barnett has written a play, What Price for Justice?, about her family's story, and says it has modern-day relevance. "It needs to be recognised what happens to a family that is split up in war because it's happening now all over the world. Donald Trump is making it worse: separating those children and sending the parents back is unconscionable."
Remembering the Kindertransport: 80 Years On is at the Jewish Museum, 129-131 Albert Street, London NW1 from 8 November to 10 February Bea Green: 'I was bowled over that these non-Jewish people were nice to us'

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The Kindertransport children 80 years on: 'When I was 14, my mother appeared out of nowhere'

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uth Barnett, 83, was born in 1935, in a Germany that was already descending into Nazi tyranny. Her Jewish father was a judge who had been deprived of his post and frogmarched out of his court by the SS in 1933; her non-Jewish mother ran a cinema-advertising business in Berlin.

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69 books based on 82 votes: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, Number the Stars by Lois Lowry, The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, Between Shades of Gr...

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In pictures: Olère art depicts Auschwitz horrors

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Powerful paintings by an Auschwitz death camp survivor - David Olère - are given to the camp memorial in Poland.