Alfred
Kantor, Who Depicted Life in Nazi Camps, Dies at 79
January 26, 2003
By PAUL LEWIS
Alfred Kantor, whose
watercolors and sketches recreating daily life in Auschwitz,
Theresienstadt
and Schwarzheide
constitute one of the few visual records of existence in a Nazi concentration
camp, died on Jan. 16 in Yarmouth,
Me. He was 79.
The cause was complications of Parkinson's
disease, his wife, Inge, said.
At the Nazi war crimes trials in Nuremburg,
the Allies
showed horrific
films of the conditions discovered when they liberated the camps. But
very few pictures exist that depict the workaday life of prisoners. Mr.
Kantor sketched and painted surreptitiously, mainly at night.
His 127 paintings and sketches of concentration camp life were published
in 1971 by McGraw-Hill as "The
Book of Alfred Kantor," which included his account of his experiences.
"My commitment to drawing came out of a deep instinct of self-preservation
and undoubtedly helped me to deny the unimaginable horrors of that time,"
he wrote. A second edition appeared in 1987, (Schocken Books, New York;
Piatkus Books, London).
While some of the book's paintings were made inside the three camps and
smuggled out, Mr. Kantor — who had destroyed most of his work, fearing
that the Nazis would find it and kill him — re-created many pictures
from memory
at the end of the war.
The paintings, done in a rapid, Impressionist
style, first show daily scenes in the "model
ghetto" that the Nazis created for Czechoslovak and other Jews
in Theresienstadt, a walled fortress town 40 miles north of Prague.
Though conditions were difficult, they appear tolerable. For example,
Mr. Kantor sketched the new shops and fresh
food that suddenly appeared in the town when an International
Red Cross delegation visited.
For most Jews Theresienstadt was only a stopping place on the way to the
death camps. And Mr. Kantor was eventually herded
into a cattle truck and transported to a much grimmer life in Auschwitz.
Finding drawing
materials there was far more difficult than at Theresienstadt, where
he got what he needed from the administration offices. But a physician
slipped him a watercolor set while he was working in the Auschwitz sick
ward.
His sketches show all the horrors of that camp: naked women being sorted
into those who would live and those who would die; prisoners loading corpses
from the gas chambers into trucks; the desperate search for food; the
lurid red glow of flames from the crematorium
chimneys at night; brutal
guards; and the haughty
and infamous chief physician, Josef
Mengele, in Nazi uniform. (An attached note said that "a motion
with his stick" was sufficient to send a prisoner to his death.)
In 1944 Mr. Kantor was sent with other prisoners to help rebuild a German
synthetic-fuel
plant at Schwarzheide, near Dresden.
There he continued drawing, despite grueling 12-hour work shifts.
When the war ended the next year, he was one of only 175 prisoners out
of 1,000 who survived a death
march back to Theresienstadt.
The last picture, "Happy End," shows a liberated concentration
camp inmate, still
in his prison stripes, talking with friends on a Prague street on
May 10, 1945, two days after V-E Day.
Alfred Kantor was born in Prague on Nov.
7, 1923. He had finished one year of a two-year commercial art course
at the Rotter
School of Advertising when he and all the other Jews were expelled.
Reaching the United States at the end of the war, Mr. Kantor served in
the Army, playing a glockenspiel
in a military band. He spent the rest of his working life as a
commercial artist in New York.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son, Jerry, of Boston; a
daughter, Monica Churchill of Falmouth, Me.; and three grandchildren.
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