Seeing Through “Paradise”: Artists and the Terezin Concentration Camp

The Drawing Center presented Seeing Through "Paradise": Artists and the Terezin Concentration Camp, an exhibition of artworks by artists imprisoned from 1941 to 1945 at Terezin, Czechoslovakia. Terezin was an 18th-century fortress town 40 kilometers north of Prague, taken over by the Nazis in 1941 to use as a transit camp for Jews. Famous musicians, composers, poets, painters, and scholars were imprisoned at Terezin, where they were allowed limited creative freedom. Although tens of thousands of people died there, the Nazis promoted Terezin as a "model" camp or refuge so successfully that many believed survival was assured in the "Paradise Ghetto."

The exhibition was organized by the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. Since 1987, its curators had worked on this project and traveled to Czechoslovakia, where they secured loans from the State Jewish Museum, Prague, and the Terezin Monument. Most of the works in the exhibition had never been presented outside of Czechoslovakia, and The Drawing Center was only one of three sites in the United States where the exhibition was seen. A broad cross-section of work was exhibited to demonstrate the cultural richness and diversity the prisoners created for themselves under the worst conditions imaginable. Large, luminous ink drawings of life and death in the camp were contrasted with the propaganda images of a "Paradise" camp that they were forced to create. The simple act of making art that did not serve the Nazis' purposes was in itself dangerous, and many of the artists who worked secretly were arrested and punished for creating "horror propaganda" after their drawings were discovered.

Among the artists the exhibition honored were Friedl Dicker-Brandeisová, the Bauhaus-trained teacher of art classes at Terezin; Petr Kien, a prodigiously talented painter and author who made oil portraits of many camp personalities from commandant to prisoners; Karel Fleischmann, a dedicated doctor and amateur artist of rare quality; Fritta (Fritz Taussig), who compiled one of the strongest bodies of work recording camp conditions; and Helga (Weissová) Hošková, who was 12 to 14 years old when she was imprisoned at Terezin, where she created extremely powerful and realistic drawings of camp activities. Most of the artists did not survive their detention at Terezin or were deported to Auschwitz, where they perished.

A full complement of programming accompanied The Drawing Center's presentation. These included a lecture series and two films dealing with the Terezin experience: Terezin Diary, a film by Dan Weissman and Susanna Justman, and Transport from Paradise, a film by Arnošt Lustig. In conjunction with The Drawing Center's exhibition, the World Financial Center hosted a performance by the Terezin Chamber Music Orchestra, made up of members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who performed music composed at Terezin. The performance was held on July 8 at the Winter Garden.