Last week us obituary savants were again presented with an odd “On The Same Day” situation. The obituaries of a goofy little Hitler historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and a surreptitious concentration camp artist, Alfred Kantor, were published on the same day.
Trevor-Roper made his reputation by writing “The Last Days of Hitler” in 1947 and unmade his reputation by authenticating the bogus “Hitler diaries”.
Alfred Kantor was an artist who provided some of the few authentic visual records of life in the Nazi concentration camps, smuggling out a total of 127 paintings and sketches from Auschwitz, Theresienstadt and Schwarzheide.
Hugh Trevor-Roper and Alfred Kantor have nothing in common.
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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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