David Olère
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David Olère (January 19, 1902, Warsaw - August 21, 1985, Paris) was a Polish-born French artist best known for his explicit drawings and paintings based on his experiences as a Jewish Sonderkommando inmate of the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II.
[edit] Biography
David Olère studied at Warsaw's Academy of Fine Arts in his early youth, and in 1918 left for Danzig (now Gdańsk) and Berlin, where he exhibited woodcuts. In 1921 he found work with the Europäische Film Allianz in Berlin as a painter, sculptor, and assistant set builder. He continued his work in the film industry with a move to the Montparnasse district of Paris in 1923, designing sets, costumes, and publicity posters, particularly for Paramount Pictures.
On February 20, 1943, Olère was arrested in the Department of Seine-et-Oise by the French police and interned in the Drancy deportation camp. On March 2, he was among a thousand Jews sent on Transport No. 49, to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
In Auschwitz, the 41-year-old Olère -- now Inmate No. 106144 -- was initially put to work digging trenches. He then was assigned to the Jewish "Sonderkommando" squad of Krematorium III, whose task was to clear out the corpses from the gas chambers and taking them for incineration in the crematory ovens. He performed this work intermittently for a period of nearly two years.
Olère's personal qualifications came to the attention of the camp staff, and were instrumental in keeping him alive. Besides his artistic talents and experience, he was able to serve as an interpreter and translator in numerous European languages: besides German, he spoke Polish, Russian, Yiddish, French, and English. He was in demand by camp personnel for whom he wrote letters home in elegant calligraphy, adorned with beautiful illustrations. Nevertheless, he was sent from time to time to work among the Sonderkommando at their grim tasks.
With the evacuation of Auschwitz on January 19, 1945, Olère was among the inmates sent on a death march westward. He reached Austria, where he was first interned in the Mauthausen camp, then sent to the Melk camp where he worked on a kommando squad excavating tunnels. On April 7, he was transferred to the Ebensee camp, where on May 6 he was liberated by the U.S. Army.
[edit] Postwar Artworks
David Olère is the only professional artist among the known survivors of Jewish Sonderkommando squads who worked in the gas chambers and crematoria of the Nazi camps. As such, his artworks can be seen as an expression of eyewitness testimony. Directly after the liberation, he began producing artworks that depicted the horrors he experienced and saw in Auschwitz. In numerous paintings, Olère himself appears as a central figure, emaciated and wide-eyed, often with his inmate's number displayed.
[edit] References
- Serge Klarsfeld (ed.), David Olère: un peintre au sonderkommando à Auschwitz (David Olère: a Painter in the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz) bilingual French-English edition. . New York: The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1989
- Miriam Novitch, Spiritual Resistance: Art from Concentration Camps 1940-1945 - a selection of drawings and paintings from the collection of Kibbutz Lochamei Haghetaot, Israel. Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981
- Alexandre Oler, Witness: Images of Auschwitz, illustrations by David Olère. Texas: WestWind Press (imprint of D. & F. Scott Publishing), 1998. ISBN 0-94-103769-X
- Alexandre Oler, Un génocide en héritage (French edition of Witness: Images of Auschwitz), Paris: Wern Éditions, 1998. ISBN 2-912487-35-8
