Marcia Specks approached the gates of Buchenwald apprehensively, expecting to be overwhelmed. When she arrived, she had a “funny,” soothing feeling instead. She turned to her husband, Granvil, and their longtime friend Bert Van Bork and said, “They killed the bodies but not the spirits. The spirits marched out of here.” It’s a comment that three and a half years later she’s a bit embarrassed to recount–“It sounds so mystical”–and she probably wouldn’t, if it weren’t for what happened next.
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Inside Buchenwald, an official handed each of them a folder containing examples of the prisoners’ work. What Marcia saw on a sheet inside hers astonished her. Overlaying handwritten music, a sketch depicted prisoners marching through Buchenwald’s closed gates–virtually an illustration of the thought she’d had outside. And at the top of the page, the artist had written a name: Marcia. “It was like someone saying you’re supposed to be here,” she says.
Oleksy told the three visitors a chapter of Holocaust history they’d never heard–that many of the prisoners at the concentration camps were artists and that their talent had kept them alive, if only temporarily. The Nazis put them to work drawing maps, copying stolen masterpieces, designing furniture, and painting landscapes and portraits. Many of the artists secretly documented the atrocities they witnessed and then hid the evidence under floorboards, behind walls, in cans they buried underground–wherever they could. When the buildings were destroyed after the war, thousands of pieces of art were discovered.
One of them, an 84-year-old Polish Catholic named Jan Komski, lives in Arlington, Virginia. A member of the Polish resistance and a graduate of Krakow’s Academy of Fine Arts, Komski arrived at Auschwitz as a political prisoner in June 1940, when the camp was still under construction. He drew maps and architectural plans for the Nazis, and while he did a few sketches on his own, he says he never made anything the SS would have found objectionable. Only later, while living in a displaced persons camp, did he feel safe enough to make art that revealed the heinous treatment he and others had received. About 50 of these pieces are now at Auschwitz.
