Obj. ID: 49871  Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Náchod, 1938

The following description was prepared by William Gross:

Some of the most famous and moving of artworks to survive the destruction of the Holocaust are the children’s drawings from Terezin in the Czech Republic.  Some five thousand drawings created by children in that Nazi concentration camp remained after almost all the children who had created them were murdered in the death camps. Research of the last 20 years has shown that these works were created in classes in Terezin organized by Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, a graduate of the Bauhaus and an accomplished artist and art teacher in her own right. This is a pastel from her hand, created in 1938 in Zhdarky, an area to which Friedl had been deported from Prague. The pastel portrays the Knitl family farmhouse, in which she was living. In December 1942 she was sent to Terezin where she organized these art classes for children, attempting to relieve their sufferings in the terrible conditions of the camp.  After arriving in Auschwitz on a transport from Terezin, with many of her young students, in October 1944, Friedl was murdered immediately.