The Book Of

Alfred Kantor

Alfred Kantor 1923-2003

In the late 1970s I purchased this modest book of 127 watercolors by Alfred Kantor, a Czech jew, who had been interned for three and a half years by the Nazis from the age of 17. It depicts one man's horrific memories of the Holocaust.

The Book Of Alfred Kantor depicts the day to day lives of jews after the Nazi invasion:

living in the Theresienstadt, a walled ghetto about 40 miles north of Prague 1941-1943 and then
as prisoners at Auschwitz 1943-1944 & later, at
Schwarzheide, a synthetic fuel plant near Dresden, in Germany 1944-1945. Kantor was undoubtedly one of the millions of workers brought into "employment" by Albert Speer.

The original drawings in the concentration camps were clandestine, done under the threat of immediate execution if discovered. This was made even more terrifying by the very real existence of the Judenrat, fellow jews who would act as informers, in return for meager provisions.

"...My commitment to drawing came out of a deep instinct for self-preservation and undoubtedly helped me to deny the unimaginable horror of Life at that time...By taking the role of observer, I could at least for a few moments detach myself for a few moments from what was going on in Auschwitz and was therefore better able to hold together the threads of sanity..."

Alfred Kantor

Of the one thousand men transported with him from Auschwitz to Schwarzheide, eight hundred and fifty were dead by Liberation Day. Kantor himself, though, was incredibly lucky. His sister in Prague had married a non-Jew and she had managed to avoid being incarcerated. She sent him packages in Auschwitz, and somehow, some of them got through to him. He smuggled a letter to her from Schwarzheide, and he was soon receiving weekly packages there, as well.

"...Even more than in Auschwitz, these packages were crucial to my survival. Without this extra nourishment, I could not have endured the months of labor at the factory..." Alfred Kantor

After Liberation in 1945, he stayed in the camp for liberated prisoners at Deggendorf in Bohemia, and recreated the drawings as watercolors. They include:

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 glow of flames from the crematorium chimneys at night etc.

"...It was not so much that I wanted to draw my own story, but rather to capture this extraordinary place, so that I could show the world something of it if and when I was ever free..." Alfred Kantor

Alfred Kantor emigrated to the USA in 1947 and worked for many years as a commercial artist. He died in 2003 from complications caused by Parkinson's Disease.