From Ghetto to Concentration Camp, this Artist Never Stopped Drawing
From a young age, Jewish artist Halina Ołomucka was constantly drawing the world around her. So when she and her family were forced into the Warsaw ghetto in 1940, Halina began to record daily life there through her art.
“My job was simply to … draw what was happening,” said Halina, who was in her early 20s when the ghetto was established. In the nearly two and a half years that Halina spent in the ghetto, she documented events including the mass deportation of most of the ghetto’s children and the Ghetto Uprising in 1943. To protect her drawings, Halina managed to smuggle many of them out of the ghetto to “Aryan,” or non-Jewish, friends.
In one of her drawings from the ghetto, Vendor of Jewish Stars, Halina depicts a young boy selling Jewish star badges, which were mandatory for all residents in the ghetto. The boy’s expression reflects the horrific conditions he was experiencing. In just the first few years of the ghetto’s existence, more than 80,000 Jews died of starvation, exposure, or disease.
In spring 1943, Halina and her family were deported to the Lublin/Majdanek concentration camp. Her mother, Margarita (pictured here in a portrait by Halina), was murdered in the gas chamber there shortly after arrival. Halina was then transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she became a number — prisoner 48652.
Despite the danger, Halina never stopped depicting the world around her. Using scraps of paper, cardboard, and other material that she took from her forced labor detail, Halina drew more than 200 images of life in Auschwitz. “To paint meant living; to live meant painting,” she later reflected.
In one drawing, the monumental figure of a Kapo, or a prisoner assigned by the SS to supervise the barracks, stands next to a barbed-wire fence, while other prisoners in striped uniforms crowd together. Some of her fellow prisoners even asked Halina to draw them so they would be remembered.
When the camp was forcibly evacuated in January 1945, Halina left her drawings hidden in a barrack. She was forced on a death march to Ravensbrück, and from there to Neustadt-Glewe, where she was liberated in May 1945.
After the war’s end, Halina managed to recover some of her artworks stashed in the ghetto and at Auschwitz. She also continued to draw. The only member of her family to survive the Holocaust, she continued to depict what she had seen as eyewitness testimony to Nazi atrocities. In her signature expressionist style, Halina drew her memories.
However, perhaps her most visceral works are a series of portraits. These figures wear haunted expressions and are depicted in muted colors, evoking the fear Halina and others might have experienced. Though created after the war, these portraits testify to the emotional impact of the Holocaust.
Halina’s oeuvre provides a comprehensive overview of life during and after the Holocaust. In 2001, she donated part of her collection to our Museum.
Halina returned to Poland after the war, where she married a fellow Holocaust survivor. They eventually settled in Israel. Halina died at age 87 in 2007.
Sources:
Yad Vashem
Auschwitz Museum
USC Shoah Foundation
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to use the feminine version of Halina Ołomucka’s last name.
