Alfred Kantor, Who Depicted Life in Nazi Camps
Hyfler/Rosner
By PAUL LEWIS
Alfred Kantor, whose watercolors and sketches recreating daily life in
Auschwitz, Theresienstadt and Schwarzheide constitute one of the few visual
records of existence in a Nazi concentration camp, died on Jan. 16 in
Yarmouth, Me. He was 79.
The cause was complications of Parkinson's disease, his wife, Inge, said.
At the Nazi war crimes trials in Nuremburg, the Allies showed horrific films
of the conditions discovered when they liberated the camps. But very few
pictures exist that depict the workaday life of prisoners. Mr. Kantor
sketched and painted surreptitiously, mainly at night.
His 127 paintings and sketches of concentration camp life were published in
1971 by McGraw-Hill as "The Book of Alfred Kantor," which included his
account of his experiences. "My commitment to drawing came out of a deep
instinct of self-preservation and undoubtedly helped me to deny the
unimaginable horrors of that time," he wrote. A second edition appeared in
1987, (Schocken Books, New York; Piatkus Books, London).
While some of the book's paintings were made inside the three camps and
smuggled out, Mr. Kantor - who had destroyed most of his work, fearing that
the Nazis would find it and kill him - re-created many pictures from memory
at the end of the war.
The paintings, done in a rapid, Impressionist style, first show daily scenes
in the "model ghetto" that the Nazis created for Czechoslovak and other Jews
in Theresienstadt, a walled fortress town 40 miles north of Prague.
Though conditions were difficult, they appear tolerable. For example, Mr.
Kantor sketched the new shops and fresh food that suddenly appeared in the
town when an International Red Cross delegation visited.
For most Jews Theresienstadt was only a stopping place on the way to the
death camps. And Mr. Kantor was eventually herded into a cattle truck and
transported to a much grimmer life in Auschwitz.
Finding drawing materials there was far more difficult than at
Theresienstadt, where he got what he needed from the administration offices.
But a physician slipped him a watercolor set while he was working in the
Auschwitz sick ward.
His sketches show all the horrors of that camp: 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 lurid
red glow of flames from the crematorium chimneys at night; brutal guards;
and the haughty and infamous chief physician, Josef Mengele, in Nazi
uniform. (An attached note said that "a motion with his stick" was
sufficient to send a prisoner to his death.)
In 1944 Mr. Kantor was sent with other prisoners to help rebuild a German
synthetic-fuel plant at Schwarzheide, near Dresden. There he continued
drawing, despite grueling 12-hour work shifts.
When the war ended the next year, he was one of only 175 prisoners out of
1,000 who survived a death march back to Theresienstadt.
The last picture, "Happy End," shows a liberated concentration camp inmate,
still in his prison stripes, talking with friends on a Prague street on May
10, 1945, two days after V-E Day.
Alfred Kantor was born in Prague on Nov. 7, 1923. He had finished one year
of a two-year commercial art course at the Rotter School of Advertising when
he and all the other Jews were expelled.
Reaching the United States at the end of the war, Mr. Kantor served in the
Army, playing a glockenspiel in a military band. He spent the rest of his
working life as a commercial artist in New York.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son, Jerry, of Boston; a
daughter, Monica Churchill of Falmouth, Me.; and three grandchildren.