OHA 1978

Auschwitz - The Dead will be avenged! Halt! Stój!

Art: 1978
Size: Drawing paper,4 ft H x 2 ft w, framed
Media: Wet & dry drawing media
Collection: University of Missouri, Museum of Art & Archaeology. Gift of the artist.

Elementary/primary school age teachers: This artwork is NOT shown in power-point presentations with classes of elementary/primary school children attending guest tolerance education with art presented by the artist.

The painting on paper was created when I was a graduate MFA student at the Art Dept, Univ. of Missouri, Columbia. After reading Elie Wiesel's Night, I did the art in an all-night drawing & painting session. That all night stint was fueled by the excesses and foolishness of being young: coffee and cigarettes. Now forty years later, I’m glad to still be here; I finally quit smoking in 1987.

Six years after I did the artwork, I visited both the Auschwitz and Birkenau death camp memorial sites in Poland, summer 1984. I visited them again in 1985.

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Auschwitz-Birkenau was a mass murder-extermination-death camp. It was not a "concentration camp" even though the Nazis used the wordage konzentrationslager for all 1,500 or so camps, including their mass murder (e.g. Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno, Majdanek, Belzec) camps.

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Other Nazi camps that were not mass murder camp were still murderous and tens of thousands perished at the concentration camps (e.g. Pawiak Prison, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Mauthausen, Terezin, etc).

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I prefer to use “concentration-death camps” re the konzentrationslager camps that were not exclusively mass murder death camps.

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The ghettos were also concentration-death camps. In the Warsaw ghetto, two hundred thousand prisoners were murdered between 1990 and 1942; all told almost all of the 500,000 prisoners in that ghetto were murdered by war’s end. Those who were captured alive during the time of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, that began April 19, 1943 were either shot in the ghetto or transported to the Treblinka death camp, where most arrivals were murdered on the day of arrival. 

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Using the term “concentration camp” to describe the mass murder death camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka is a gift to professional Holocaust deniers. If you hear, or read of, or see a television show, etc. where Auschwitz is described as a concentration camp, please correct and educate them. Professional Holocaust deniers love it when the Nazi mass murder camps are described (e.g. in news articles, tv news reports, Wikipedia) as 'concentration camps.' Why? They use that to buttress their poisonous lies and obscene claims that there was no mass murder nor gassings at the Nazi death camps. The Holocaust deniers claim the Nazi death camps were the same as the US prison camps where mainland Japanese-Americans were imprisoned during WWII. Those camps, while immoral and a huge violation of human rights of those imprisoned, are now called concentration by some, including in the NYTimes. Yet those prison camps had no beatings, slave labor, forced starvation, hangings, gassings, shootings and diabolical medical “experiments” as the Nazi concentration-death camps and Nazi mass murder death camps had.
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An op-ed on the wordage of Concentration camps, written by the artist, published in Seattle’s Real Change newspaper, Dec. 5, 2018:
“The term ‘concentration camp’ is a troubling euphemism; let’s be blunt”