Holocaust Art – Significant Examples of Holocaust Survivor Art

Holocaust art includes works made by people persecuted under Nazi rule, by survivors reflecting on their experiences, and by artists who documented liberation and its aftermath. Drawings, paintings, prints, and other visual records can preserve testimony, memory, and individual perspectives on ghettos, concentration camps, forced labor, displacement, and loss. Because many of these works depict extreme violence, starvation, death, and persecution, they can also be distressing to view.

What Was the Holocaust?

The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Antisemitism was fundamental to Nazi ideology, and the persecution became increasingly radical after the Nazis came to power, culminating in systematic mass murder during the Second World War. Nazi Germany also persecuted and murdered millions of other people, including Roma, people with disabilities, Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, political opponents, and others targeted by the regime.

Holocaust art can function as testimony, documentation, commemoration, and later reflection. Understanding who made a work, when it was created, and under what conditions is essential to interpreting what it can tell us.

Understanding the Significance of Holocaust Survivor Art

The works discussed here range from art made by prisoners and survivors to works by British artists who documented Bergen-Belsen after its liberation in April 1945 and during the months that followed.

Some works were created inside ghettos and concentration camps, some were made during liberation and its immediate aftermath, and others were produced years or decades later from memory.

For some survivors who later settled in Britain, art became one way of recording or revisiting experiences that were difficult to express in words. There was no single survivor response: some artists made images soon after liberation, while others returned to particular people, places, and memories only much later.

Several women made art while imprisoned during the Holocaust, despite severe restrictions and shortages of materials. Some worked secretly, while others produced drawings or designs under orders from camp authorities. Prisoners also sometimes exchanged artwork for food or other necessities. Their surviving works range from documentary observation to humor, fantasy, portraiture, and scenes of ordinary life.

Recurring subjects include crowded living conditions, forced labor, food, sanitation, fences, illness, and portraits of fellow prisoners. Other works use imagination or humor, showing that Holocaust art was not limited to a single visual language.

The names in this image are taken from the Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names. This work memorializes a tiny fraction of those who perished in Auschwitz in 1941; Dzeni, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

How Holocaust Art Developed, From the Camps to Today

Holocaust art preserved in museums today comes from several different historical contexts. Identifying when a work was made, who created it, and whether it records an event directly or reconstructs it later changes how the work should be read.

At the Terezín (Theresienstadt) ghetto, artist and teacher Friedl Dicker-Brandeis taught drawing as part of a largely clandestine educational program for children. Before her deportation to Auschwitz in 1944, she hid about 4,500 children’s drawings in two suitcases; the surviving collection is now held by the Jewish Museum in Prague. Other imprisoned artists, including Bedřich Fritta and Leo Haas, secretly documented conditions in Terezín while also working in the ghetto’s technical department. The SS arrested Fritta, Haas, and fellow artists in July 1944 after discovering unofficial drawings that contradicted Nazi propaganda about the ghetto. At Blechhammer, Bill Spira likewise made drawings while imprisoned and exchanged some of them for necessities.

British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945. Soldiers, photographers, official war artists, Red Cross artists, and other witnesses recorded the camp and its aftermath. Their work differs from art made by prisoners because it represents an outside eyewitness perspective, often produced only after the SS regime at the camp had ended.

Survivor memory art forms another important group. Edith Birkin completed The Death Cart – Lodz Ghetto in 1980 and Shmuel Dresner made Benjamin in 1982, decades after liberation. These works transform remembered people, places, and experiences into later visual testimony rather than documenting a scene at the moment it occurred.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum’s collections include approximately 4,100 works of art, about 2,000 of them created in the camp during its operation. Museums and archives also preserve thousands of drawings, paintings, photographs, documents, and testimonies from other ghettos and camps.

Holocaust Art Timeline: Key Turning Points

• 1942–1944: Friedl Dicker-Brandeis teaches children’s drawing classes in Terezín and hides about 4,500 drawings before her deportation to Auschwitz.
• July 17, 1944: Bedřich Fritta, Leo Haas, and fellow artists are arrested after the SS discovers unofficial drawings that documented conditions in Terezín.
• April 15, 1945: British forces liberate Bergen-Belsen; visual records are subsequently made by soldiers, photographers, war artists, and Red Cross artists.
• 1945: Survivors such as Jan Hartman create works soon after liberation, while British artists document Belsen and other sites during the immediate aftermath.
• 1980–1982: Edith Birkin completes The Death Cart – Lodz Ghetto and Shmuel Dresner creates Benjamin, showing how Holocaust memory continued to shape art decades later.
• Preservation today: The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum holds approximately 4,100 works of art, including about 2,000 created in the camp during its operation.

Camp Art, Liberation Art, and Survivor Memory Art: How to Tell Them Apart

The term “Holocaust art” can cover works made in very different circumstances. The categories below are a practical guide rather than a rigid taxonomy: individual works can overlap, and the maker’s circumstances matter as much as the date.

Art by Prisoners, Survivors, and Artists Responding to the Holocaust

Lama Sabachthani [Why Have You Forsaken Me?] (1943) by Morris Kestelman

Morris Kestelman grew up in London’s East End in a Jewish immigrant family. He received a bursary to study at the Central School of Art in 1922 and later attended the Royal College of Art. Alongside painting and abstract art, he also worked on theatrical sets and costumes.

Painted in 1943 as reports of the mass murder of European Jews reached Britain, Lama Sabachthani takes its title from the biblical cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Lama Sabachthani [Why Have You Forsaken Me?] (1943) by Morris Kestelman; Kestelman, Morris (RA), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The composition presents a group of Jewish figures amid burning buildings and unburied bodies. Women dominate the foreground, with raised arms, bowed bodies, and gestures that can be read as grief, appeal, or despair. Rather than documenting a place Kestelman had witnessed, the painting is an early British artistic response to reports of Nazi persecution and mass murder in German-occupied Europe.

The work is therefore different from prisoner-made camp art: it responds to knowledge of the Holocaust from Britain rather than recording direct experience inside a ghetto or concentration camp.

Prisoners Carrying Cement (1944) by Bill Spira

Bill Spira was an Austrian cartoonist who escaped to Paris shortly before the Second World War. After a period of internment in France, he worked as a forger for Varian Fry’s Emergency Rescue Committee, which helped refugees escape Nazi persecution. Spira was deported in 1942 and imprisoned in several camps, including Blechhammer. During the evacuations of 1945, he was forced westward through further camps before reaching Terezín, where he remained until liberation in May.

Prisoners Carrying Cement belongs to a group of drawings Spira made while imprisoned at Blechhammer. He and other artists exchanged some of their work for food, clothing, cigarettes, and other necessities.

The cartoons in the Imperial War Museum (IWM) collection were given to the museum by relatives of a British officer who was also imprisoned at Blechhammer and had obtained the sketches in exchange for cigarettes.

Women with Boulders (1945) by George Mayer-Marton

George Mayer-Marton grew up in Győr, Hungary, and served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War. He studied painting in Munich and Vienna from 1919 to 1924 and moved to Britain in 1938 as the threat from Nazi Germany increased. His parents remained in Győr. Mayer-Marton learned of their deaths in 1945 and created Women with Boulders after receiving news that they had been deported from the Győr ghetto and killed.

The painting’s barren landscape, isolated figures, and massive stones create an image of grief and dislocation. The boulders may also evoke Jewish memorial practices, but the scene is best understood as a symbolic response to loss rather than a literal record of a camp.

Death March (Czechowice-Bielsko, January 1945) (1945) by Jan Hartman

Jan Hartman moved with his parents and older brother Jiří from Prague to the Czechoslovak countryside in September 1938. Despite the family’s efforts to escape Nazi persecution, Jan and his brother were deported to Terezín in 1942 and later imprisoned in other camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald.

The brothers survived and were reunited in spring 1945. Jan later learned that his parents had been murdered in Auschwitz. Soon after returning home, he began making images based on what he had witnessed, while those memories were still immediate.

Death March (Czechowice-Bielsko, January 1945) is survivor testimony made soon after the events it recalls, placing it between immediate documentation and later memory art.

The Death Cart – Lodz Ghetto (1980) by Edith Birkin

In this unsettling picture, people pull white-sheeted bodies along a city street toward a horse-drawn cart, while figures watch from windows and doorways. Birkin was deported with her family from Prague to the Łódź ghetto in 1941, where her parents died. She was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, later sent to forced labor in Germany, and finally transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where she was liberated in April 1945. She later settled in Britain.

The skull-like faces, compressed street, and dark blue-purple palette turn Birkin’s remembered ghetto scene into an image of isolation, hunger, death, and communal loss.

Birkin described developing a “pictorial language” for memories that were difficult to express directly, with particular emphasis on loneliness and separation rather than only physical cruelty. The Łódź ghetto was the second-largest ghetto in German-occupied Poland after Warsaw and became a major forced-labor production center. By July 1942, it contained 74 workshops, many producing textiles, especially uniforms, for the German military.

German authorities kept the Łódź ghetto functioning as a forced-labor center longer than most major ghettos, then liquidated it in summer 1944. It was the last major ghetto in German-occupied Poland to be destroyed.

Benjamin (1982) by Shmuel Dresner

Shmuel Dresner was born in Warsaw in 1928. He was 12 when the city’s Jewish population was forced into the Warsaw ghetto, and he was later used as forced labor in several camps. Dresner arrived in Britain in 1945 and began making art during the years that followed. Benjamin (1982) memorializes a close friend whom Dresner had known while both were imprisoned.

Rather than reconstructing a camp as a complete historical scene, Dresner centers the work on the memory of one person and builds the portrait from fragile, damaged material.

Dresner remembered Benjamin as optimistic and recalled that this friendship helped him endure imprisonment and the loss of his father. When the two were called for a transport, Benjamin went while Dresner hid. Dresner later learned that Benjamin had been killed.

The torn and burned newsprint in Benjamin makes damage part of the work’s physical structure. Instead of illustrating violence in detail, Dresner uses fragmentation to connect the material surface of the portrait with memory, loss, and absence.

British Artists Who Documented Bergen-Belsen and Its Aftermath

Belsen 1945 (1945) by Edgar Ainsworth

An elderly, emaciated man sits near the center of the composition, surrounded by bodies and other figures moving through the devastated camp. Another man drinks from a cup, while a group to the left appears to handle one of the dead.

The relatively well-clothed figures handling bodies may represent German civilians compelled by the British to assist with burial after Belsen’s liberation, although the painting itself should not be treated as a photographic record of every individual shown.

Dark specks resembling flies hover across the scene. Ainsworth compresses the living and the dead into the same devastated space, emphasizing how starvation, disease, and mass death shaped the visual reality encountered after liberation.

One of the Death Pits, Belsen (1945) by Leslie Cole

Cole’s painting looks into one of the mass graves at Bergen-Belsen after liberation. SS personnel are shown handling bodies under British supervision, with the camp visible beyond the pit.

The skeletal bodies reflect the catastrophic effects of starvation, disease, and neglect at Bergen-Belsen, where tens of thousands of prisoners died before and after liberation.

Leslie Cole had sought work as an official war artist and eventually traveled widely to record the effects of the war in Europe, the Mediterranean, and Asia. At Belsen, he focused directly on the physical aftermath of mass death rather than on a single survivor or remembered individual.

Human Laundry (1945) by Doris Zinkeisen

This is one of several works Zinkeisen created while attached to the British Red Cross. In the improvised “human laundry,” German nurses and captured soldiers cut survivors’ hair, washed them, and applied delousing powder before patients were transferred for further treatment.

The painting’s tension comes from the contrast between severely emaciated survivors and the healthier medical staff and German personnel required to wash and delouse them.

Human Laundry, Belsen – April 1945 (1945) by Doris Zinkeisen; Doris Zinkeisen, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A row of wooden tables holds emaciated figures, seated or lying down. Each is being washed by a man or woman in a white uniform, with metal buckets placed beside the tables.

Human Laundry documents an emergency medical process after liberation: washing and delousing survivors before transferring them for further care.

The contrast between the gaunt bodies of survivors and the healthier people treating them gives the painting much of its visual force. The scene also shows why liberation did not immediately end the crisis at Bergen-Belsen: survivors still faced severe illness, malnutrition, and typhus, while medical teams worked under emergency conditions.

A Young Boy From Belsen Concentration Camp (1945) by Eric Taylor

Eric Taylor was a painter and printmaker who served in the British armed forces during the Second World War. He reached Bergen-Belsen with British troops and later recalled drawing both the dead and people who were barely alive.

Taylor’s Belsen drawings are eyewitness works made by a soldier-artist after liberation, not survivor testimony from someone who had been imprisoned in the camp.

A Young Boy From Belsen Concentration Camp (1945) by Eric Taylor; Eric W. Taylor, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Taylor sketched what he saw at Bergen-Belsen when his military duties allowed. Rather than attempting to represent the entire camp, many of his strongest works isolate individual survivors. In A Young Boy From Belsen Concentration Camp, the child’s gaunt face and body make the effects of malnutrition and illness immediately visible without requiring a speculative story about what he is thinking.

The work’s power comes from close observation of one survivor, showing how a single figure can communicate the human consequences of conditions that affected tens of thousands.

Notes From Belsen Camp (1945) by Mary Kessell

Mary Kessell was one of only three British female official war artists selected to work abroad during the Second World War. She visited the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in August 1945, four months after liberation. By then, the original camp buildings had been evacuated and destroyed, and surviving prisoners had been transferred to a nearby displaced persons camp.

Kessell’s work therefore records a later phase of Belsen’s history: survival, medical recovery, displaced-person life, and the difficult transition away from the liberated camp.

Notes From Belsen Camp (1945) by Mary Kessell; Kessell, Mary, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Kessell focused particularly on women and children, often drawing isolated figures with little or no surrounding setting. The Imperial War Museum identifies the surviving Notes from Belsen Camp sketches as including images that may relate to a sick child Kessell encountered in the displaced persons camp.

Because Kessell arrived months after liberation, these drawings should not be read as images of the camp at the moment British troops entered it; they document the aftermath and the continuing vulnerability of survivors.

Holocaust art is most useful when its different forms are not collapsed into one category. Prisoner-made works can be contemporaneous evidence, liberation art can record what outside witnesses encountered, and survivor memory art can show how experiences were revisited and given visual form years later.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is Holocaust Graffiti Art?

“Holocaust graffiti art” is not a formal art-historical category. The phrase is most useful for contemporary murals, street art, and public interventions that commemorate Holocaust victims or respond to Holocaust memory. Such works differ from graffiti made historically inside ghettos or camps, which can function as direct material evidence. Contemporary projects may instead involve artists, schools, museums, or communities using public space to support remembrance and education.

Where Can One See Holocaust Artworks?

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum preserves approximately 4,100 works of art, including about 2,000 created in the camp during its operation. Other major collections of Holocaust-related art and testimony are held by institutions such as Yad Vashem, the Jewish Museum in Prague, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Imperial War Museums. What a visitor sees varies by institution: some collections emphasize prisoner-made art, while others also include liberation works and later survivor memory art.

Is All Holocaust Art Made by Survivors?

No. Holocaust art includes works made by prisoners and victims during persecution, works created later by survivors, and works by artists who witnessed liberation or responded to reports of the Holocaust from outside the camps. Leslie Cole, Doris Zinkeisen, Eric Taylor, Edgar Ainsworth, and Mary Kessell, for example, documented Bergen-Belsen or its aftermath without having been prisoners there. Their works should therefore be distinguished from prisoner-made testimony and from later survivor memory art.

Why Did Some Holocaust Survivors Wait Years or Decades to Make Art About Their Experience?

There was no single reason. Some survivors drew or painted almost immediately, while others returned to their experiences only years later as personal circumstances, audiences, and ways of speaking about the Holocaust changed. Edith Birkin completed The Death Cart – Lodz Ghetto in 1980, and Shmuel Dresner made Benjamin in 1982. In both cases, the distance in time makes the works retrospective acts of memory rather than direct records produced during imprisonment.

Isabella Meyer( Head of Content, Editor, Art Writer )

Isabella studied at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature & Language and Psychology. Throughout her undergraduate years, she took Art History as an additional subject and absolutely loved it. Building on from her art history knowledge that began in high school, art has always been a particular area of fascination for her. From learning about artworks previously unknown to her, or sharpening her existing understanding of specific works, the ability to continue learning within this interesting sphere excites her greatly.

Her focal points of interest in art history encompass profiling specific artists and art movements, as it is these areas where she is able to really dig deep into the rich narrative of the art world. Additionally, she particularly enjoys exploring the different artistic styles of the 20^th century, as well as the important impact that female artists have had on the development of art history.

Learn more about Isabella Meyer and the Art in Context Team.