Aba Bayefsky at Belsen Concentration Camp
"For the first time I had become aware of man's monstrous capacity for evil. It was the determining factor in everything I have done since." (2)
Bayefsky had just turned 22 when he visited Belsen for the first time on 10 May 1945. For the young Jewish man the experience was of critical importance to his later career as well as to his attitude to life.
""The truck loads of dead inmates were being placed into newly dug pits by captured German soldiers and German civilians who were denying any previous knowledge or connection with the death camp." (3)
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Belsen Concentration Camp - The Pit |
Belsen Concentration Camp - The Pit #2 |
The artist revisited Belsen a week later, and sketched another pit scene. This work shows signs of tension: the lines of the composition are scratched in an urgent manner and possess an anxious, nervous quality.
Belsen Concentration Camp Pit
The final work, an oil on canvas, is more like the first drawing. The contorted, nervous lines are gone. Perhaps the agony is over, and the victims have found some kind of peace. On the back of the painting is a quotation from Goethe: "Man needs but little earth for pleasure and even less for his final repose."
At the same time that he was sketching a pit for the second time, Bayefsky made a sketch of a starving German Jewish boy who died the next day. He returned to this theme twice more. In each version, the artist strove to capture the pathos, misery, and hopelessness of the boy's situation despite the fact that the camp was now liberated.
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| Belsen Concentration Camp - Malnutrition | Belsen Concentration Camp - Malnutrition |
Belsen Concentration Camp - Malnutrition
Echoes of these compositions reappear in two works entitled Boy with Butterflies dating from 1948 and 1949, and based on sketches the artist made in displaced persons camps around Paris and Milan in 1947.
On a third visit to Belsen on 28 May 1945, Bayefsky sketched one of the slave workers.
Slave Worker
On his 10 June visit Bayefsky sketched one of the typhus victims, returning to the theme in a subsequent work.
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| Concentration Camp - Typhus | Belsen Concentration Camp, Malnutrition Wards Were Full of Old and Young |
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