Ľudovít field

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Ľudovít field (born March 19, 1904 in Košice ; † May 18, 1991 ibid) was a Czechoslovakian painter , graphic artist and draftsman . In 1944 he was deported to the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp , where he was a dwarf victim of human experiments by Josef Mengeles .

Life

Feld grew up as one of nine children of a Jewish family in modest circumstances in Košice. Between 1916 and 1923 he attended the secondary school there . Between 1922 and 1925 he also studied graphics at Eugen Krón's private drawing school. In 1925 he moved to the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest on a scholarship , where he studied with Nándor Lajos Varga (1895–1978) and Viktor Olgyai . In 1935 Feld founded a private painting and drawing school in Košice. His students included Jozef Haščák , Július Hegyessy and Arpád Račko .

As a result of the First Vienna Arbitration Award in 1938, Košice was ceded by Czechoslovakia to Hungary and occupied by the Wehrmacht in 1944 . Feld was taken to the ghetto established in a brick factory near Košice-Kassa on April 24, 1944 , where a total of 11,500 Jews from Košice and the surrounding area were crammed into two camps under catastrophic conditions, and where there was a lack of food and drinking water. In May 1944, the field was in the concentration camp Auschwitz deported . Because of his dwarfism - he measured 1.12 m - he attracted the attention of the SS . The concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele, who was interested in addition twins especially for short stature and Malformed to various studies and to experiment with them, took the field for this purpose together with pairs of twins and other little people in their own concentration camp barracks under. He also employed him as a draftsman.

“We were given numerous syringes in almost every organ, given medication, and had countless blood draws. We were experimented with almost every day. [...] Mengele personally supervised the experiments, and he was there almost every day and gave instructions to the inmate doctors about us. ... Even if our living conditions were much better "[than those of the other prisoners,]" we experienced great mental agony because we knew that sooner or later we would be killed and that our skeletons would be placed in a biological museum. "

- L'udovít field : Testimony in the Mengele preliminary investigation , June 12, 1967

Feld was liberated by the Red Army in Auschwitz concentration camp , and Soviet propaganda ascribed a number of heroic deeds to him. Of the entire Feld family, only he, a sister and a brother survived the Holocaust . He was the only survivor of the members of his family who had also been deported to Auschwitz. In 1946 he moved to a sister in Bratislava , but in 1949 he decided to return to Košice. He lived here as a painting and drawing teacher until his death. His art was based on socialist realism , mainly painting cityscapes, but also dealing artistically with his experiences in Auschwitz.

literature

  • Yehuda Koren, Eilat Negev: At heart we were giants. The survival story of a midget family . Econ Verlag, Munich 2003, ISBN 3430171539 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Eleonore Lappin-Eppel: Hungarian-Jewish forced laborers in Austria 1944/45. Labor deployment - death marches - consequences . Münster 2010, p. 41.
  2. ^ Ulrich Völklein : Josef Mengele. The doctor from Auschwitz. Göttingen 1999, ISBN 3-88243-685-9 , p. 157.
personal data
SURNAME Field, Ľudovít
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Feld, Ludovit
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czechoslovakian painter, graphic artist and draftsman
DATE OF BIRTH March 19, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Košice
DATE OF DEATH May 18, 1991
Place of death Košice