Alfred Cantor

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Alfred Kantor (born November 7, 1923 in Prague , † January 16, 2003 in Yarmouth , Maine ) was a Czech-Jewish artist .

Live and act

The young draftsman Alfred Kantor had to break off his training as a commercial graphic artist at the Rotterdam School in Prague when the Germans ordered the exclusion of all Jews from public and private schools in 1940. On December 1, 1941, he received the deportation order to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and stayed there until 1943; afterwards he was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp and, from 1944, to the Schwarzheide satellite camp . From here he was taken with a few hundred surviving prisoners under guard on a march in the direction of Theresienstadt. The guards disappeared on May 7, 1945 shortly before this goal. In both camps "Fredy" secretly recorded the experiences and impressions of the inhumanity in sketches and pictures, which he had to destroy almost all of them for safety reasons (see below).

The book of Alfred Kantor - first edition 1971 New York - with 127 watercoloured drawings that the 22-year-old made in just two months in a camp for " displaced persons " near Deggendorf in 1945 after the liberation from the concentration camps is published and well known . Free of sentimentality and hatred, the documentary images, mainly created from memory, with brief bilingual texts, reproduce the horror of the Holocaust and the elusive martyrdom of the three and a half years in prison. “Walking corpses! A new one asks: Where does the hideous smoke come from? Life of corpses! A 'greenhorn' asks 'What, the hell, is he meaning of this awful smoke!' "

Alfred Kantor, who emigrated to the USA on March 14, 1947, together with his future wife Inge, whom he met on the ship to New York, always had his experiences and the possibility of preserving his will to live by drawing in the camps reported again in the schools of Maine. The young Inge Nattmann, who from 1940 to 1943 was obliged to do forced labor in a cable works of a German industrial company, arrested on February 27, 1943 in Berlin and deported on trucks - Goebbels had promised Hitler "a Jew-free Berlin" - was delighted about the liberation in 1945 from Theresienstadt responded by jumping into a Soviet tank by Red Army soldiers. "We received medical care and everything was very good!"

Alfred Kantor, who worked as a graphic designer for Mac Adams in the field of medical advertising for 28 years and has lived in the state of Maine since 1980, makes it clear in his book: “My urge to draw came from a deep instinct of self-preservation and undoubtedly helped me to To deny the indescribable horror of life at that time. Through the role of the observer I was able to detach myself for at least a few moments from what was going on in Auschwitz, and thus it was possible for me to keep the threads of my mind together. "

Kantor died on January 16, 2003 as a result of a long-standing Parkinson's disease . Unpublished pictures from Schwarzheide, given to a fellow inmate for safekeeping, are now in the archives of the Jewish Museum Washington DC. The widowed Inge Kantor's return has been withheld to this day - despite legal efforts.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Pictures from Auschwitz: Alfred Kantor is dead , welt.de , accessed on May 17, 2020
  2. ^ Alfred Kantor Dies At 79; Depicted Life in Nazi Camps , The New York Times , accessed May 17, 2020
personal data
SURNAME Cantor, Alfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czech artist
DATE OF BIRTH November 7, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague , Czechoslovakia
DATE OF DEATH January 16, 2003
Place of death Yarmouth , Maine , United States