Bedrich Fritta

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Bedřich Fritta (Portrait of Peter Kien , Theresienstadt)

Bedřich Fritta , also Friedrich Taussig (born September 19, 1906 in Böhmisch Weigsdorf , † November 8, 1944 in Auschwitz-Birkenau ) was a Czech-Jewish graphic artist and caricaturist . He gathered the group of Theresienstadt painters around him.

Life

Bedřich Fritta was born in 1906 in Böhmisch Weigsdorf. Before the war, Fritta worked under the name Fritz Taussig as a draftsman, commercial artist and caricaturist in Prague . In the 1930s he devoted himself to political caricature and contributed to the satirical magazine Simplicus, which appeared in Prague .

Theresienstadt ghetto

At the beginning of December 1941 he was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto on transport "J" . The men from this transport became part of the construction command (construction battalion). He was entrusted with the management of the drawing room of the technical office by the NS headquarters in the ghetto. He managed to gather up to 25 artists in this office. They had to produce building plans and propaganda material there. The artists were supposed to contribute to the "beautification" of the camp on behalf of the Nazis. Here the world public, especially the International Red Cross , should be deceived about the true fate of the Jews imprisoned there. But together they also created countless illegal works about the inhuman everyday life in the camp in Theresienstadt.

Affair of the painters of Theresienstadt

The painters who worked in the drawing room managed to have some drawings smuggled abroad. These graphics strongly contradicted the external image that the Nazi leadership had tried to create of the Theresienstadt ghetto.

On the evening of July 16, 1944, the deputy “Jewish elder” Otto Zucker warned the painters Bloch, Fritta, Haas and Ungar that they had to report to the SS headquarters the next morning. The four of them had no doubt that their drawings were the cause of the summons. They acted immediately and hid many of their drawings. Bedřich Fritta buried his works, including the picture book For Tommy's third birthday in Theresienstadt January 22, 1944 on the third birthday of his son Tomáš in the courtyard. The other three inmates walled up their drawings.

On July 17, 1944, Bedřich Fritta was arrested along with the three others for spreading “atrocity propaganda”, interrogated by SS officers and Adolf Eichmann, and transferred to the Gestapo prison in the small fortress . His wife and three-year-old son Tomáš were also imprisoned in the Small Fortress, where his wife later died. Tomáš survived and was adopted by Leo Haas and his wife Erna in 1945 .

Auschwitz-Birkenau

After three months in the cells of the Small Fortress, Bedřich Fritta and Leo Haas were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on October 26, 1944, where he perished soon after his arrival on November 8, 1944.

Some of the artists from Bedřich Fritta's group of painters in the ghetto

literature

  • Wolf H. Wagner: escaped from hell. Stations of a life. A biography of the painter and graphic artist Leo Haas. Henschel Verlag, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-362-00147-5 .
  • Bedřich Fritta: For Tommy's third birthday in Theresienstadt, January 22nd, 1944. Neske, Pfullingen 1985, ISBN 3-7885-0269-X (picture book). DNB
  • Arie Goral-Sternheim: Concentration Camp Transit Theresienstadt - Pictures and Documents from Ghettos and Camps / Jewish Museum Rendsburg . Ed .: Rendsburger Kulturkreis in cooperation with the Schleswig-Holstein State Museum. Presented and commented on by Arie Goral-Sternheim. With a contribution by Frauke Dettmer and with texts by HG Adler and Leo Haas. DNB
  • Children in the concentration camp -… u. flowers bloom outside. With children's drawings. from Theresienstadt, drawings by the Theresienstadt painter Leo Haas a. Fritz Fritta, photos a. Documents, ed. by Dorothea Stanic, Elefanten-Press, Berlin (West) 1982, ISBN 3-88520-021-X . DNB
  • Novitch, Miriam, Lucy S. Dawidowicz and Tom L. Freudenheim: Spiritual Resistance: Art from Concentration Camps, 1940–1945. Philadelphia 1981.
  • Bernd-Rainer BarthHaas, Leo . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
  • Detlef Hoffmann ; Karl Ermert (Hrsg.): Art and Holocaust - pictorial witnesses of the end of Western culture. Evangelical Academy Loccum, Rehburg-Loccum 1993 (contains two reproductions.)

Movie

  • Angelika Kettelhack: This is not a fairy tale, this is the truth. 1988, documentary about the son Thomas Fritta-Haas

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Angelika Kettelhack: The legacy of the murdered father. In: Neues Deutschland , May 24, 2013.
  2. a b c d e Wolf H. Wagner: Escaped from hell. Stations of a life. A biography of the painter and graphic artist Leo Haas. Henschel Verlag, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-362-00147-5 .
  3. Uni-Regensburg, annual edition 2015 PDF, page 14
  4. Ferdinand Bloch on the website ghetto-theresienstadt.info