Irene Awret

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Irene Awret (born January 30, 1921 as Irene Spicker in Berlin ; † June 6, 2014 in Falls Church , Virginia ) was an American writer and painter of German origin. She survived the Holocaust as a Jewish prisoner in a temporary camp in Mechelen ( Belgium ).

Life

Irene Awret was the daughter of Moritz and Margarete Spicker and the sister of Werner (* 1912) and Gerda Spicker. The father, a merchant, was a soldier in the First World War and a deeply patriotic German. He made a living for himself and his family as a traveling seller of brushes and brooms. In 1927 the family moved into a new apartment in the Onkel Toms Hütte (Berlin) settlement .

After her mother's untimely death in 1927, Irene Spicker was cared for by her older sister Gerda until a falling out broke out between her and her father because she was in a relationship with a Christian whom she eventually married. Since the father had been a volunteer in the First World War, the family enjoyed relative protection in the immediate period after the seizure of power , from which Irene Spicker still benefited. She was able to continue attending her school for the time being. The increasing anti-Jewish mood led her to deal more intensively with Judaism and finally to join the Zionist-oriented youth association of workers . Membership in the Werkleuten has become the center of her future life.

In February 1937, reading Leo Pinsker's book Autoemancipation put her in immediate danger for the first time. A police officer caught her reading the book and took her to a police station. However, she was soon released because it was assumed there that the political message of the Scriptures was not related to Germany. This stroke of luck was followed by the expulsion from school at the end of 1937, as the father's war volunteer bonus was no longer recognized by the authorities.

From then on, Irene Spicker attended a technical school in the mornings, where she trained as an art restorer, and in the afternoons she received private lessons from the Jewish painter Eugen Hersch. At the same time, the economic situation of the entire family deteriorated, Sister Gerda had to give up her business and the father lost his job and had to leave the apartment. After the November pogroms in 1938 , the Spickers decided to emigrate. Irene's brother Werner immigrated to Santo Domingo because he had not received a visa from any other country, and Irene tried to get an England visa for domestic help. When this failed, the family tried to smuggle her and her sister Gerda to Belgium. However, they were betrayed by the hired smuggler and ended up in jail for two weeks. Another attempt succeeded, and finally Gerda's husband and father also came to Belgium.

Irene Spicker kept her head above water in Brussels by working as a maid and selling small drawings. She also studied at the art academy and made friends with Belgian students. With some of them she vacationed on a farm in Waterloo in the summer of 1942 . Its owner, a Mr. Dessy, belonged to the Belgian resistance and knew that she was Jewish. He allowed her to stay on his farm beyond the vacation stay. But in early 1943 their presence there became too dangerous. Dessy supplied them with forged papers and Irene Spicker returned to Brussels. During an apartment search, she was arrested and taken to the SS assembly camp in Mechelen . According to Rosenberg, she was betrayed by a Jewish Gestapo spy.

Irene Spicker escaped the usual imminent deportation to Auschwitz and worked in a leather workshop within the camp. When she received the order from the camp commandant to paint the walls of the SS casino and was therefore transferred to the painter's workshop, she met Azriel Awret, a fellow worker from Lodz . In his book Felix and Felka about the fate of the painter Felix Nussbaum and his wife Felka Platek , Hans Joachim Schädlich also writes about Irene Spicker and Azriel Awret:

“Like Felix and Felka, the painter Irene Spicker, born in 1921, was interned in the Mechelen camp. Fled from Berlin to Brussels in 1939, she worked as a maid for a Jewish family and was arrested by the SS in 1942 and taken to the SS Sarnmellager in Mechelen.
She has to work in the Ledei workshop under inmate number W-526.
The new camp commandant Johannes Frank had her called and asked if she could decorate walls. She followed him into the officers' mess, where he asked her to make "beautiful designs that would go with a dining room" for the bare walls.
And from now on he ordered her to the painter's room.
Artists work in the painter's room: the Polish sculptor Azriel Awret, the Belgian caricaturist Jacques Ochs , the German sculptor Herbert von Ledermann-Wartberg.
They have to paint the cardboard signs with the prisoner numbers and portray SS officers according to photo templates. After the liberation, Irene Spicker and Azriel Awret marry. You live in Brussels, Israel and finally in the USA. "

Azriel Awret was initially luckier than Irene Spicker; he was released in November 1943 through the intervention of the Belgian Queen Mother, but was able to make contact with Irene occasionally in the following months. On September 4, 1944, she was one of 527 Jews who were liberated from the camp. She found her father again, who had survived the war in a Jewish retirement home but died in March 1945. Irene married Awret and gave birth to a daughter.

After the war, the Belgian authorities decided that, since Mechelen was under German jurisdiction, Irene and Azriel Awret were foreigners without legal residence in Belgium; they were asked to leave the country. In 1949 Irene and Azriel Awret emigrated to Israel with their three-year-old daughter. They became founding members of the artists' colony in Safed . This artist colony was built in the abandoned houses of the city after the Israeli War of Independence and the expulsion of the Arab population from Safed . In the 1950s, many of Israel's best-known artists had opened galleries in Safed and formed the Artists Quarter Association .

In 1968 the Awrets moved to the United States and have lived in Falls Church in Virginia ever since.

Azriel Awret

Azriel Awret, born on August 10, 1910 in Lodz, who Irene Spicker met in Mechelen in 1943, had emigrated to Belgium from what was then the Ukraine and lived in Brussels. He married the non-Jewish Anna Louisa Bonhiere, which saved him from deportation, but not from internment in Mechelen in January 1943. Awret was an engineer, which is why he was employed as an electrician in the camp. As already reported above, it was here that he met Irene Spicker, with whom he stayed in contact even after his happy release. Nothing is known about the divorce from his first wife, but after marrying Spicker (1945), the two lived together for the rest of their lives. Azriel Awret, who like his wife became a respected artist after World War II, died on December 20, 2010 in Falls Church, Virginia.

Artistic creation

Irene Awret managed to save part of the work she had done in Mechelen after the liberation of the camp. They were later donated to museums.

Irene Awret painted watercolors and oil paintings; Pencil, ink and charcoal drawings are also part of her work. Some pictures deal with motifs from the time of National Socialism and from the time in the camp, including portraits of deportees, a watercolor of a deportation train or the depiction of the dormitory in the camp. Their pictures and sculptures, as well as the works of her husband, issued in Israel and in the US in galleries, including the Museum of the House of Ghetto Fighters ( Ghetto Fighters' House ) in kibbutz lohamei hageta'ot . In the exhibition there entitled “My Home There” - Artworks from the Ghetto Fighters' House Collection , works by six Jewish artists “who were active during the Holocaust” are on display. Some painted in secret and risked their lives in ghettos and camps (like Aizik-Adolphe Féder , who died in Auschwitz in 1943). Those who survived continued to draw for the rest of their lives (like Irene Awret, the youngest of the artists on display here [..]). "

Under the title A word that means the world , there is an appreciation of the artistic work of Irene and Azriel Awret, which also indicates their public appreciation:

“A man, a woman, a child, a tree, a flute - LIFE. These posters express a dream of a better world, and their beauty catches the eye, while their optimism warms the heart. Mystical Jewish symbols appear in them: an open hand against the evil eye, a fish for fertility and a dove for peace.
Irene and Azriel Awret are well-known artists living in Safed, Israel, whose works express a simple message: “We believe in peace and brotherhood.”
This is a remarkable message from two people sharing the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp and have lived through almost 30 years of war and terrorism in Israel.
Nevertheless, they have translated this conviction time and again into many pictures [..].
The Awrets' works can be seen in museums, galleries and private collections, and their posters were given to the Egyptian delegation by the Israeli government as part of President Sadat's peacekeeping mission in Jerusalem. These peace posters appeared three times on television as part of the news; they made history and are not only artistically valuable, but are now also hanging in the White House . "

Street sign on the site of the former Dossin barracks in Mechelen, Belgium

In her autobiography (2005), Irene Awret describes her experiences during the time of National Socialism in Germany, the flight to Belgium, the arrest there by the Gestapo and the time in the Mechelen transit camp. For this book she traveled all over the world to interview other survivors of Mechelen and so to make it beyond her own memories into a document about Mechelen's role in the Holocaust. As there are few written sources on the Mechelen interim camp, the history of which was only researched late in Belgium, Irene Awret's book is one of the few authentic documents on the history of the camp. For her services to the Dossin Barracks Museum, the Irene Spickerplein was inaugurated on September 25, 2019 in the presence of her son and grandson , a square on the site of the former barracks.

For her first book, Days of Honey , Irene Awret received the Janusz Korczak Prize of the Anti-Defamation League .

Fonts

  • Irene Awret: Days of honey. The Tunisian boyhood of Raphael Uzan . Schocken Books, New York 1984, ISBN 978-0-8052-3923-2 .
  • Irene Awret: But first you have to get me. Memories of a Painter 1921–1944 . Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-351-02594-7 (autobiography).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary in Falls Church News-Press , June 11, 2014, accessed February 2, 2016
  2. ↑ Unless other sources are given below, the biography of Irene Spicker is presented on the USHMM website . The story reported there follows the book by Irene Awret They'll Have to Catch Me First , published in 2004, which was published in 2005 under the title But first you must get me. Memoirs of a Painter 1921–1944 was published in German.
  3. ↑ Eugen Hersch (* August 21, 1887 - † September 30, 1967 in London) studied from 1905 to 1909 at the Royal Academic College for the Fine Arts in Berlin. In 1910 he received the first scholarship from the Michael Beer Foundation for a year of study in Italy. He became known for his portrait paintings, including one by Paul von Hindenburg in 1915 . In 1939 Eugen Hersch emigrated to England with his wife, where he rebuilt his career. His work has been shown in exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts , among others . His last work was a mural of twelve paintings: A Requiem for consolation for the bereaved ( A Requiem to Comfort the Bereaved ). ( Leo-Baeck-Institute: Guide to the Papers of the Hersch Family 1941-1955 )
  4. ↑ a b Pnina Rosenberg: Irène Awret (1921-) Biography (see web link)
  5. ^ Hans Joachim Schädlich: Felix and Felka. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2018, ISBN 978-3-64405091-4 (e-book), excerpt: Felix and Felka at Google Books . Regarding the mentioned new camp commandant Johannes Frank: He had been in office since April 9, 1943. He was an SS Sturmscharführer and a former police officer, member of Section II (Administration) of the SiPo-SD in Brussels. Frank was in command of the camp until September 1944. “Under Frank's regime, conditions in the camp improved slightly. There was less violence and the internees received more food. However, due to the slower deportation, the detainees stayed longer and the camp became overcrowded. This led to bleak hygienic conditions and contagious diseases such as scabies and lichen. The camp was closed on September 4, 1944 after the guards had fled the day before for fear of the approaching Allied troops and after the remaining 520 internees had been released. Only 1,203 deportees from Mechelen survived. ”( The International Institute for Holocaust Research: Caserne Dossin (Malines-Mechelen), Camp, Belgium ).
    There is very little further information about the sculptor Herbert von Ledermann-Wartberg; there is a drawing by Irene Spicker that depicts him: Irene Awret: Baron Herbert von Ledermann-Wartberg - to Inmate Wearing a Coverall . It shows von Ledermann-Wartberg in Mechelen prisoner's clothes. According to information from the Kazerne Dossin Memorial in February 2018, von Ledermann-Wartberg was born on August 24, 1900 in Breslau (Wrocław). On February 12, 1943, he was interned in the Kazerne Dossin and then employed in the painting workshop. He was number 32 on the W list (workers) and, like the other prisoners who were still in the barracks, was liberated on September 4, 1944, the day the British Army reached Mechelen.
  6. ↑ a b Jonathan Padget: Portrait of a Holocaust Survivor (see web link)
  7. ^ Artist Quarter of Tzfat
  8. ↑ Identification card issued to Azriel Awret stating that he had been incarcerated as a political prisoner by the Germans , USHMM document
  9. ↑ Pnina Rosenberg: Azriel Awret (1910-) Biography
  10. ↑ AZRIEL AWRET Sculptor 1910 - 2010
  11. ^ Yad LaYeled News: "My Home There" - Artworks from the Ghetto Fighters' House Collection
  12. ^ A word that means the world . A man, a woman, a child, a tree, a flute - LIFE. These posters express a dream of better world, and their beauty strikes the eye while their optimism warms the heart. Mystical Jewish symbols appear in them; an open hand against the evil eye, a fish for fertility and a dove for peace. Irene and Azriel Awret are well known artists living in safed, Israel, whose works express a simple message: 'We believe in Peace and Brotherhood.' This is a remarkable declaration coming from two people who have lived through the terrors of a Nazi Concentration Camp and almost 30 years of war and terrorism in Israel. Yet, they have repeatedly translated this conviction into many images [..]. The Awret's works are being seen in museums, galleries and private collections, and their posters were given to the Egyptian delegation by the Israeli government on President sadat's peace mission to Jerusalem. These peace posters appeared 3 times on television as part of the news; they made history besides being of artistic value and are now hanging in the White House. The Jerusalem Art Prints website , from which this quote is taken, is a commercial site that offers artwork for sale. But it also offers the opportunity to get to know a large number of works of art that come from Irene and Azriel Awret and are offered for sale there.
  13. ^ Kazerne Dossin - memorial, museum and documentation center
  14. ↑ https://www.kazernedossin.eu/NL/Nieuws/Irene-Spickerplein
personal data
SURNAME Awret, Irene
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Spicker, Irene (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer and painter
DATE OF BIRTH January 30, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH June 6, 2014
Place of death Falls Church , Virginia