Jacques Ochs

Jacques Ochs medal table
fencing
Belgium
Olympic games
	1912 Stockholm	Epee team

Jacques Ochs on the cover of the satirical magazine Pourquoi Pas? (August 31, 1911)

Jacques Martin Ochs (born February 18, 1883 in Nice , France , † April 3, 1971 in Liège ) was a Belgian draftsman , caricaturist and Olympic champion in epee fencing.

Life

Jacques Ochs, of Jewish origin, was born in Nice in 1883. His family emigrated to Liège, Belgium, in 1893, where Ochs graduated from the local art academy in 1903 and continued to study at the Académie Julian in Paris until 1905 .

In 1912 he became Belgian fencing master and in the same year won a gold medal at the Olympic Games in Stockholm in the epee fencer team together with Gaston Salmon . During the First World War he was a fighter pilot with Victor Boin . In 1920 he received a teaching position for painting at the Royal Art Academy in Liège and in 1934 became director of the city art museum.

Ochs also worked as a cartoonist and published in April 1938 in the satirical magazine Pourquoi Pas? (“Why not?”) A caricature of Hitler with a swastika on his head and a scepter in the shape of a headless Jew. After a denunciation by the Gestapo he was arrested at the art academy and taken to the prison in Fort Breendonk in December 1940 , where he made drawings of inmates on the orders of commandant Philipp Schmitt . With the help of a Flemish SS man, he was able to flee Breendonk in February 1942.

In 1944 he was arrested again and interned in the SS assembly camp in Mechelen , where he also made drawings. He was sentenced to death but survived World War II. After the end of the war he taught again at the Art Academy and in 1948 became a member of the Belgian Academy of Sciences . In 1947 he published some of his drawn scenes from camp life under the title Breendonck - Bagnards et Bourreaux ("Breendonck - Forced Laborers and Executioners").

He died in Liège in 1971. Some of his drawings from Mechelen were made available by Irene Awret , who was imprisoned there with him, for the art collection in the house of the ghetto fighters in Kibbutz Lochamej haGeta'ot .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Breendonck - Bagnards et bourreaux

Web links

• Jacques Ochs in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )
• Holocaust through Art Biography