Karl Robert Bodek

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Karl Robert Bodek (born April 13, 1905 in Czernowitz , Austria-Hungary ; died in 1942 in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp ) was an Austrian painter.

Life

Karl Robert Bodek was the son of the kuk Oberleutnant and accounting officer Moses Mordche Bodek and his wife Friederike Anna Bodek. Bodeks birth Czernowitz fell after the end of the First World War in Romania . Bodek grew up in Vienna, where he attended school and the graphic institute . Then worked as a photographer and technical draftsman. After the "Anschluss" of Austria, he fled to Belgium in November 1938.

He was arrested in Belgium in October 1940 and first detained in the Saint-Cyprien camp and then in the Gurs camp in Vichy France . In Gurs he made miniature paintings and worked with the painter Kurt Conrad Loew (1914–1980). In 1941 he was transferred to the Les Milles camp near Aix-en-Provence , where he gave drawing lessons. He painted portraits of his fellow inmates and worked on murals. His attempts to escape from custody failed. In April 1942 he was deported as a Jew to the Drancy assembly camp and from there in August 1942 to the Auschwitz concentration camp , where he was murdered.

Banquet of Nations in Les Milles

Banquet of Nations in camp des Milles

At Camp Les Milles, the walls of the guards' dining room at that time were painted with mostly symbolic-satirical "peintures murales" . The dominant fresco on the front shows the "Banquet of Nations" - people of all races at a feast. The fresco was later mainly attributed to Bodek.

literature

  • Jörn Wendland: The warehouse from picture to picture. Narrative series of images of prisoners from Nazi forced camps. Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne 2017, ISBN 978-3-412-50581-3 , p. 199.
  • Angelika Gausmann: German-speaking visual artists in the internment and deportation camp Les Milles from 1939 to 1942. Möllmann, Borchen 1997, ISBN 3-931156-17-6 (also Paderborn, Univ.-GH, Diss., 1995).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Rolf Liffers: Vorzimmer von Auschwitz , in Nordwestzeitung , July 21, 2012


personal data
SURNAME Bodek, Karl Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian painter
DATE OF BIRTH April 13, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Chernivtsi , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH 1942
Place of death Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp