Beating of an inmate

Drawing by Ernest Morgenstern depicting a Kapo beating an inmate in the barracks in Theresienstadt with inmates on bunk beds watching the scene. A note on the back of the drawing states: "This is a daily, but even worse nightly occurrence in every concentration camp. The excuse for their crude ordering us around, by the leadership of the Block and their submissive helpers, is to maintain discipline."

The Sydney Jewish Museum collection has a handful of artworks produced during the period of the Holocaust. Artists did not have ready access to materials. They faced punishment if they were caught documenting the horrors that were taking place daily. Artwork made during the Holocaust, when experiences of events are raw and fresh in the mind of those experiencing it, are particularly powerful.

Such is the drawing by Ernest Morgenstern. Ernest was not an artist. He was a lawyer by profession when he was deported from his hometown in Czechoslovakia to Theresienstadt concentration camp and ghetto in January 1942. His non-Jewish fiancée, Trudy, smuggled art materials in to him with various transports and thus began his compulsion to draw and to document, and to apply his artistic inclinations to depicting events as he witnessed them.

Just before he was deported to Auschwitz in December 1943, Ernest hid his drawings. They were recovered after liberation. In July 1945, Ernest and Trudy married. As soon as they found an apartment he began to draw again. He began to recreate the misery of daily existence in the camps. His ability to not only recall scenes like the beating of an inmate in the barracks, but also convey the emotional experience of it, reveals how art bears witness as visual testimony.