by Adele R
Originally published in Currents December 2004/January 2005
Copyright © 2004-2005 AWC Hamburg

 

Note to our readers: Although it is in the Christmas issue, this is not exactly a Christmas story. Or perhaps it is after all. It is the story of a woman who brought light and joy into a world of darkness, and it is a story about the power of love. Isn’t that what Christmas is really all about?

A superb artist, Friedl Dicker, born in Vienna in 1898, first came to the attention of the European art world with the work begun in her four years in Weimar, Germany, at the Bauhaus, the revolutionary school which was the single most important force in architecture and design between the World Wars. She was deeply influenced by her teachers, especially Walter Gropius, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, and her work reflected those geometric and abstract styles. In 1923 she opened a design atelier with her lover, Franz Singer, a man who was to cause her great emotional pain but with whom she created an extraordinary range of works, including wonderfully imaginative designs for costumes and stage sets, toys and accessories, as well as buildings, furniture, textiles and paintings. Later in her life she developed a distinctive impressionist painting style, and these were the paintings which resonated especially with me when I saw them at the international exhibition of 300 of her works now at The Jewish Museum on 92nd Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City. (The exhibit is there until January 16, 2005.)

In response to the rise of Hitler and fascism, Friedl Dicker became an active member of the Communist Party and was eventually interrogated and jailed by the Nazis. (There are a few gut-wrenching canvasses in the exhibit which she painted about this experience.) But Dicker was able to convince her captors to release her, and shortly after that she fled to Prague where she continued to be a political activist. In Prague she met and married her second cousin, Pavel Brandeis, a man she loved deeply and with whom she found great happiness, despite the dire circumstances of their lives.

As the Nazis imposed ever more restrictions on the Jews, friends and admirers of Dicker-Brandeis implored her to immigrate. A number of possibilities were available to her, including a treasured visa for Palestine but, as her husband Pavel was not able to secure a visa for himself, she chose to remain with him. It proved a fatal decision.

Friedl and Pavel Brandeis were forced by the racist policies by then in force in Czechoslovakia to ever smaller quarters and eventually left Prague in 1938 to live in Hronov, a country village, where they were happy for a time. Here Dicker-Brandeis produced lyrical figurative paintings – landscapes, still lifes and portraits. But in 1942, Friedl and Pavel Brandeis were rounded-up with the other Jews of the village and sent to the Bohemian town of Terésin.

In 1941 the Nazis had converted the small town of Terésin into what was to be one of their greatest propaganda ploys, a concentration camp which they labeled simply “a ghetto” and claimed was the “ideal city of the Jews”. Its German name was Theresienstadt. The Nazis produced a film, shot at the camp, showing Jews sitting at a café in the sunshine drinking coffee, musical concerts and theatrical productions – all staged for the movie, of course – with which they hoped to convince the German people (and the world) that the Jews who were disappearing all over Europe were being treated humanely.

It was here, in Theresienstadt, that Friedl Dicker-Brandeis harnessed her courage and talent to help others endure. She convinced the authorities to assign her (and her husband) to living space in the children’s home for girls. An optimistic and joyous person all her life, she never painted the horrors and terrors she experienced in the camp, and she was able to keep her cheerful, happy countenance as a badge of hope even in that dreadful place. She began art classes for children throughout the camp and extended them to the elderly, the infirm and the traumatized of all ages. But it was the children who were her main concern. It was her work here, and a study she wrote on her teaching methods which miraculously survived the Holocaust, that contributed so much to the foundation and understanding of traumatic art therapy today. A member of those art classes who survived the Holocaust wrote later of her art teacher: “I remember Ms. Brandeis as a tender, highly intelligent woman who managed – for some hours every week – to create a fairy world for us in Terésin…a world which helped us forget all the surrounding hardships which we were not spared, despite our early age.”

Despite their use of Theresienstadt as a propaganda vehicle, the Nazis never lost sight of their goal to eliminate all the Jews of Europe. A judge who survived the camp wrote, “…’Transport’ was a word of terror; it paralyzed all life and thinking. One heard the order ‘five thousand people to be processed’. Who would be called – your mother, your child, your friend – yourself?”

Of course, along with the transports, famine and disease prevailed there as at the other camps. The statistics are clear and numbing:

• a little over 141,000 Jews passed through Theresienstadt
• 33,456 died in Theresienstadt
• 88,202 were transported to death camps in the east
• when the camp was liberated on May 9, 1945, there were 16,832 prisoners still alive
• of the 15,000 children transported from Theresienstadt to Ausch-witz, only about 100 survived – none under the age of 14

Dicker-Brandeis and her husband Pavel (whom she had insisted learn carpentry while they were still in Prague) were deported to Auschwitz on August 6, 1944. Three days later Friedl Dicker-Brandeis was put to death. Her husband Pavel survived, thanks to his useful skill as a carpenter, and lived until 1971. Also surviving the teacher and her pupils were 5,000 drawings made by the children of Theresienstadt which Dicker-Brandeis collected and stored in two suitcases hidden in an attic the night before her deportation. The drawings were discovered and ten years later shown in an exhibition. In 1964, some of them were published, along with the desperate poems of the children, in a book titled, I Never Saw Another Butterfly.

I Never Saw Another Butterfly by Hana Volaková is available in paperback from Amazon.de for EUR 17.10. Click on the book or here to order it from Amazon.de.