image credit: Girl with yellow star, 1942/3, ink on paper, Marianne Grant Holocaust Artworks Collection © The family of Marianne Grant
27 January 2025 is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp. Of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz by the fascist Nazi regime, 1.1 million were murdered. The number of victims includes 960,000 Jews (865,000 of whom were gassed on arrival), 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Romani, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and up to 15,000 others, including Black people, disabled people, queer people, religious minorities, as well as political opponents. Those not gassed were murdered via starvation, exhaustion, disease, individual executions, or beatings. Others were killed during medical experiments.
One of the few who survived was young art student Marianne Grant (née Mariana Hermannová, aka ‘Mausi’) who was sent to work in the children’s block, looking after those who had been separated from their parents. Using what materials she could find, she taught the children art. Having spotted her talent, an officer asked her to make hand painted story books for his children, and later took her to paint a young Roma woman as a present for his wife. After Marianne fell ill with pleurisy, and no medicine was provided, he brought Marianne additional bread and butter for her, likely saving her life. News of Marianne’s artistic talent spread in the camp, and she was later summoned to Nazi physician Joseph Mengele, who ordered her to draw the family trees of his victims and the markings on the bodies of twins subjected to his experiments.
After the war Marianne moved to the UK, where she finished her art education at Glasgow School of Art. Marianne’s work is now held in the permanent collection of Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum
You can read more about Marianne’s work and Holocaust Memorial Day at hmd.org.uk
(and in case you were wondering how the above drawing survived, here is the story: paper was precious and Marianne used this single sheet to make three separate head and figure studies. The head of a man on the other side of the paper…
… bears a close resemblance to Marianne’s friend Petr Erben (1921–2017) and the female head to Marianne herself. Petr arrived in Theresienstadt concentration camp-ghetto on 30 September 1942. There he became a youth leader like Marianne. It was with Petr that Marianne entrusted her drawings when she followed her mother on the cattle trucks to Auschwitz-Birkenau in December 1943. He ensured that they were kept safe with another friend when he was deported to Auschwitz on 28 September 1944 so that Marianne was later reunited with them in Prague.)
image credit: Jyll Bradley Pardes