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Colored pencil drawing of the final red train cars passing through a concentration camp gate

Object | Accession Number: 2006.125.23

Colored drawing done by around 1990 by Arie Singer commemorating the millions of Jews who were murdered in Auschwitz concentration camp. It depicts a line of red cattle cars entering the gate of a concentration camp as 2 German soldiers watch; there is a pencil sketch on the reverse. After the Soviet occupation of Vilna, Poland (Vilnius, Lithuania), in late 1939, nine year old Arie and his family fled to Glembokie (Hlybokaye, Belarus). When Germany invaded Russia in June 1941, the area was assaulted by German mobile killing units, who with the help of the local populace, murdered thousands of Jews. Arie and his mother were forced into the Jewish ghetto. His father, Zvi, age 38, was killed in the massacres at Ponary in 1941. As the pogroms continued into the spring of 1943, Arie and his mother, Chaya, age 35, escaped the ghetto, which was being destroyed by the Germans. They went into hiding in the Nievier (sic) Forest near Vilna, where they engaged in partisan activities. The area was liberated by the Red Army in July 1944. After some years in a displaced persons camps, Arie and Chaya emigrated to Israel in the late 1940s. Colonel Singer began creating this series of paintings about his Holocaust experiences in the mid 1980s as rehabilitation following a stroke in 1975.

Artwork Title
Taken by Train to Auschwitz
Series Title
Imagining Auschwitz
Date
creation:  1985-2000
depiction:  1942-1945
Geography
creation: Tel Aviv (Israel)
Language
Hebrew
Classification
Art
Category
Drawings
Object Type
Naive art (aat)
Credit Line
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Arie Singer
 
Record last modified: 2022-07-28 18:30:00
This page: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn523733