802 Prisoners attempted escape from Auschwitz. 144 were successful. Kazimierz Piechowski, a Polish boy scout, was one of them. Today, at age 91,
he tells his story.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Apr 13, 2011 -
30 comments
Auschwitz: Then and Now.
From Remember.org: In 1979, The Auschwitz Museum Archive reproduced selected pieces of art and sent them to writer/photographer Alan Jacobs. After years of related work and many more trips, Jacobs, and his son Jesse, returned to the camps in 1996 to find and photograph the identical scenes depicted in the art.
[more inside]
posted by bwg
on Mar 5, 2010 -
12 comments
"I would like to do better, to be better than I am". He's the French New Wave
maverick and Academy Award winner (
at 26, for his first short) who, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz -- with considerable personal pain and the admission that "
no description, no picture can reveal the true dimension" of what happened in the camps -- made what François Truffaut called "
the greatest film ever made", duly
censored by French authorities. Four years later he baffled audiences with "
the first modern film of sound cinema",
shattering the rules of chronology to describe the “anguish of the future”: even if all he ever wanted was "
to stop death in its tracks"
(French language link),
only for one minute. But he is also the unabashed lover of
la bande dessinée who
learnt English by reading comic books and
in the Seventies dreamed (French language link) of making
"Spider-Man" into a movie (the Hollywood studios were not convinced), the
MGM old-school musical and
operetta nut so in love with design that "
half of the fashion photography of the past 40 years owes a debt" to him. Now,
Alain Resnais' new
work, just shown
at the Venice Film Festival where
his buddy David Lynch was awarded a lifetime achievement Golden Lion, is a French film
inspired by an
English play with 54 short scenes, music by the X-Files's Mark Snow. (more inside)
posted by matteo
on Sep 8, 2006 -
20 comments
Who owns the products of slave labour? Or, more broadly, how do we remember the Holocaust?
A unique dispute over ownership rights to artwork in the case of the Auschwitz Memorial Museum vs. former camp prisoner Dinah Gottliebova Babbitt illuminates underlying moral questions about the Holocaust and post-Holocaust culture. Babbitt, now living in southern California, is a university-trained Czechoslovak artist who has been fighting to reclaim her art from the Auschwitz Museum since 1973... [She] was a Jewish prisoner there in 1944 when Josef Mengele learned of her artistic skills and forced her to make watercolor portraits of dying Gypsies in order to get the kind of documentation he wanted on exact skin color and ear shapes. Gottliebova Babbitt made a dozen such portraits, seven of which are now tucked away in Room No. 11 of the Auschwitz Museum. [...] "Mengele ordered me to do it as slave labor. But it was my work, my paintings."
posted by jokeefe
on Mar 28, 2002 -
20 comments
Guantanamo Bay: 'The American Auschwitz' "...We always see how human beings prey upon each other, how values are trampled, and how tragedies recur. This is exactly what happened, and is still happening, at the 'American Auschwitz' detention camp...excuse me, I meant the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay!! " more follows: any truth to what he is saying or is this total madness?
posted by Postroad
on Mar 5, 2002 -
35 comments
The Last Expression project is a forum to explore the roles, functions, meanings and making of art in the Nazi concentration camps of World War II, focusing on the notorious site of Auschwitz-Birkenau. ... It is neither widely recognized in the realm of Holocaust history, nor in the discipline of art history, that concentration camp prisoners -- victims of the Nazis -- produced works of art during their incarceration.
[from the Introduction.]
posted by tranquileye
on Feb 12, 2001 -
2 comments
