The first time that I ever saw Jan Komski’s works was in Krakow, during a trip that I made to Poland on February 2013. While traveling around the south of the country, I visited what used to be the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau, currently part of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. Throughout the tour of the camps and their blocks, barracks and the debris of the gas chambers, the guides commented on the existence of thousands of artistic artifacts and images produced between 1940 and 1945 inside the camps by inmate artists and amateurs. The pieces include decorative objects, wall decorations, drawings and paintings, and some can still be seen in the museum and on the walls of some bathrooms and cells. The images the prisoners created that I saw while visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau were the main trigger that sparked my interest in the art produced inside the concentration camps.
Even though I had a general awareness of the Holocaust and overall knowledge about the artistic production in Europe during the Second World War, I was not conscious, until that moment, of the many artistic works created inside the concentration camps and ghettos. As a student of art history, I started to speculate about why this kind of artistic production has been rarely or never been mentioned in books that discussed the development of European art during the first half of the twentieth century.
I spent the following days walking the streets of Krakow. One day, I entered into a small gallery-bookstore, and there I saw, hanging on one of the narrow walls, three or four small drawings that caught my attention. The drawings depicted scenes of the Auschwitz concentration camp. I remembered one in particular: Through Work to Freedom, a black and white drawing depicting a man dressed in a striped uniform in front of the gates of Auschwitz, in the exact moment when he is dropping a cart full of bricks while a guard is hitting him on the back (fig. 1). According to the captions under the images, a Polish artist named Jan Baraś-Komski, a survivor of the Holocaust, had created them in 1945. I promptly assumed that Komski was a Jew, given the fact that most victims of the Holocaust were Jewish and the bookstore-gallery was located in Kazimierz, the Jewish neighborhood of Krakow. That area of the city used to be part of the ghetto during the Second World War. I did not know that he was not Jewish, but Catholic, and that I was looking not at his original works, but reproductions of drawings he made in a refugee camp in Germany in 1945.
I wrote down the name of Komski, but I forgot about him for a while, until I
traveled to Cambodia in August of the same year. After arriving in Phnom Penh, I decided to visit the Choeung Ek Killing Fields and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.
Inside the museum, formerly the S-21 prison, are displayed the photographs of the victims of the Cambodian genocide and the paintings of the Cambodian artist Vann Nath, one of the seven survivors of the prison during the dictatorship of Pol Pot in the 1970s (fig. 2). The similarities in display of the photographs of the prisoners in Tuol Sleng reminded me of my visit to Auschwitz six months before: both museums display the photographs that had been taken of the victims’ faces to familiarize the viewers with the process of registration of the prisoners (figs. 3-6). The paintings of the Cambodian artist also reminded me of the works of Komski I had seen in Krakow, not because anything in their style was distinctively similar, but because both artists painted scenes of violence, murder and torture that the prisoners in Auschwitz and the S-21 suffered and witnessed. Jan Baraś-Komski and Vann Nath were two artists and survivors I would not have known about without having had the opportunity to travel to Poland and Cambodia that year. Perhaps because of the similarities I found in both museums and works, and the background of my study field, I could not help inquiring about the nature and meaning of these paintings.
Additional research about the works of these two painters still needs to be done from an art historical perspective. However, it is not the purpose here to compare the particularities of the contexts, life experiences and artistic works of Komski and Vann. Instead, the central proposal of this study is to provide a comprehensive interpretation of the works of Jan Komski to achieve in-depth understanding of its artistic and testimonial qualities. The present study dusts off the works of Jan Komski and studies them to make them visible and evaluate their integration into the field of art history. The questions I asked after my encounter with Jan Komski’s works led me to investigate further, and the more I researched him, the more noteworthy and complex information I uncovered about his artistic production.
Jan Mieczysław Komski was born on February 3, 1915, in the town of Bircza, located in the Southeast of Poland. He was a Catholic Polish artist who survived five concentrations camps during the Nazi occupation of Poland in the Second World War.
Before the beginning of the war, from 1934 to 1939, Komski studied fine arts at the School of Fine Arts in Krakow. Soon after he graduated, the Second World War started with the German occupation of Poland, and Komski decided to join the army of the Polish resistance in France. However, on April 29, 1940, the Gestapo arrested
him when he tried to cross the border between Poland and Slovakia.1 After his detention, he became one of the first 728 male prisoners ever sent to Auschwitz. On June 14, 1940, these prisoners arrived by train in what Komski describes as “an obscure deserted place with a sign that bore the inscription ‘Auschwitz,’” 2 fifty four kilometers from Krakow. He was registered in the camp under the name of Jan Baraś using the false identification he provided to the Gestapo when he was arrested, and in Auschwitz, he was assigned the number 564.3
Komski’s artistic production is extensive: Since 1939 and until his death in 2004, he executed a corpus of more than two hundred works that include images made officially in the concentration camps; drawings, paintings and watercolors depicting scenes of Auschwitz after the war; works created while he worked for the Washington Post as a graphic artist; and landscape watercolors executed during the last years of his life. His artistic repertoire comprehends a wide range of techniques, materials and styles, and the larger amount of his production was done intermittently between the 1970s and the 1990s.4 Nevertheless, his works have been rarely exhibited, published or commented upon by scholars.
One of the first obstacles one encounters when researching Jan Komski is a dearth of primary and secondary materials about him. It is possible, however, to find a few references containing important information about his life and work. The first traceable source is Za Drumami/Behind Barbed Wires, a book published in Munich in 1946 that compiles fifteen drawings with scenes from the Auschwitz concentration camp that Komski painted in a refugees camp right after the war.5 These drawings are complemented by legends in English, German and Polish. Nevertheless, with the exception of the catalog Eyewitness: The Artwork of Jan Komski published by the Houston Holocaust Museum for the exhibition of Komski’s works in 1998,6 the documentary film Eyewitness (1999) directed by Bert Van Bork,7 and the descriptive cards in Komski’s catalog of paintings in the archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau
1 Jan Komski, “Jan Komski,” in: Richard C. Lukas (ed.), Forgotten Survivors. Polish Christians Remember the Nazi Occupation, Kansas, 2004, p. 53.
2 Komski, “Jan Komski,” p. 53.
3 Komski, “Jan Komski,” p. 53.
4 Komski, “Jan Komski,” p. 58.
5Jan Komski, Za Drutami, Behind Barbed Wires, Munich 1946.
6Jan Komski, Eyewitness: The Artwork of Jan Komski, exhibition catalogue, Houston Holocaust Museum, Houston 1998.
7Bert Van Bork, Eyewitness, documentary, Los Angeles 1999.
Memorial and Museum, relevant secondary literature that analyzes his oil paintings, drawings or watercolors does not seem to exist.8
However, there are some brief comments about his biography and work in certain secondary sources. The most important are Richard Lukas’ Forgotten Survivors. Polish Christians Remember the Nazi Occupation from 2004,9 and the descriptions of some of the paintings Komski made while imprisoned in Auschwitz that appear in the book Kunst in Auschwitz 1940-1945/Sztuka w Auschwitz 1940-1945, published in a bilingual Polish and German edition in 2005.10 Therefore, considering the lack of consistent and comprehensive secondary literature that comments upon his work with rigor and depth, the main goal of the present study is to make a first attempt to interpret, analyze and understand the complexity of his works. Bearing in mind that Komski’s works have been little discussed by art historians, and that only a few secondary references exist, the outcome of the present study will be based on visual analysis of the works of art, as well as on other primary sources: interviews with the artist and archival images and documents from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum and the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow.
Jan Komski’s paintings and drawings have an unquestionable historical value.
Most of his works were made after he had survived the concentration camps, and they portray the horrors that he and many others had experienced. At some point, it even seems reprehensible to ask ourselves whether these works have artistic value or not. It might also seem problematic to make a critical judgment about images that are meant to be, above all, a tribute to the memory of those who had suffered and had not survived. These images were not created mainly and uniquely to be displayed in art galleries or museums and subjected to aesthetic criticism, but as “artistic works” that bear witness.
This might be perhaps one reason that could explain the lack of studies about Jan Komski’s work, as well as of other works created by artists who survived the
8The works of Komski can also be found in other sources. However, while developing the present research it was not possible to have access to that material, or obtain relevant information about them.
Therefore, the following publications will not be studied in the present research. The first one is Remember that/Denket Daran!/Pensez-y! a visual guide to the former concentration camp of Dachau published in Munich in1950, written byErich Preuss and illustrated with drawings by Komski. The second one is the publication in Japanese 絶望の中の光 /Zetsubō no naka no hikari, published in Tokyo in 1996 that presumably narrates the story of the artist. And third Dlaczego/ Warum?/Why? the personal memories of Józef Czarski illustrated by Komski and published in Boston in 1999.
9Lukas (ed.), Forgotten Survivors. Polish Christians Remember the Nazi Occupation.
10Jochen Boberg and Hermann Simon (eds.), Kunst in Auschwitz 1945/Sztuka w Auschwitz 1940-1945, Bramsche 2005.
camps. The case of the artworks made by well established artists such as Christian Boltanski and Harun Farocki, among many others, that deal with the subject of the Holocaust and that are hosted in art museums and institutions is different. During the postwar period, numerous responses from the arts to the Holocaust emerged and have had an influence until this day. The art concerning the Holocaust and the concentration camps has been created by artists who survived the war, by artists who had not suffer directly or by those with few or no connections with it.11 However, it is peculiar that among the artistic responses to the Holocaust, the works created by those who actually lived through it and survived it, especially by the ones who were artists before the beginning of the war, have not been commented upon carefully enough.
The particularities of these works makes the task of judging them from the point of view of their artistic qualities harder. However, this fact does not imply that these particular works do not have any artistic value at all, particularly if we take into consideration that many were created by inmates who, like Komski, had an artistic formation and background before being confined in the camps. The objective of this study is to consider the problem of the tension between the artistic expression and the testimony present in the works of art representing the concentration camps, taking Jan Komski’s works as example. My aim in this research is dual. First, I will analyze three groups of images Komski depicted about three motifs: the torture by reverse hanging he suffered in Block 11, the executions on the gallows and the shooting executions at the “Death Wall.” My objective will be to evaluate them from an art historical perspective to comprehend their artistic characteristics and qualities. Second, I will explore why Komski’s works have been overlooked by scholars and discuss three major problems that have interfered with the reception of Komski’s and other survivors’ works of art. I will close my study by discussing how the tension between the artistic expression and the testimonial value of such works can be approached.
11 Monica Bohm-Duchen examines multiple cases. See Monica Bohm-Duchen (ed.), After Auschwitz:
Responses to the Holocaust in Contemporary Art, London 1995.