Witnessing and the Spectacle of the Gallows

As described previously, one strategy Komski used to depict his memories was the creation of narrative self-portraits in which he re-enacts his own torture. In addition, he realized other images representing what he saw in which he avoids representing himself and assumes the role of the observer, of the “eyewitness to history.”

Since 1945, Komski has strived to document the public forms of punishment and murder the SS officers perpetrated inside the concentration camp. Among these works, four versions show capital punishments of prisoners hanged at the gallows.

The four versions include the 1945 drawing Szubienica/Gallows (fig. 59); the pen-and-ink drawing Execution by Hanging, drawn after 1980 (fig. 60); the oil on canvas

…Refleksje na potem/Hanging and Eating (fig. 61), painted between 1970 and 1980, and the watercolor Collective Gallows/Wbiorowa szubienica (fig. 62), realized between 1990 and 1997.

In the 1945 drawing Szubienica/Gallows, Komski represents two prisoners hanged at the gallows beside a SS guard in front of a group of prisoners. One characteristic one might first notice is the verticality of the format, reinforced by the corpse of the hanged prisoner in the middle of the image. His body, turned backwards and facing the multitude of prisoners in the background, marks a visual symmetrical division. On the left side, Komski depicts a second prisoner, around whose neck the SS guard is tying a rope, suggesting he will be executed soon. At the right side, two

174 Fuhs, “Re-imagining the Nonfiction,” p. 53.

175 Fuhs, “Re-imagining the Nonfiction,” p. 53.

176 Fuhs, “Re-imagining the Nonfiction,” p. 53.

officers are looking at the two condemned to the gallows. One crosses his arms over his chest, while the second keeps his hands in his pockets, smiling lightly.

The technique Komski used in the drawing is hatching and cross-hatching, characteristic of his drawings of 1945, which produces a chaotic and sketchy effect.

By using this technique, Komski also creates a strong contrast between shadows and light. The effect of light especially emphasizes the figures in the foreground: the hanged prisoners and the perpetrators. In contrast, in the background, in the shadows, are prisoners who are forced to watch the horrendous crime.

More than thirty years later, Komski drew Hanging, a version of the same scene with similar characteristics. Out of the four versions of the gallows, this is the only one featured in the 1998 exhibition at the Holocaust Museum of Houston.¹⁷⁷ As in the case of Szubienica/Gallows, the drawing depicts the murder of a prisoner at the gallows, while the SS officers and a large group of prisoners stand in the background and observe him. Both images have in common the narrative of the public display of the dead and the spectacle of suffering. However, in the second version, Komski introduces variations in terms of technique and perspective. Comparing the drawings, the first noticeable difference is the arrangement of the composition. In Hangings, the hanging body in the middle of the image implies verticality, but the layout is horizontal. This horizontality gives Komski the opportunity to include more elements, figures and details, including the architecture of the buildings in the background.

The perspective from which we as spectators look at the image is different as well. In the 1945 drawing, the angle from which we are looking at the scene does not correspond fully with the point of view of the perpetrators or the prisoners. But in Hanging, the point of view is that of the SS officers, specifically of one depicted with his back to the viewer in the foreground.

Unquestionably, the public execution of prisoners at the gallows was a common practice in the majority of Nazi camps. Thus, one might understand better the visual outlook Komski proposes in this drawing when comparing it with works created by other artists who lived in the concentration camps and the ghettos and who depicted the same scene. Numerous works depicting the motif of the gallows have survived, including the print Doppelt Haelt Besser (Double Holds Better), representing an execution at the gallows inside Terezín, and the charcoal drawing

177 Komski, Eyewitness, 1998.

Hanging, depicting the gallows in Auschwitz, both by the Jewish artist Leo Haas.

However, the drawing Roll Call in July 19, 1943 (fig. 63), created in 1946 by the Polish Catholic artist Jerzy Adam Brandhuber, represents the spectacle of the gallows from the perspective of the prisoners.¹⁷⁸ In the foreground, Brandhuber depicts the back side of the shaved heads of a group of prisoners, creating the illusion that the viewer belongs to that group that is looking at the row of corpses hanging at the gallows. Unlike Komski, this artist does not depict the faces and attitudes of the SS men and only notes their presence by drawing the military hats standing out from the multitude of shaved heads. In the background, the lifeless bodies of the murdered inmates become the focal point of the scene, emphasizing the verticality of the image.

The point of view obligates us to stand in the shoes of the prisoners for a moment, to stand in their place during the roll call. Compared with Komski’s work, Brandhuber’s drawing might be interpreted as a “zoom in” of the spectacle of the gallows, almost a mental snapshot of the event the artist witnessed from that perspective. The reference to a concrete date in the title of the drawing reveals the artist’s attempt to represent and commemorate a particular historical event. As a matter of fact, one of the most horrific episodes of hanging took place on July 19, 1943 in Auschwitz. On that day, twelve prisoners who were working in the surveyors’ group—the same one in which Komski worked during his first months in Auschwitz—were hanged after four prisoners in that group escaped from the camp.¹⁷⁹ The direct reference to a concrete historical event is not present in the titles Komski assigned to his works, although it does not necessarily mean that he does refer to any specific event. Komski’s watercolor version of the gallows refers to this very same event of July 19, 1943.

Jan Komski’s drawings of the gallows, especially the second version, aim to represent objectively what he saw in Auschwitz to fulfill his duty as witness to history.

However, he was also a trained artist, so we might compare his works with those created by other artists who also witnessed horrors and abuses. I will compare Komski’s drawings of the gallows with Callot’s and Goya’s prints depicting the same motif, because such comparison might identify a possible influence in his work and

178 Jerzy Adam Brandhuber was born in Poland on October 23, 1893, and died on June 19, 1981. In 1914 he began his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. He was arrested for helping Jewish people and he was sent to KL Auschwitz in January 1943. See ,,...Mam jeszcze bardzo dużo do zrobienia…,” in: MIK. Miejski Informator Kulturalny, Oświęcim, 2001, p. 2, at

http://www.um.oswiecim.pl/pl_gzo/mik1_2001.pdf (accessed December 12, 2015).

179 See “Hanging,” Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, at

http://auschwitz.org/en/history/punishments-and-executions/hunging (accessed December 12, 2015).

grasp the particularities of his visual proposal. Komski has three main characteristics in common with Goya and Callot. First is the need to condemn the abuses perpetrated by the criminals in contexts of war and violence. Second is the intention to create visual records to document some of the events in those violent contexts. Third is the representation of death and torture as a spectacle. The way in which Callot, Goya and Komski address these three aspects is, nevertheless, different.

Callot’s print The Hanging (La Pendaison) (fig. 64), is the eleventh plate of his series of The Miseries and Misfortunes of War (Les Misères et les Malheurs de la Guerre). Inspired by the brutal Thirty Years War that devastated the countries of Central Europe between 1618 and 1648, Callot published in 1633 Les Misères et les Malheurs de la Guerre, a series of eighteen etchings that show murders, executions, hanged people in gallows, and other brutal punishments perpetrated by the French troops against the population of Lorraine in the early 1630s.¹⁸⁰ The etchings were accompanied by captions in French and, as the title suggests, were created as a protest against the consequences of war.

The print The Hanging (La Pendaison), also known as The Hangman’s Tree by some scholars,¹⁸¹ depicts a group of men hanging from a tree while a large group of soldiers stand around contemplating the spectacle. On the bottom of the etching is an inscription in French: “A la fin ces Voleurs infames et perdus, Commes fruits Malheureux a cet arbre pendus, Monstrent bien que le crime (horrible et noire engeance), Est luy mesine instrument de honte et de vengeance, Et que c'est le Destin des hommes vicieux Desprouer tost au tard la justice des Cieux.”¹⁸² However, Callot did not write these verses—they had been attributed to his friend the Abbé de Marolles, the publisher of the series.¹⁸³ The important characteristic about the inscription is the statement that the hanged soldiers were thieves and the soldiers who hung them are prosecutors of justice. The problem of the publisher’s or Callot’s “own

180 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, New York 2003, p. 43. See also Laura Brandon, Art and War, London 2007, p. 26; and Diane Wolfthal, “Jacques Callot’s Miseries of War,” in The Art Bulletin 59, n. 2, June, 1977, pp. 222-233.

181 Katie Hornstein, “Just Violence: Jacques Callot’s Grandes Misères et Malheurs de la Guerre,”

Bulletin of the University of Michigan Museums of Art and Archaeology 16, 2005, pp. 29-48, p, 41.

182 “Finally these infamous and abandoned thieves, hanging from this tree like wretched fruit, show that crime (horrible and black species), is itself the instrument of shame and vengeance, and that it is the fate of corrupt men to experience the justice of Heaven sooner or later.” Caption and translation taken from the online catalog of the Victoria and Albert Museum. See “La Pendaison [The Hanging; Les Miseres et les Malheurs de la Guerre [The Miseries and Misfortunes of War],” Victoria and Albert Museum Online Collection, at http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O115422/la-pendaison-the-hanging-les-print-callot-jacques/ (accessed June 14, 2015).

183 Hornstein, “Just Violence,” p, 34.

support of the punishments as an appropriate response to the soldier’s earlier transgressions,” as Katie Hornstein puts it, will not be discussed here. What is relevant is the distinction of the hanged men as criminals and the hangers as the “good guys,” because in Komski’s works, one see the opposite depiction: the hanged men are victims and the SS men who hang them are unfair and abusive perpetrators.

Callot’s print The Hanging (La Pendaison), as well as other prints in the series, has a horizontal layout that creates the illusion of an open and wide vision field in which the artist can incorporate different details and figures, including numerous spectators. Since each print measures around 18.3 cm in length and 8.2 cm in width, one cannot see the details of the facial expressions, but rather the spectators as masses.¹⁸⁴ Therefore, the verses accompanying each work play a fundamental role in the way we read and interpret his images. But perhaps the most important element about Callot’s print is the depiction of punishment as a form of social spectacle.

Goya’s print Here Neither (Tampoco) (fig. 65) also depicts a hanging scene.

Between 1793 and 1808, Spain was plunged into a state of war with the new French Republic, led by Napoleon Bonaparte, who became emperor of France in 1804. The year 1808 is critical for Spanish history: Bonaparte launched a brutal invasion into Spanish territory and proclaimed his brother Joseph king of Spain.¹⁸⁵ Goya created a series of prints titled The Disasters of the War (Los Desastres de la Guerra) between 1810 and 1820. Unlike Callot, Goya did not publish these prints during his lifetime.

Except for three plates, they were published thirty-five years after his death in 1863.¹⁸⁶

Goya’s Here Neither (Tampoco) is plate number thirty-six from the series.

Differing from Callot’s engraving, Goya makes a single hanged man the central focus of the image, not a large group of soldiers. The man in the center of the image is hanging from a tree trunk, while on the right side, a soldier lies back, looking at the corpse. His relaxed and apparently comfortable pose and the slight smile on his face indicate that he finds pleasure in the spectacle. In the background, Goya depicts two more trunks with the silhouettes of two hanged corpses.

Comparing Callot’s The Hanging (Le Pendaison), Goya’s Here Neither (Tampoco), and Komski’s drawings Szubienica/Gallows and Execution by Hanging,

184 Hornstein, “Just Violence,”p, 34.

185 Brandon, Art and War, p. 32.

186 Sontag, Regarding the Pain, p. 44.

the first difference is the titles of the works. Callot’s print and Komski’s drawings have descriptive titles referring to the action of hanging or the instrument used to hang the prisoners (gallows). However, the caption under Goya's print is not descriptive but a moral comment about the scene he depicts. In addition, the meaning of the title Here Neither (Tampoco) can be fully grasped by looking at the caption of the preceding plate of the series: One Cannot Tell Why (No se puede saber por que).¹⁸⁷ One cannot find a visual chronological narrative in Goya’s prints, but the captions are linked to each other.

The techniques the artists use also deserve brief comment. Callot and Goya work with printing techniques, while Komski drew with India ink on paper. Although they opted for different techniques and materials, all chose a monochromatic technique characterized by the contrast between black ink on white paper.

As mentioned, Komski’s drawings from 1945 are realized with rushed lines that create a sketchy effect. The focal point of the images is on the actions or events taking place rather than on faithful reconstruction of the backdrop and architecture of the camp. This is evident in Szubienica/Gallows, and the effects of Komski’s technique can be compared in this case with Goya’s Here Neither (Tampoco). In this print, Goya also uses rapid and simple lines that produce the same sketchy effect, and he omits many details of the landscape. The difference between Goya’s and Komski’s works is, however, that Komski fills up the space with more lines than Goya, thus creating stronger contrasts between light and shadow. Recalling that Szubienica/Gallows was part of a series of 15 drawings published Za Drutami in 1946 is crucial to comprehending the relationship between Komski and Goya. Moreover, it is highly possible that Komski knew Goya’s prints before the beginning of the war because they were widely known and admired by Polish artists in Krakow and Warsaw in the first decades of the twentieth century.¹⁸⁸ Therefore, there is reason to believe Komski knew Goya’s work and that his drawings in Za Drutami might have been partially inspired by Goya.

Unlike the drawing Szubienica/Gallows, Komski’s Execution by Hanging more resembles Callot’s The Hanging (Le Pendaison) than Goya’s print. Similarities

187 See “Tampoco,” Museo del Prado Online Catalog, at

https://www.museodelprado.es/coleccion/obra-de-arte/tampoco/ea76b5ed-b37d-4acc-ac95-e077d92e70bd (accessed April 15, 2015)

188 Kossowska, “Graphic Art in Poland,” pp. 230; and Weiss Albrzykowska, “The Prints of Wojciech Weiss,” p. 405.

include not only the titles, but also some visual characteristics. On the one hand, the lines Komski drew are more defined and softer, making it possible for him to incorporate more details, including the architecture of the buildings in the background.

On the other hand, like Callot, he emphasizes the notion of the hanging as a public spectacle seen by spectators—perpetrators, prisoners and us—from every possible angle. Nonetheless, what Komski underscores is the focus on only one hanged body instead of a multitude of them, probably to stress the individuality of the victims.

Spectatorship is essential and persistent in Komski’s works, a characteristic shared with Callot’s and Goya’s prints. Commenting the impact of Goya’s prints on the spectator, Susan Sontag observes:

Goya’s images move the viewer close to the horror. All the trappings of the spectacular have been eliminated: the landscape is an atmosphere, a darkness, barely sketched in. War is not a spectacle. And Goya’s print series is not a narrative: each image, captioned with a brief phrase lamenting the wickedness of the invaders and the monstrousness of the suffering they inflicted, stands independently of the others. The cumulative effect is devastating.¹⁸⁹

Sontag identifies two important elements: the idea of the absence of narrative and what she implies by “spectacle.” On the one hand, she affirms that Goya’s prints do not have a sequential narrative, and each of them should be considered independent from the others. This characteristic is, as a matter of fact, also valid in Komski’s series of drawings from 1945, and in the rest of his paintings and watercolors. On the other had, although Sontag rightly comments on the lack of public spectacle in Goya’s Disasters of War, her appreciation of his depiction of war as “no spectacle”

might overlook two important issues. One is the role of the figures such as the soldier looking at the hanged body Here Neither (Tampoco), and the second is our own role as spectators of the image.

The issue of spectatorship is indeed highly complex. In the works of Goya, Callot and Komski, the notion of suffering as spectacle, as something to be looked at, can be understood on various levels. First is the literal representation of a public spectacle, as in Callot’s The Hanging (Le Pendaison) and Komski’s drawings, or in the form of a “private” display of a perpetrator enjoying the spectacle of the suffering he caused as in Goya’s Here Neither (Tampoco) and in Komski’s versions of the

189 Sontag, Regarding the Pain, p. 44.

reversed hanging torture. Second is the spectatorship constituted by the viewers of the images: these images were created with the purpose of bearing witness and document particular historical events, and as such to be looked at by a public ready to watch the spectacle and acknowledge the pain depicted in them. Moreover, in the artworks of these three artists, and especially in the case of Komski, one can see a third layer of spectatorship: the artists as the spectators of the reality of the historical events that inspired their works. Witnessing is, therefore, looking at the spectacle of suffering, torture and death in a particular historical context.

Indeed, the role of the artist as a spectator of suffering has a long tradition.

Helena Gurzik affirms that the relationship between art and spectatorship was crucial during the Renaissance¹⁹⁰: “The concept of one’s body in torment was such a powerful one that it was not uncommon for images of the criminal undergoing his or her physical punishments to be painted in places of high traffic for all to witness, to the shame and infamy of the transgressor.”¹⁹¹ Secular artistic representations born from such circumstances were visual reminders to the public of the punishments of those who committed criminal acts. In addition, they served as artistic training for artists to observe and represent the tortured bodies.

Helena Gurzik affirms that the relationship between art and spectatorship was crucial during the Renaissance¹⁹⁰: “The concept of one’s body in torment was such a powerful one that it was not uncommon for images of the criminal undergoing his or her physical punishments to be painted in places of high traffic for all to witness, to the shame and infamy of the transgressor.”¹⁹¹ Secular artistic representations born from such circumstances were visual reminders to the public of the punishments of those who committed criminal acts. In addition, they served as artistic training for artists to observe and represent the tortured bodies.