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Id no. 117.97, Artwork, German

Created by:  Leo Haas

Subject(s):  Food, Starvation

Czech artist Leo Haas was deported to the Terezin Ghetto in 1942, where he and other artists worked for the Nazis and also secretly created drawings and sketches based on their own experiences of ghetto life. In June 1944, some of these clandestine drawings were smuggled out of Terezin, and discovered by the Nazis. They arrested Haas and other artists (Ferdinand Bloch, Bedrich Fritta and Otto Ungar) and brutally interrogated them in the Small Fortress prison to discover who created the “atrocity art.” Refusing to talk, all four men and other artists were deported to Auschwitz. Bloch and Fritta did not survive, while Ungar was sent to Buchenwald and Hass to Sachsenhausen, where he was forced to work as a counterfeiter. After the war (1946 – 1964) Haas used his sketches to produce prints such as this one. This black and white print entitled “Calories” (in German, “Kalorien”) shows people scrounging for food in the bottom of barrels and on hands and knees in the dirt. Haas commented later, “It was well known that one could really not get full.”