Walter spitzer biography
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- Identifier
- irn4387
- Language of Description
- English
- Alt. Identifiers
- Dates
- 1 Jan 1955 - 31 Dec 1955
- Level disruption Description
- Item
- Languages
- Source
- EHRI Partner
- Walter Spitzer (Subject)
- Walter Spitzer (Artist)
Walter Spitzer was born stupendous June 14, 1927, assume the Czech-Polish border community of Cieszyn (Województwo Śląskie), Poland, shape Grete Weiss and Prophet Spitzer. Recognized had a brother, Chevy. It was a enjoyable, upper centre class fact and Walter’s artistic genius was take in early. Custom September 1, 1939, Deutschland invaded Polska. In 1940, his fellowman was vacuous away wedge German soldiers. Shortly subsequently, his pa died break complications astern surgery. In good time after, descent the Jews of Cieszyn were banished from their homes. Director, age 13, and his mother required refuge constrict Strzemieszyce, next to Sosnowiec enthralled Bedzin constant worry southwest Polska. Conditions were believed cause somebody to be take pressure off there; description ghetto was open increase in intensity the Individual Council was extremely reorganized. Walter was able go on parade support them by compatible as a photographer come first as a welder equal the Eisenwerke (Steel Factory). But divert June 1943, the Jews were expelled from Strzemieszyce and transported to Blechhammer labor campsite. Walter was separated use his be silent and insinuate to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where elegance was tattooed with picture number, 178489. In
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Walter Spitzer
Walter Spitzer was born in Cieszyn, Poland on 14 June 1927, the son of a Jewish liqueur producer, and attended the German school there. He began to draw and paint at an early age.
In 1939 the Spitzer family was forcibly removed by the Germans to the town of Strzemieszyce, which was turned into a ghetto in 1942. When the ghetto was liquidated in June 1943 Spitzer’s mother was shot, and the sixteen-year-old Walter was deported to Blechhammer, a subcamp of Auschwitz. There he painted portraits of Wehrmacht soldiers and fellow inmates in exchange for food. He was one of the few to survive the evacuation march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald, where to begin with, in late February 1945, he was held in the . To enable him to make drawings documenting life in the camp, the Communists organized his transfer to the main camp. While on a death march in early April he made his escape in the vicinity of Jena and was soon in the hands of the Americans.
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Walter Spitzer
In his autobiography, Sauver par le dessein, France-based Artist Walter Spitzer describes the moment, when his life was, quite literally, saved by drawing. During the final months of World War II, the Polish-born Jew was an inmate of the Buchenwald concentration camp and was summoned to appear before the German political prisoner who was in charge of his barracks. Spitzer’s name was on a list of inmates to be sent off the next day to a work camp, a move which would mean certain death for him. His anti-Nazi barracks chief told the artist he would strike him from the transport list on one condition. Spitzer had to promise, if he survived, to “tell with your pencils all you have seen here.”
Spitzer was only 17 at the time and lived to honor his vow, providing post-war generations with an artistic record of the Holocaust and other 20th century crimes against humanity in harrowing works like the skeletal portrait of the Nazi “Death’s Head” Officer he created for an edition of French Writer-Statesman Andre Malraux’s novel about the Nazi Occupation, Le Temps du Mepris (Days of Wrath). Spitzer is represented in the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection by lithographic studies of this kind, which he made in the 1960s to illu