Arts and Education

Friedl Dicker, 1916, private collection

On April 18, the exhibition "Friedl and the Children of Terezin: An Exhibition of Art and Hope" opened at the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum. The exhibition, organized by the Simon Wiesenthal Center/Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum and guest curator Elena Makarova, presents the work of an extraordinary woman whose courage and creativity helped illuminate one of the darkest and most tragic chapters of history, the Nazi Holocaust.


"Today, show me your soul!"

"Friedl Dicker-Brandeis", says Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center," . . . is a person who used her art to empower humanity, when the foundations of civilization were threatened; who used her artistic skills to provide children with hope, at a time when all they witnessed and experienced was dehumanization and death."

Friedl Dicker was born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria, in 1898. At 17 she began her formal art training under the painter Franz Cizek whose exhortation, "Today, show me your soul!" would later be incorporated into Friedl's own teaching methods. In 1919 she began training at the Bauhaus, the revolutionary school of art and design in Weimar, where she studied under Paul Klee.

Many believe that, had her life not been so tragically curtailed by the Holocaust, Friedl would have become one of the great artists of the 20th century. As it is, she is now remembered for the selfless courage that she displayed during that dreadful time.


Terezin: Waiting Room for Hell

"Interrogation I," Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, 1934-38, Jewish Museum, Prague

By 1942 Friedl, who had already experienced success as an artist and designer, was now struggling to eke out a living in a continent that was becoming increasingly hostile to Jews. In the same year senior Nazi officers drew up plans for Hitler's "final solution," the mass murder of the European Jewish population. Friedl and her husband were imprisoned in Terezin, a concentration camp outside Prague designated as a place to hold Jews before eventually sending them to their death in camps such as Auschwitz. Between 1941 and 1945 some 140,000 Jews were imprisoned in this "waiting room for hell," as it came to be known. This number included 15,000 children, of whom only 100 survived.

Friedl brought with her to Terezin as many art supplies as she could. For the duration of her stay in the camp she devoted her time and energy to clandestinely teaching art to the children held there, using methods that have become the foundation of art therapy. Drawing on previous experience of working with displaced children and her own liberal art training, Friedl was able to bring comfort to the children in this hellish environment, helping them express their fears and their defiance and create hope.

Before her deportation to Auschwitz in October 1944, Friedl packed some 5,000 of her students' drawings in two suitcases and hid them. These remained undiscovered for the next 10 years.

These pictures form the most poignant part of the current exhibit, which will be shown in five other museums in Japan between June and October. The impact of these artworks, often completed on scraps of paper, is compounded by photographs of some of their young creators and a film projection of Jewish mothers and children being herded from trains and through the gates of a concentration camp.


Unbounded Creativity

In all, the exhibit features some 300 items, including letters and diaries, chronicling and shedding light on the life and art of this remarkable woman. During her lifetime, Friedl created works in a great variety of styles and mediums. Besides painting, she designed textiles and furniture, toys, stage sets, costumes and interiors. Chronologically placed and beginning with her "constructivist" Bauhaus work, the pieces show the development of her style and the influence of the times on her art.

After Bauhaus, Friedl established an architectural and design studio in Vienna. Her work from this period includes exquisite custom designs for textiles, lace, tapestries, jewelry and bookbinding. In Vienna Friedl became politically active, joining the communist party and helping design antifascist posters. Her political leanings would lead to her arrest and detention. Two of Friedl's most striking pieces in the exhibit are paintings portraying her experience of interrogation by the fascist regime.

Final scene from "Brundibar," still taken from a Nazi propaganda film, 1944, Yad Vashem Archives, Jerusalem

Soon after her release, Friedl moved to Prague and in 1936 married Pavel Brandeis. In Prague she began to work with refugee children and found that her methods provided effective therapy for children who had suffered from trauma. Friedl's post-Vienna work reflects a more contemplative person. During this period she designed less, concentrating on still lifes, landscapes and portraits.

As the 1930s wore on, the discrimination and harassment that Jews had been subjected to became life-threatening. In the part of the exhibit that chronologically corresponds to the early 1930s is an unsettling section on the Holocaust, a harrowing preview of the dark future that was being fashioned. Documents, video footage, uniforms, the personal effects of prisoners, a drum skin and a pair of inner soles made from a desecrated Torah and photographs of piles of naked, emaciated bodies being moved by a bulldozer, provide a disturbing glimpse of the horrific world that millions would soon be forced to endure.


Memories of Friedl

Also included in the exhibit and on display for the first time are the drawings and diaries of Erna Furman, a survivor of Terezin and pupil of Friedl. Prof. Furman, now a pediatrician, writes, "Friedl's teaching, the times spent drawing with her, are among the fondest memories of my life. . . . [Friedl] taught without ever asking for anything in return. She just gave of herself."

Tokyo Fuji Art Museum founder Daisaku Ikeda, who was instrumental in bringing the exhibit to Japan, comments, "The various artworks left behind by this great woman and the children of Terezin are their legacy to the present, to all of us today. They demand that we continue in our quest for a society that truly treasures human life, transcending all differences of race, religion, politics and ideology. It remains my heartfelt hope that this exhibit may provide a moment of introspection for its viewers, a moment for us to reaffirm the importance of our rights as human beings and the value of life itself."

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