It is the largest exhibition to date depicting the moving paintings and drawings of the artist, presenting almost the entire exceptional work related to the artist’s traumatic experiences in the camp. In addition to 19 paintings from the Auschwitz Museum Collections, the exhibition will display 64 works on loan from the Yad Vashem and Lohamei haGeta'ot in Israel, as well as the Mémorial de la Shoah in France.
While opening the exhibition, Director of the Auschwitz Museum Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński noted that the vast majority of David Olère’s works had been collected in one place for the first time. "The exhibition does not only present events that occurred in the most secretive and secured space of Birkenau, but these paintings show the unspeakable trauma people experienced. They are also a kind of outcry to the entire world, and for the future of this world to look different than its past," Cywiński emphasised.
The exhibition depicts subsequent stages of the extermination process, from the moment of arrival at the ramp and selection to killing in the gas chambers and burning of bodies in the crematoria, recorded just after the war in documentary drawings and then in huge paintings. The works are accompanied by excerpts from the accounts and records of the Sonderkommando prisoners.
All images: Auschwitz Memorial