Drawings by Jerzy Zieleziński
at the Auschwitz Museum
Paweł Sawicki
Jerzy Zieleziński was arrested on 18 March 1943, in his apartment in Warsaw, and detained in the Pawiak prison, from where he was deported to Auschwitz on 28 April. He was registered as a political prisoner with number 119 517, which was tattooed on his left forearm. During his time at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, he stayed, among others, in the penal company. In November 1943, he fell ill with typhoid. He was transferred from Auschwitz to the Flossenbürg camp, and later to Dachau, where he was liberated.
'His series of drawings consists of 41 works, most of which were created immediately after the war, in the years 1945-46 during his recovery in a hospital, and stay at the "Displaced Persons" camp in Schwandorf. In the drawings, he refers directly to the camp experience. Individual drawings show the subsequent stages in the life of a concentration camp prisoner: arrival at the camp, punishment, returns from work, hunger, cold, and death marches. They also depict prisoners dying from the electrified wires of the camp fence or victims of hanging executions,' said Agnieszka Sieradzka, an art historian working for the Museum Collections. 'Most of the drawings refer to Auschwitz and are marked with his camp number. The whole is an expressive, subjective, and intense artistic expression of recorded camp episodes, full of drastic details, Agnieszka Sieradzka emphasized.
The Collections of the Memorial have been enriched with a set of drawings by the former Polish prisoner of Auschwitz Jerzy Zieleziński. Most of them were made shortly after the war, depicting the reality of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp.