Façades for the International Commission

Bedrich Fritta

1943–1944

Sketch of storefronts next to a pile of corpses and brick wall and a couple is kissing against a wall in left foreground.
In the Terezin concentration camp, before a visit by the International Red Cross and the Danish Red Cross in 1944, the Nazis created an elaborate ruse, designed to convince the delegation that the camp was actually a “self-governing town,” and not a prison camp where tens of thousands had died and which served as a transit point for deportation to Auschwitz. To this end, they constructed a fake park, theater, school, sports area, playground, and café, and forced ghetto inhabitants to put on a show and pretend to be happy. Even a fake documentary film was produced. Here, Bedřich Fritta satirizes the deception. Behind the false façades are dead bodies and, at left, a gaunt prisoner looks out from the window of a prison. After the departure of the international delegation, almost everyone who had been forced to act in the farce was deported to Auschwitz, including Bedřich Fritta.

Credits

© Thomas Fritta-Haas, long-term loan to the Jewish Museum Berlin, photo: Jens Ziehe.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 9.

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Creator Bio

Bedrich Fritta

1906–1944

Czech artist Bedrich Fritta trained in Paris and then worked as a graphic designer and cartoonist in Prague until 1941, when he was deported to the Terezín ghetto. There, along with other artists and engineers, he was ordered to direct the painting section of the technical department that produced propaganda materials for the Nazis. In the studio, Fritta and his fellow artists covertly produced paintings and drawings documenting daily life in the ghetto. When SS officers discovered these artworks, the artists were sent to a Gestapo prison and then deported to Auschwitz, where Fritta died. After the war, more than two hundred of his drawings were discovered hidden in the former ghetto.

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