Rodion Raskolnikov

🎷🎷Weekly series: Paintings by Jewish artists related to the Holocaust and WWII.🎷🎷 ______________________________ 🎷These works were created by Jewish artists, some who survived the camps and ghettos, some who were murdered, and some who painted from exile. Another way to remember the Holocaust and those who perished. 🎷This week’s painting is Gassing (also called Gazage) by David Olère. 🎷David Olère was a Polish Jewish painter who lived in France. In 1943 he was deported to Auschwitz and forced to work in the Sonderkommando, the unit of prisoners made to empty the gas chambers and burn the bodies. He survived because the SS used his skills as an artist. After liberation he devoted his art almost entirely to documenting what he had witnessed. He is the only known Jewish Sonderkommando survivor who created an extensive visual record of the killing process. 🎷In this 1960 painting, Olère shows the interior of a gas chamber. Crowded, emaciated bodies of men, women, and children fill the space. Some still stand; others have already fallen. A Zyklon B container is visible. The colors are muted and heavy. 🎷Olère could not have been inside the chamber during the gassing itself, his work began afterward. The painting is a reconstruction based on what he saw, heard, and lived through as an actual witness to the worst horrors of Auschwitz. Very few paintings by actual witnesses and survivors of the death camps reached us. Works like this one remain among the rare lasting visual testimonies & a necessary reminder. At a time when Holocaust denial continues to rise, his testimony as a survivor who stood inside the machinery of death carries particular weight. 🎷The painting is associated with the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.