Za Drutami (Behind Barbed Wires) – 15 drawings from a concentration camp. By Jan Komski. Published by Nakładem Agencji Informacyjnej P.B.I – the PBI News Agency, a Polish information agency operating in exile. Munich, 1946 – first edition. Introduction and drawings are presented in three languages – English, Polish, and German.
Harsh drawings documenting the horrors that took place in the death camps, created by Jan Komski (1915–2002) – a Polish painter and artist, Auschwitz survivor, who also survived the Gross-Rosen, Flossenbürg, and Dachau camps. He studied art in Kraków before the war and fled from Nazi-occupied Germany in 1940, but was caught, identified as a political refugee, and sent to Auschwitz. There he was given prisoner number 564. Komski managed to escape from Auschwitz in a daring breakout along with three other inmates. Throughout his time in the camps, Komski secretly sketched and drew what he witnessed with his own eyes – a rare visual documentation of camp life: torture, forced labor, executions, starvation, and inhuman conditions. The drawings include: prisoners of the kommando marching out to work, forced labor on the railway tracks, brutal beatings by SS officers during work, the exhausted return from labor, a prisoner who attempted escape being severely beaten after capture, execution by hanging, execution by shooting, burning of bodies in the crematorium, the death march, and more.
[2], 15 leaves. Light wear to cover. Good condition.
