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    Imprisoned: Drawings from Nazi Concentration Camps
    Imprisoned: Drawings from Nazi Concentration Camps
    Imprisoned: Drawings from Nazi Concentration Camps
    Ebook295 pages49 minutes

    Imprisoned: Drawings from Nazi Concentration Camps

    By Arturo Benvenuti and Primo Levi

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    About this ebook

    In September 1979, at age fifty-six, writer and artist Arturo Benvenuti fueled up his motor home and set forth on what he knew would be an emotional journey. His planhis own Viae Cruciswas to meet with as many former prisoners of Nazi-fascist concentration camps as he could. He wanted not only to learn their stories, but to learn from their stories.

    He met with dozens of survivors from Auschwitz, Terezín, Mauthausen-Gusen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Gonars, Monigo, Renicci, Banjica, Ravensbrück, Jasenovac, Belsen, and Gurs. Many of these men and women shared their memories with Benvenuti along with artwork they’d created during their internment with pencil, ink, and charcoal.

    After four decades of research, Benvenuti presented these original black-and-white pieces in Imprisoned. This stunning collection provides visuals that oftentimes even the most eloquent words and sentences cannot convey.

    In his foreword, chemist, writer, and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi highlighted the importance of these reproductions, stating, some have the immediate power of art; all have the raw power of the eye that has seen and that transmits its indignation.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSkyhorse
    Release dateJan 17, 2017
    ISBN9781510706682
    Imprisoned: Drawings from Nazi Concentration Camps

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      Book preview

      Imprisoned - Arturo Benvenuti

      Cover Page of Imprisoned

      Translation copyright © 2016 by Skyhorse Publishing

      Originally published as K.Z., disegni dai campi di concentramento nazifascisti by BeccoGiallo, Italy.

      Copyright © 1984 by Arturo Benvenuti. Published by agreement with BeccoGiallo.

      Photo of isolation cell at Auschwitz by Jorge Gonzalez on page 1. Photo of Beds in Dachau by Philip Brechler on pages 2 and 3. Photo of the Terezín cells by Leandro Kibisz on pages 270 and 271. Photo of K.Z. by Allie Caulfield Plaszow on page 272.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

      Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or info@skyhorsepublishing.com.

      Skyhorse® and Skyhorse Publishing® are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

      Visit our website at www.skyhorsepublishing.com.

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

      Cover design by BeccoGiallo

      Cover: Portrait of Giovanni from Rzeszów by Jaźwiecki Franciszek

      Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-0666-8

      Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-0668-2

      Printed in China

      Title Page of Imprisoned

      The further that time distances us from it, and although the decades that have followed have not spared us violences or horrors, the story of Hitler’s concentration camps is increasingly considered to be a unicum, an exemplary episode in the negative: Man, you, were capable of doing this, the civilization of which you boast is a gloss, a garment, and when a false prophet comes and tears it off you, naked, you are a monster, the cruelest of animals.

      Since then, National Socialism (except for the few raving voices that justify, deny, or even celebrate its crimes) has been a reference point, a knot to be avoided. Countless works of testimony and analysis have appeared, but until now a book like this one has been missing in Italy. I think that, beyond pure remembrance, it has its own specific merit. In describing these horrors, words prove insufficient. The images reproduced here are not equivalents or surrogates: they replace the word, but with an advantage—they say what the word is not able to. Some have the immediate power of art; all have the raw power of the eye that has seen and that transmits its indignation.

      For this collection—as Benvenuti too has seen—works produced after the fact, cold, in a studio, would have struck a false note, just as, even when written with the purest of intentions, the books where the camps have been fictionalized sound wrong. Here, save a few exceptions, the works come from there, from the hands of those who saw and experienced, and the exceptions are mostly from those who entered the camps as liberators and captured their final, convulsive images.

      The editor is not a survivor of the concentration camps. He is an observant and devout man, sensitive to the past and the present; he is a poet-painter to whom, especially for this singular book he composed with such care, we all owe a little something.

      Primo Levi

      October 27, 1981

      Without Words

      The idea for this book is not from today. Today, it has come into being for a variety of reasons that I need not enumerate here. Everyone, generations old and new, is familiar with the accounts of human life from at least the last twenty years. There is plenty, if I’m not mistaken.

      We all know how and where freedom and the sacrosanct rights of humanity ended up.

      No doubts remain.

      They told us: no more wars, no more oppression, persecution, genocide. Words. Nothing but words. And a sea of rhetoric. Exhausted, hypocritical rhetoric.

      Humanity continues to kill, to massacre, to persecute, with increased ruthlessness. Before eyes that are increasingly indifferent, passive. When not complicit. There’s no pity for the elderly, for women, for children. There’s no pity for anyone anymore. Man is wolf to man, today as much as—and more than—yesterday.

      Arturo Benvenuti

      The older generations seem to have learned very little; the new ones don’t seem to want to learn any more. Wars continue to sow slaughter. Behind the barbed wire of new concentration camps, it has gone on; humanity has gone on being suppressed.

      Most of all, this book aims to be—attempts to be—a contribution to the just revolt on behalf of those who feel like they can’t, in spite of everything, resign themselves to a monstrous, terrifying reality. Those who believe they must still and always resist. Without empty words. Without rhetoric. Just as without words or rhetoric resisted the authors of these images, awful testimonies of an immense tragedy. Acts of accusation, but also unequivocal messages from yesterday for today. Without useless speeches. There’s really no need.

      Editor’s Note

      I confess that, for me, organizing this project wasn’t without its perplexities, especially concerning the methods of gathering and selecting this particular form of testimony given by art—almost always created in prohibitive material and spiritual conditions and at the risk of death—from the Nazi-Fascist concentration and extermination camps.

      A book of art or of testimony, then? Testimony, however valid, does not always possess the necessary aesthetic criteria to support rigorous analysis. However, is it possible—or legitimate, I would say—to maintain the rigidity of the stern judge, the cold aesthete, with a project like this one?

      This is why I decided to reconcile, within the limits of possibility, both of these demands, without losing sight of the fact that my primary intention

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