Gaunt figures march grimly on, hunched against the cold in their thin striped garments, armed soldiers shepherding them at pace.
Dead bodies bearing scarcely more flesh than the skin stretched over their bones are carried to be disposed of by equally skeletal prisoners.
A man barely alive is hung by his wrists from a tree and tortured by officers shamelessly smiling with delight.
Another man is hanged from a bare wooden gibbet before a line of prisoners forced to look on and wonder if this too will soon be their fate.
These are a few of the haunting and historic sketches created by concentration camp survivor Marcel Roux in 1945, providing a glimpse of the violence and hunger that underpinned the horrors remembered on Yom HaShoah.
The extraordinary colour pencil drawings had been hidden from the world for decades, until they were discovered hidden behind a closet wall in a house in the town of Scarsdale, New York in 2009.
It had been the home of Dr William Epstein, who had served as a US Army doctor with the 20th Field Hospital in the Second World War and later became an obstetrician and gynaecologist at Mount Sinai Medical Centre in Manhattan. Three years after his death in 1990, the house was sold by his widow Ruth to lawyer Kenneth Orce and his wife Helene.
It was only when carrying out renovations more than a decade later that they discovered a satchel hidden away, containing more than 20 sketches by Roux as well as some postcards, photographs, newspaper clippings and a handwritten note.
He had given them to Dr Epstein as one of the American troops who had liberated the Langenstein-Zwieberge concentration camp, itself a subcamp of Buchenwald, where Roux had also been held earlier in 1945, after three years at Buchenwald. The sketches are inscribed in French to “mon ami, le capt. Epstein”.
The Orces offered to return them to Ruth but she declined. They contacted the Yad Vashem museum in Israel, where the art archive identified them as the work of Roux, a non-Jewish French resistance fighter born in Arles in 1904.
It is believed he had wanted to create a permanent record of what he had witnessed of the Holocaust and of the brutal reality of everyday life in Nazi concentration camps.
Now the 26 sketches have been donated to Ken Orce and his wife to his alma mater, Manhattan University, where they will go on display at the O’Malley Library Gallery.
According to the exhibition notes: “Roux was not a professional artist in the conventional sense.
"His artistic production appears to have been limited, private and shaped entirely by the circumstances of his imprisonment.”
The sketches are believed to have been created from memory in the weeks shortly after liberation.
The director of Manhattan University’s Holocaust, Genocide, and Interfaith Education Centre, Dr Mehnaz M Afridi said: “We are incredibly grateful to the Orces for donating these impactful images and for their contribution to Holocaust history.
“The drawings represent an important form of primary source documentation, and they will now serve the very purpose for which Roux created them: to ensure that the suffering and crimes of the Holocaust, and the stories of its survivors, are remembered and documented for future generations.”
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