UTW 35

Claustrophobia in the Warsaw ghetto, with a page of a Judenrat-issued labor identity card issued to ghetto prisoner Frydrych Zelman

Art: The ID card in the center was drawn in 1993;  the surrounding areas in 2014
Media: Ink, gouache, colored pencil on etching paper
Framed, 26 1/4 in. H x 40 1/4 W

Zelman died during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, April - May '43. The portrait in the center of the artwork was drawn from one of 4 pages of a Judenrat-issued labor card of Frydrycz Zelman, a ghetto prisoner. The pages were photocopied courtesy of YIVO Research Institute & Library, New York, 1993.
Later I photocopy enlarged two of the pages; each of those without Nazi swastika rubber stamps;
and I hand-drew the images.
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The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust states Zalman was known as Zygmunt. He was born in 1920. He "was smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto in July 1942 to confirm the existence of [the] Treblinka [death camp]...[this] in turn spurred the Jewish Fighters Organization to plan the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
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He accompanied a (Polish Christian) railroad worker along the tracks leading to Treblinka. Zygmunt met an eyewitness escapee, Azriel Wallach, the nephew of Maksim Maksimovich Litvinov, who confirmed that deportation [from the ghetto] meant death.
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Moving through the sewers, he [Zygmunt] fought on both sides of the wall in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. During a rescue mission, he was captured by the Nazis and executed."
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A number of the people (in sections surrounding the center) were inspired by photos in The 45th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Interpress, Warsaw, 1988)