UTW 58

A Jehovah's Witness prisoner at the Auschwitz death camp, prisoner number 190377.

Art: 2008
Media: Ink, gouache, colored pencil
Framed: 16.5 in. H x 13.5 W

The drawing was based on a based on an Auschwitz photo of a newly arrived prisoner who was a Jehovah's Witness. There are 3 photos of this prisoner in the book “The Jehovah's Witnesses and the Nazis - Persecution, Deportation, and Murder, 1933-1945.”  Authors: Michel Reynaud, Sylvie Graffard, Cooper Sq. Press, 2001; Introduction by Michael Berenbaum. Photo attribution in the book: The Auschwitz Museum and the USHMM Photo Archives.

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It is estimated that between 1,100 and 2,500 Jehovah's Witnesses were murdered by the Nazi government's soldiers and police, and nationals of other countries who worked with the Nazis in perpetrating the genocide in the Nazi-run death-extermination camps, concentration-death camps, police stations and prisons.

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Over one million non-Jewish Poles; over one million Russian POW’s; 250,000 Romany & Sinti and 500,000 physically and mentally disabled Protestant and Catholic Austrians and Germans were also murdered by the Nazis, in addition to six million Jewish Europeans.

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Today, numerous professional Jew-haters (including some American Christian clergy) and Holocaust deniers pro-actively promote revisionist history (a polite term for Holocaust denial) by stating that Auschwitz was a concentration camp; and that there was no mass murder (by the Nazis) of Jews or any other prisoners. (Four million non-Jews were also murdered by the Nazi government during the Holocaust). Auschwitz was a concentration camp in name only. It was a mass murder – extermination – death camp.

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While Auschwitz-Birkenau included a large number of slave labor - concentration camp sections within the massive city sized complex, it was first and foremost a mass murder, extermination - death camp. It had large sections of concentration-death camp slave laborers.

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Several well-known survivors of Auschwitz included Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl. Elie Wiesel was also a prisoner there, before he was shipped to the Buchenwald concentration-death camp in Germany. Over one million people were murdered at Auschwitz, predominately Jewish victims