1) Title: Prisoners Carrying Cement
Artiste: Bill Spira
Year: 1944
Medium: Drawing
Prisoners Carrying Cement is a piece of art created by Bill Spira. The work is expressed in the form of a drawn picture that depicts some of the activities that took place in German-controlled concentration camps during the Second World War. The drawing shows prisoners who are dressed in blue and yellow prison garments carrying bags of cement from a parked lorry towards a storeroom. There is a German soldier who stands guard to ensure that no prisoner escapes.
The drawing paints a picture of one of the many torturous punishments the Jews, Slavs, and other captives underwent in German-held concentration camps. Forced labour was one of the many evils Nazi Germany led by Adolf Hitler subjected their prisoners and accounted for a considerable amount of death of those held (Zeidner & Aharoni-David, 2015) . The captives worked under harsh conditions like extreme weather and lack of food. There were armed soldiers who stood guard to prevent any of the prisoners from escaping. Those who attempted to run were shot dead or recaptured and given more severe torture.
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From the drawing, viewers can be able to visualize some of the horrors the Jews and other captives underwent in the hands of the Nazi regime. The creator’s use of colour on the drawing distinguishes the prisoners and guards and the role each played. The captives were supposed to work under the supervision of German soldiers (Allain, 2012) . The background also contains buildings with chimneys that resemble factories. This may illustrate the industrial benefit the country got from free and forced labour.
2) Title: Belsen
Artiste: Edgar Ainsworth
Year: 1945
Medium: Drawing
The background is set in Belsen, one of the major concentration camps the Nazis took their captives like Jews and Slavs. There is a picture of an upright sitting man who is wearing striped prison clothes. He is close to several dead bodies with frames that look so emancipated due to supposed painful death they must have passed through. Behind him, another man stands while drinking from a mug while on the left another group is watching two people lift a corpse. These two workers look healthy unlike the two men who appear frail and weak. Everything in this drawing gives a true picture of what happened during the holocaust. It was only after the end of the Second World War that the general public and the world at large were able to come to terms with the extent and severity of killings in those extermination camps.
The viewers can be able to visualize the horrific condition the captives underwent in Nazi-held concentration camp. The holocaust which claimed the lives of millions of people especially the Jews marked one of the dark moments in history (Silverman, 2015) . Nazi regime administered some of the gruesome tortures to the captives like starvation, forced labour, and horrific medical experiments. The workers represent some of the German citizens who were forced by Allied forces to give the dead a decent burial for being complicit of the crimes. Viewers can be able to imagine the magnitude of the effect the society can have by possessing deranged ideologies.
References
Allain, J. (2012). The Legal Understanding of Slavery: From the Historical to the Contemporary. In The Legal Understanding of Slavery: From the Historical to the Contemporary . https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199660469.001.0001
Silverman, M. A. (2015). The Third Reich in the third person: exhuming the horrors of the Holocaust. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly . https://doi.org/10.1002/psaq.12011
Zeidner, M., & Aharoni-David, E. (2015). Memories of Holocaust-related traumatic experiences, sense of coherence, and survivors’ subjective well-being in late life: some puzzling findings. Anxiety, Stress and Coping . https://doi.org/10.1080/10615806.2014.954244
