Who is david olere

When the camp was evacuated on January 19, , he took part in the Death March. He was sent to Mauthausen camp, and worked in the mines of Melk camp, on the banks of the Danube. On April 7, he was sent to forced labor in Ebensee camp. On May 6, he was liberated by the Allied forces, and returned home to France.

From his liberation on he drew and painted the dreadful sights he witnessed while interned in the different camps. Later on his works, which document the gas chambers in Auschwitz, were used as legal evidence.

From the spoken words of influential leaders, to emotionally powerful lyrics in a song, heroic audio is all around us. After the war, his art works were used as evidence by historians to prove the existence of gas chambers in Auschwitz. There was no photography was taken inside concentration camps; the world didn't know the dreadful reality inside the camps.

Olere, the artist who survived the Holocaust, documented the cruel scenes in his artwork. Olere's artistry mostly centered around his life experiences in the concentration camp where he worked as a labor and witnessed terrible atrocities Jewish people suffered. People did not want to look at it, worse, they did not want to accept the fact it presented real events.

What is depicted in the paintings goes beyond human comprehension. It is easier for us to treat these paintings as the vision of an artist obsessed with the subject. Yet when we take a closer, deeper look at the canvas, analyse the particular elements, we discover in these visionary forms historical facts, the successive stages of an unprecedentedly gruesome extermination process that had been carried out in the largest German Nazi death camp: Auschwitz.

On the exhibition we have unique occasion to confront with these shocking evidence, both big oil paintings and the earlier drawings. The exhibition is arranged in an unusual, atmospheric, calm way showing the work of David Olere in the context of place and history.

Agnieszka Sieradzka — art historian, graduate of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, curator of artistic collections at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. She specializes in the subject of camp art. Author of publications and exhibitions devoted to this subject.