It is reported that many Jews, perhaps 60,000 persons, survive in Lods, Poland. The Soviet authorities are undoubtedly aware of the danger that the Germans may attempt to exterminate these people before evacuating the city. This Government is confident that Soviet authorities will use every means within their power consistent with the military situation to avert much tragedy. In view, however, of the Government's deep concern for the safety of victing of pricy perseontion, it would be appreciated if you would discuss this matter gith appropriat officials of the Soviet Government.

Theresienstadt Ghetto

Leo Haas

Leo Haas was born in 1901 to a Jewish family in Opava, Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From 1907 to 1919, he attended school in Opava, where he learned landscape design and urban architecture. In 1919 he began studies at the Karlsruhe Art Academy; his friendship there with the realist Karl Hubbuch created links to the revolutionary Spartacus movement. The years 1922 to 1924 were spent in Berlin, where Haas made the acquaintance of Willi Jäckel through the German artist Emil Orlik. In 1925 Haas worked as an illustrator for a working class press in Vienna and published drawings in Stunde, Bühne, Arbeiterzeitung, and Abend; he also sold several book illustrations for the first time. Haas's early art was influenced by disparate artistic movements, including German Expressionism, Goya's Desastres, and Toulouse-Lautrec.

Returning to Czechoslovakia in 1926, Haas worked in Opava until 1938 as a painter, graphic artist, book illustrator, and stage designer. During those years he took several trips to southern France to study the career and works of Toulouse-Lautrec. Haas belonged to both Moravian-Czech and German artists' associations; his ideal was to have one German guest artist at every Czech exhibition and one Czech at every German show. To the nationalist Sudeten German press, however, Haas was a "cultural Bolshevik" and a "spoiler of German-Silesian art." After the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, he was arrested by the Gestapo in October 1939 for aiding illegal border crossings by German Communists fleeing their Nazi persecutors.

Haas was initially deported in late October 1939 to the camp at Nisko on the San River near Lublin, and when the first Nisko deportations organized by Adolf Eichmann failed, he was transported in April 1940 back to Ostrava for forced labor. As both a Communist activist and a Jew, he was subsequently deported to the Jewish ghetto of Theresienstadt (Terezin) on 1 October 1942. (Leo Haas was prisoner number 504 on the transport from Ostrava to Theresienstadt.) While working in the Technical Department at Theresienstadt, Haas managed to do numerous clandestine drawings of actual ghetto conditions. Assigned to the overcrowded rooms of the Hanover barracks, he was able to hide his illegal drawings in replastered walls there. During July 1944 he was arrested and imprisoned in the Small Fortress of Theresienstadt in the so-called Painters' Affair, when the Gestapo interrogated him and other Theresienstadt artists for "smuggling atrocity propaganda abroad," which had reached the inspection commission of the International Red Cross at Theresienstadt.

Haas was subsequently deported in October 1944 to Auschwitz with the designation "KL Au I, R.u.," which meant deportation to Auschwitz I, “return not desired” (the translation of R.u. or Rückkehr unerwünscht), and later to the forgery detail of Operation Bernhard at Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In Sachsenhausen he was assigned to the so-called Himmelfahrtskommando (the "suicide work brigade," prisoners who were to be executed in Barracks 18/19). Instead, Haas was transferred on 25 February 1945 to Mauthausen concentration camp and in April to the Mauthausen satellite camps at Redl-Zipf and Schlier. (Archive Mauthausen Museum, Vienna, B 36/5, contains a list of the Sachsenhausen prisoners arriving in Schlier on 13 April 1945; Haas is number 35 on that list.) From there, in the last days before liberation, he was moved again, this time to the subsidiary camp of Ebensee, where he was freed by the Americans on 9 May 1945, a day that he later described as his “rebirth.”

After the war Haas returned to Czechoslovakia together with the orphaned son, Tommy, of the Czech Jewish artist Bedrich Fritta; Haas raised him as his adopted son. (Leo Haas carried the gravely ill Fritta on his back during the 1944 transport from the Small Fortress to Auschwitz, where Fritta subsequently died on 8 November 1944.) Haas also retrieved more than four hundred of his drawings hidden in the walls of Theresienstadt and donated them to the Terezin Memorial Museum and the Jewish Museum in Prague. Haas's testimony and clandestine art were used as evidence in the 1946 trial of Heinrich Jöckel, who had served as commandant of the Small Fortress during Haas's imprisonment there. Until 1955 Haas worked as an editor and a political caricaturist at the Czech Communist-party daily Rude Pravo in Prague. In 1955 he moved to East Berlin, where he edited Eulenspiegel and also worked for the film company DEFA and the German Democratic Republic television network. His works were widely exhibited in France, Italy, Austria, Germany, Israel, China, and the United States. Most of Haas's postwar art reflects his concentration-camp experiences and survival. Shortly before his death, he noted: “I feel the same anger towards Nazi violence that I felt in 1942." Haas died in Berlin on 13 August 1983.

Haas's works are represented in collections at the Terezin Memorial Museum, the Jewish Museum in Prague, the Peter-Bezruc Museum in Opava, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Memorial Museum, the Sachsenhausen Memorial Museum, the Mauthausen Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, as well as in the collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Biographical material about Haas is available at the State Archives in Prague, the Baden Generallandesarchiv in Karlsruhe, Germany, and the collections of the Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance and the archives of the Mauthausen Memorial Museum, both in Vienna. Extensive biographical data on Haas

is also found in Janet Blatter and Sybil Milton, Art of the Holocaust (New York: Layla-W. H. Smith, 1981); and Wolf H. Wagner, Die Hölle entronnen: Stationen eines Lebens; Eine Biographie des Malers and Graphikers Leo Haas (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1987).

The following memoir by Leo Haas is reprinted from Seeing through "Paradise": Artists and the Terezin Concentration Camp, 2d ed. (Boston: Massachusetts College of Art and Geothe-Institut, 1991), 1–88. It was published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Massachusetts College of Art in 1991. The second printing of the catalog was made possible, in part, with the support of the Goethe-Institut, Boston.

On a June day in 1944 the painters and graphic artists, Bedrich Fritta, Otto Ungar, Felix Bloch and Leo Haas were called to the "Council of the Elders," to Mr. Zucker in the Magdeburg barracks, where the "Mayor's Office" of the Terezin ghetto was located. There he disclosed to us that we were to report the next morning to the commander of the SS. Mr. Zucker, who had certainly been sworn to secrecy, merely made the suggestion that we should pack warm underclothing and take a coat, for we might have to wait in the cold cellar of the commander's office, and "it might possibly last quite a while" before we were questioned this was just a precaution, he said, so that we would come to no harm! Next morning we found there the architect Troller and an old man, Mr. Strass from Nachod, and I must say that the precautions of Mr. Zucker were justified. It really did last quite a while! For me and, if I am correctly informed, for Troller it lasted to the 9th and 22nd of May, 1945, and for the others all eternity.

What was it all about?

The Jewish leaders of the ghetto, who were responsible to the Gestapo for everything and could not take the least decision, except under the greatest danger, and with SS approval, had a sort of drafting office as part of the construction work in the ghetto, where some of the necessary technical drafting for building purposes was done. But it was also a place where artists from different countries (Dr. L. Heilbrunn of Brno, the graphic artist Pöck from Vienna, Petr Kien, etc., in addition to those I mentioned above) were able to carry out all sorts of drawings and writing, necessary for bringing this phantom life to an end. For example, I remember that I myself drew a series of posters that were addressed to the smallest inmates of the ghetto, with the slogan, "Children, don't do that," trying to help in regard to rules of hygiene and general training of children. This team was headed by the splendid graphic artist Bedrich Fritta of Prague, who was at first protected from the transports as AK-man.

Naturally, we were soon making use of this activity that was sanctioned by the SS (since we were employed by the “government") and which we exercised as part of our work,

to actually make studies and sketches of life within the walls of the ghetto, camouflaged as official work. Especially Fritta and I myself were constantly encouraged to create this unique documentary testimony. The members of different cells would use the traditional Czech saying, "Write this down, Kisch!" Well, this encouragement was not necessary. Even before this I had not been idle when, after my arrest in Ostrava, I had been working in the construction of the first European camp for Jews (in 1939-1940) in Nisko on the San. I had brought from there a thick folder of documentary sketches made in a similar way. I was driven all the more by the shocking experiences within the ghetto walls to be constantly on the lookout, wherever I could, sketch pad in hand.

Of course we were often in danger and had to use the greatest caution in drawing, hiding from the SS men that were spread out all over the town, keeping to attics or somewhere in a crowd. Fritta, Ungar, and often Bloch and I were so oppressed by the horrible surroundings that we devoted ourselves to our "office duties" in the day and then night after night gathered in our darkened workroom, where our sketches matured as a cycle. At that time and under these conditions (perhaps it is only today that I realize what great danger we were then working under) the cycle of 150 splendid drawings by "Fritzek" (Fritta), for instance, came into being. Today they hang in the Jewish Museum in Prague. This was also how I made my cycle of drawings of Terezin, some of which are in the possession of the Czechoslovak government, but a large number of which were sent on an information tour of the United States; others are among my property and still others serve as a basis for subsequent works and thus help in some attempts to depict Terezin life. At that time we came in contact with the above-mentioned Mr. Strass, a businessman in Nachod, whose "Aryan” family kept up underground connections with him. He told us that this contact was made through some courageous members of the Czech gendarmerie, who served in the ghetto and helped all they could. I myself came in contact with two brothers-I think their name was Prikryl. Strass, who was a passionate collector, especially of Czech art, often begged drawings from us that then were sent out of the ghetto by the same route that food and tobacco came in. We thought that in this way something of our documentary material would survive, even if we did not. We learned that successful contacts had been with foreign countries and that our works had been sent beyond the borders of the territories ruled by the Nazis. In our enthusiasm we undoubtedly underestimated the danger that had thereby increased, and we worked even more passionately and intensively on our presentation of the ever more dismal “life” in the ghetto.

Things went on like this for a full two years. Then-I think it was in the spring of 1944-the visit of an especially important Red Cross commission from Switzerland was announced. I believe I forgot to say that we had been told that

our drawings had gone to Switzerland. For conspiratorial reasons we could not-consciously-meet with our colleagues. The preparations for this commission's visit, on which the Nazis seemed to place great value, in the precarious situation they were already in by that time, we also sketched.

Then the visit of the Red Cross was over. Among the initiate it was rumored that the SS leaders were dissatisfied with it-dissatisfied and suspicious. Evidently the representatives of the Red Cross were not content with the streets that had been polished clean with Jewish persons' toothbrushes, and wanted a look behind the scenes of the Potemkin village. They seemed to have been well informed. There had been no success in tracing their contacts, but the fact is that a few weeks after the visit came the orders from Mr. Zucker with his troubled warning, which introduced this report.

I do not know to what circumstances it is due that the SS made no raid on our rooms. I think it was to show their mastery of the situation, and to avoid any irritating surprise. Our employment in the "government" gave us the only privilege, but one that was not to be discounted, that we were lodged in barrack rooms divided off by lath walls and so aroused the illusion that we were living in our own homes. When things had gone on in this way for a half year, we succeeded in saving a large part of the rest of our work. With feverish efforts, and with the help of a building expert, engineer Beck of Nachod, we succeeded in prying out a part of the wall in our room and walled in the drawings. In a few hours it was finished, but I did not forget to leave some unimportant drawings lying about, so that if there was a house search by the Gestapo, I could stop the mouths of the wolves to some extent. Fritta's works were also buried by friends in a tin case in a farmyard, and were saved in this way.

After a short discussion with each other, when we had heard Zucker's report, we naturally decided that our activity as "documentarians" was the basis for our questioning, and this was shown to be quite correct.

We reported on the morning of—I think-June 17, 1944, actually, July 17, 1944 (there is an assignment card to the police headquarters in the card-file of the Jewish Religious Communities office in Prague) at the office of the Gestapo head and were immediately herded down to the cellar.

After a long wait, we were hustled up to Rahm's room. Besides Rahm there were present: Moes, also known as the "bird of death," also Gunther whom I recognized immediately from my time at Nisko, for there he had headed the organization of the transports, together with his brother in Ostrava. But then still another person came in, whom I again recognized from his inspection trips to Nisko: he was Eichmann. I knew, of course, that this meant no good for us.

I am trying to make as dispassionate as possible a portrayal of the "Affair of the Painters from Terezin,” as I found, after our return in 1945, our case was called. And here also I cannot speak of any brutalities.

Eichmann, in opening the questioning, gave the impression rather of one who was deeply hurt that his noble intentions for the Jews could be so slanderously interpreted. And it was in this sense and this tone that he spoke. Then the questioning was continued by Gunther and Rahm. Both followed Eichmann in using an oily smooth, soft tone, and carried on a sort of discussion on the history of art with us. Naturally the undertones sounded that much more dangerous. They had from two to three drawings from each one of us four painters as evidence. Each of us was in a different SS-man's charge. Gunther questioned me-that I remember precisely showing me a study of Jews searching for potato peels and saying, "How could you think up such mockery of reality and draw it?" I immediately used the same tone and explained to him that it was not, as he thought, something I had invented, but a simple study from nature, such as any proper artist is accustomed to make, a sketch of what I had happened to see by chance when I was on official duties, and which I had immediately sketched, in the same way as any painter seeks for objects to paint.

Then came the question: "Do you really think there is hunger in the ghetto, when the Red Cross did not find any at all?" The subsequent questions were aimed at making us name the people who had been our contacts with the outside world and tell whether we thought they formed a Communist cell. Since we denied this and shifted everything onto our artistic interest, the questioning was interrupted and we were taken again to the cellar. I do not know how long we lay there. After some hours, Gunther and Moes appeared again, and this time the latter had a long pistol in his hand. Their tone was much more like the familiar Gestapo manner, and now their sole aim was to find out our connection with some Communist cell. We could go home immediately if we would tell all the names of those who had “led” us into this activity. Then Moes, after brandishing the revolver in a terrible way, broke off the questioning and said in a German that still rings in my ears, "Just stop it! You'll get nothing out of these fellows." (It is certainly very interesting from a psychological point of view that one often retains some not very essential fragment of conversation from situations that could be a matter of life and death.) Now we were left alone and felt we'd never get home again.

It had already got dark in the cellar when we heard a heavy truck pull up in the early evening. Soon thereafter came the typical bawling of the SS guards as they clattered into the cellar and drove us with the butts of their guns and with blows up the stairs and onto a place densely covered with trucks, in which were our wives and children, crying and yet happy to see us again. There was Fritta's wife and three-year-old boy Thomas, Mrs. Bloch, Mrs. Ungar with her five-year-old daughter, my wife Erna, then the aged Frantisek Strass from Nachod and the architect Troller who was sent away with us. As architect he had to carry out the

special demands of the camp command and in some way had not suited the gentlemen.

The whole transport went to the Small Fortress that was situated in the vicinity. There we first had to stand with our faces to the wall, the children as well. Then we men were put in one cell and the women and the two children in another, but not in the women's court.

I do not want to recount here the suffering we had to endure. This is impossible for lack of space. I believe that Ungar was the first to be sent from the Small Fortress, and I think Bloch was beaten to death on the spot, then Troller went to Auschwitz also, and I heard that he survived this, but lives somewhere overseas. The aged Strass also held out for a while in Auschwitz, I believe, and there he and his wife perished. Mrs. Ungar and her daughter survived the horror (in Auschwitz, too, I believe), while Otto Ungar died of typhus, in Buchenwald after liberation, I believe. There remained in the Fortress Fritta and I, our wives and little Thomas Fritta.

In the course of our daily labor at the "Richard" works in Litomerice I was so beaten that as a result I had a serious phlegmon, among other things, that was cut out by our cell policeman, Dr. Pavel Wurzel, with the assistance of Julius Taussig (a furrier from Teplice), who could not go to work there because of a broken leg-without sterilization, without anesthetic, with a rusty saw. We from the "Eastern nations" were not allowed access to the sick bay or to be visited when ill. While I was going through the crisis of the wound's healing I lay hidden in old rags, where our yard commander Oberscharführer Rojko found me and drove me with blows into the bunker cell and forbade anyone to give me food. I was there about a month, then more and more fellow prisoners were brought in, among them the severely ill Fritta, who had dysentery. I had been saved by the solidarity of my fellow prisoners (Jewish and non-Jewish), above all our yard trusty, the Czech General Melichar. Then, before the whispered rumors of our liquidation by Pindja and Rojko came true, we two received an indictment from the Prague Gestapo, that spoke ambiguously of “horror propaganda and its dissemination abroad," together with a warrant for our arrest that we were to sign voluntarily, “for fear of the just anger of the German people," and which bore the remark that was familiar to us: "R.u." (return not desired).

The very next day (it was towards the end of August) we rode in cell cars attached to an express train with a stop in Dresden for questioning, then through what was then called Breslau to Auschwitz. Fritta was very feeble and was

scarcely able to move, but had to be taken to the toilet because of the dysentery every quarter hour. I offered to care for him, and thus my handcuffs were temporarily removed. For instance, I carried him, almost on my back-he was a good head taller than I-in Dresden, through half the city to the police headquarters. In Auschwitz, where we were taken to the so-called Stone Camp Auschwitz I, as political prisoners (not for racial reasons, what a nuance!), the prisoners' organization was already functioning. Fritta was taken directly to the sick bay by the architect Hanus Major and Dr. Pavel Wurzel, who had become doctor for the sick bay in the meantime. I visited Fritta there a few times in the next eight days. He had almost completely lost consciousness and on the eighth day he died, a horrible spectacle of decay, covered all over with oedema, with complete decomposition of the blood (sepsis). I went on to Sachsenhausen in a Sonderkommando of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt [Central Office for Reich Security]. Together with Czech pals like Adolf Burger, Stein-Skála, Karel Gottlieb, Dr. Kaufmmann-Horice, and with the well-known Berlin publicist Peter Edel, I followed all the movements of this Himmelfahrt (heaven-bound) command up to liberation in May 1945, in Ebensee, Austria.

Meanwhile my wife Erna, although her health was completely undermined, remained among the living and returned home. She had spent the year with little Thomas Fritta in solitary confinement in the Fourth Yard of the Small Fortress, where Fritta's wife Hansi had died, miserably ill. We later adopted Thomas. In 1955, my wife Erna died, after having barely existed for ten years, one hundred per cent disabled after her imprisonment.

Immediately after we had returned we sought out the places in Terezin where we had hidden our works. We actually found them again, unharmed. Later I was able to show these (they were published in almost all centers of publication throughout the world), with the splendid drawings by Fritta and some by Ungar, as well as some strongly incriminating drawings by a Terezin doctor, Dr. Fleischmann, who had managed to save his, too. Added to other evidence, this was strong testimony on the "final solution" engineered by Eichmann and Globke.

I feel it my duty to accuse, until the end of my life, the fascist murderers named in my report, and to accuse the men in the background-in the name of all the victims, I in my own name, and above all in the name of my friends who did not return, the painters of Terezin.