‘I am glad you are recording what they have done to me’: portraits from Belsen concentration camp among exhibits in London anniversary show – The Art Newspaper

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A selection of paintings, photographs and letters giving insight into one of the most infamous concentration camps of Nazi Germany are going on display this week in London.

The exhibition, held at the Wiener Holocaust Library in Russell Square, is being held to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by the British. It features paintings and artwork showing the true horror of life inside the camp, where more than 50,000 prisoners of war and other inmates were killed.

Among the exhibits are portraits by British soldier and artist Eric Taylor, who helped to liberate the camp on 15 April 1945. “We hold nine paintings by Eric Taylor in our collection, each one distinguishing individuals from the wider horror he witnessed as a soldier entering the camp 80 years ago this week,” Barbara Warnock, the curator of the exhibition, told The Art Newspaper.

After liberating the camp, Taylor returned to his studio and documented what he had seen, working from sketches he’d made. “The paintings are significant for the way they evoke the paradox of ‘liberation’,” Warnock says. “Liberation did not bring reprieve for those too ill or malnourished for freedom to be of any use—under one portrait Taylor left a handwritten inscription, ‘the unbelievable horror of Belsen was beyond human understanding’.

An inscription under another portrait, the curator adds, however, “offers a sense of hope. [It reads:] ‘I am glad you are recording what they have done to me’. We hope visitors to this important new exhibition will see the immense value of the photographs, documents, letters, and artworks from our collection, which evidence the crimes that took place at Belsen.”

Artefacts from Belsen are rare. The Nazis stopped keeping records towards the end of the war and destroyed much of what remained, while the British burned the camp after liberating it to prevent the spread of diseases such as typhus and typhoid, which had been widespread there.

Other items on display at the Wiener Holocaust Library include sketches by a survivor of the camp and photographs of Soviet prisoners of war posted through the letterbox of a family living close to Bergen-Belsen in 1942. There is also a diary clandestinely smuggled into the camp by the Ruth Wiener, the daughter of the Wiener Holocaust Library’s founder, Alfred Wiener. The diary reveals the hardship of everyday life for Jewish prisoners, while one entry describes an occasion when Ruth Wiener spotted friends who had once lived in nearby Amsterdam—Anne and Margot Frank. Anne Frank, known for her own diary account of the Holocaust, and her sister Margot died at Bergen-Belsen in 1945.

The director of the Wiener Holocaust Library, Toby Simpson, says: “Traces of Belsen takes a fresh look at a subject that many of us think we are familiar with, because of the images of overwhelming death and suffering that were broadcast to the world in April 1945.”

Warnock adds that she hopes that its exhibits, from personal items to “photographs of the brutally treated Soviet Prisoners of War, whose story is often overlooked“, can “help to tell the complex story“ of the camp.