Artist: Lyndsey Hatchwell
Date: 2014
Museum: Sydney Jewish Museum (Sydney, Australia)
Technique: Drawing
‘Selection’ by Lyndsey Hatchwell, charcoal, pastel on paper, 2014, is part of a collection of drawings by Lyndsey Hatchwell, Joanne Morris and Bob McPhillips commissioned by Harry J. Fransman to illustrate his Holocaust experiences. On 10 May 1940, Germany invaded The Netherlands. It was the beginning of a five-year fight for survival for Harry J. Fransman. From the German bombing of Rotterdam where, as a 17-year-old apprentice in the men’s section of a department store he was the only survivor of the bomb blast, through the increasingly brutal antisemitic measures of the occupation, the inhumane treatment he experienced as a forced labourer, the harsh conditions he encountered in Blechhammer (sub-camp of Auschwitz), to his daring escape from a death march in the last chaotic weeks of the collapsing Third Reich, Harry’s story is expressed through a series of drawings he commissioned in 2014. Selection, roll call, punishment, beatings, hangings, humiliation, sexual abuse, starvation, exhaustion, lice infestation and even cannibalism witnessed in Gross-Rosen concentration camp, are illustrated through the direction and narration of the survivor in collaboration with the artists. These seminal events, seared into Harry’s memory, confront the viewer with the harsh reality of the war years and illuminate why survivors, like Harry, attribute their survival to a ‘miracle’.
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