A Holocaust Mystery Finds Some Answers

http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2007Sep17/0,4670,DrawingsfromDachau,00.html

A Holocaust Mystery Finds Some Answers

Monday, September 17, 2007

BAD AROLSEN, Germany - Deep in Shari Klages' memory is an image of herself

as a girl in New Jersey, going into her parents' bedroom, pulling a thick

leather-bound album from the top shelf of a closet and sitting down on the

bed to leaf through it.

What she saw was page after page of ink-and-watercolor drawings that convey,

with simple lines yet telling detail, the brutality of Dachau, the Nazi

concentration camp where her father spent the last weeks of World War II.

Arrival, enslavement, torture, death _ the 30 pictures expose the worsening

nightmare through the artist's eye for the essential, and add graphic

texture to the body of testimony by Holocaust survivors.

"I have a sense of being quite horrified, of feeling my stomach in my

throat," Klages says. Just by looking at the book, she felt she was doing

something wrong and was afraid of being caught.

Now, she finally wants to make the album public. Scholars who have seen it

call it historically unique and an artistic treasure.

But who drew the pictures? Only Klages' father could know. It was he who

brought the album back from Dachau when he immigrated to America on a ship

with more than 60 Holocaust orphans _ and he had committed suicide in 1972

in his garage in Parsippany, N.J.

The sole clue was a signature at the bottom of several drawings: Porulski.

Klages, 47, has begun a quest to discover who Porulski was, and how her

family came to be the custodian of his remarkable artistic legacy. The

Associated Press has helped to fill in some of the blanks.

What unfolds is a story of Holocaust survival compressed into two tragic

lives, a tale with threads stretching from Warsaw to Auschwitz and Dachau,

from Australia to suburban England, and finally to a bedroom in New Jersey

where a fatherless girl makes a traumatic discovery.

It shows how today, as the survivors dwindle in number, their children and

grandchildren struggle to comprehend the Nazi genocide that indelibly

scarred their families, and in the process run into mysteries that may never

be solved.

This is Shari Klages' mystery: How did Arnold Unger, her Polish Jewish

father, a 15-year-old newcomer to Dachau, end up in possession of the

artwork of a Polish Catholic more than twice his age, who had been in the

concentration camps through most of World War II?

None of the records Klages found confirm that the two men knew each other,

though they lived in adjacent blocks in Dachau. All that is certain is that

Unger overlapped with Porulski during the three weeks the boy spent among

nearly 30,000 inmates of Dachau's main camp.

"He never talked about his experiences in the war," said Klages. "I don't

recall specifically ever being told about the album, or actually learning

that I was the child of a Holocaust survivor. It was just something I always

knew."

As adults, she and her three siblings took turns keeping the album and

Unger's other wartime memorabilia.

The album begins with an image of four prisoners in winter coats carrying

suitcases and marching toward Dachau's watchtower under the rifles of SS

guards. It is followed by a scene of two inmates being stripped for a

humiliating examination by a kapo, a prisoner working for the Nazis.

One image portrays two prisoners pausing in their work to doff their caps to

a soldier escorting a prostitute _ intimated by the seam on her stocking.

Another shows a leashed dog lunging at a terrified inmate.

The drawings grow more and more debasing. Three prisoners hang by their arms

tied behind their backs; a captured escapee is paraded wearing a sign,

"Hurray, I am back again"; an inmate is hanged from a scaffold; and, in the

final image, a man lies on the ground, shot dead next to the barbed-wire

fence under the looming watchtower.

The album also has 258 photographs. Some are copies of well-known, haunting

images of piles of victims' bodies taken by the U.S. army that liberated the

camp. Others are photographs, apparently taken for Nazi propaganda,

portraying Dachau as an idyllic summer camp. Still others are personal

snapshots of Unger with Polish refugees or with American soldiers who

befriended him.

Barbara Distel, the director of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site,

said Porulski probably drew the pictures shortly after the camp's liberation

in April 1945. He used identical sheets of paper, ink and watercolors for

all 30 pictures, she said, and he "would never have dared" to draw such

horrors while he was still under Nazi gaze.

"It's amazing after so many years that these kinds of documents still turn

up," Distel told the AP. "It's a unique artifact," and clearly drawn by

someone with an intimate knowledge of the camp's reality, she said.

Holocaust artwork has turned up before, but Distel and Holocaust scholar

Michael Berenbaum, who is with the American Jewish University in Los

Angeles, say they are unaware of any sequential narrative of camp life

comparable to Porulski's.

"I've seen two or three or four, but never 30," said Berenbaum.

In Coral Springs, Fla., where she now lives, Klages showed the book in 2005

to a neighbor, Avi Hoffman, executive director of the National Center for

Jewish Cultural Arts. Hoffman immediately saw its quality and significance.

The two became determined to uncover its background and find out if the

artist had created an undiscovered body of work.

In August, Klages, Hoffman and Berenbaum went to Germany to begin their

hunt. They hired a crew to document it, hoping a film would help finance a

foundation to exhibit the book.

They began chipping away at the album's secrets at the Dachau memorial,

outside Munich, where they found an arrival record for Michal Porulski,

which listed his profession as artist, in 1941.

They learned that Unger hid the fact that he was Jewish when he reached

Dachau three weeks before the war ended. "That probably saved his life,"

Hoffman said. They also discovered a strong likelihood that the album's

binding was fashioned from the recycled leather of an SS officer's uniform.

Unger, an engaging youngster, became an office boy and translator for U.S.

occupation authorities at Dachau, which was turned into a displaced persons

camp, and obtained a U.S. visa in 1947.

Research by Klages' group and the AP has begun to pull together the

scattered threads of Porulski's life from long forgotten records at the

Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, a tiny museum in Warsaw, Auschwitz and Dachau,

the International Tracing Service of the Red Cross, the Yad Vashem Holocaust

Memorial archives in Jerusalem, Australian immigration records and data from

England.

Porulski enrolled in the Warsaw arts academy in 1934 after completing two

years of army service. Attached to his neatly written application is a

photograph of a good looking young man with light hair and dreamy eyes.

It says he was a farmer's son, born June 20, 1910, in the central town of

Rychwal, although in later records Porulski said he was born five years

later.

Chronically poor, he left the academy after failing to secure a loan for his

tuition but was later reinstated. After Germany invaded in 1939, he made

some money painting watercolor postcards of Nazi-occupied Poland, two of

which have survived and are now in the Warsaw Museum of Caricature.

In June 1940, he was arrested in a Nazi roundup "without any reason," he

wrote many years later in an appeal for help from the U.N. High Commissioner

for Refugees.

Two months later, he and 1,500 others were the first Poles to be shipped

from Warsaw to Auschwitz. He spent eight months there, then was sent to the

Neuengamme camp and finally to Dachau, near Munich, in May 1941.

In Dachau, according to a brief reference in a Polish book on wartime art,

he painted portraits, flowers, folk dance scenes and decoration for a

clandestine theater.

In 1949 he sailed to Australia and tried to work as a painter and decorator

but mostly lived off friends. He returned to Europe in 1963 and lived in

England and France. He visited Poland in the early 1970s for several months,

and stayed with his sister, Janina Krol, in Gdynia on the Baltic coast, and

another relative outside Warsaw, Wanda Wojcikowska.

He brought his sister paintings of Dachau, his niece, Danuta Ostrowska, now

75, recalls. But her mother threw them away, saying "I can't look at them."

The family still owns 10 of his mostly prewar paintings.

He was robbed of his money and passport, and Poland's communist authorities

wanted Porulski out of the country, Wojcikowska's daughter, Malgorzata

Stozek, recalls. "My mother even found a woman willing to marry him, to help

him stay in Poland," she said. But he already had borrowed money from his

sister and left.

His letters from England said he found work maintaining bridges, Stozek

said. "He wrote that the moment he finished painting a bridge over some

river, he had to start again." It could have been a metaphor for a life

going nowhere.

"One day I came to see my mother and she was crying because he wrote to her

that he had no money, he was hungry and was sleeping on park benches. He

lived in terrible poverty," Stozek told the AP.

He was so lonely, she said, he had considered suicide.

In 1978 he sent a request for war compensation to the International Tracing

Service in the central German town of Bad Arolsen, which houses the world's

largest archive of concentration camp records and lists of Holocaust

victims.

"I have no occupation of any sort. I was unable to resume my studies after

all those years in the camps," he wrote. "I am just by myself, and I live

from day to day."

The ITS replied that it had no authority to give grants, but was sending

confirmation of his incarceration to the U.N. refugee agency to support his

earlier reparations claim.

Unger also shows up in the Tracing Service, in a 1955 two-page letter he

wrote recounting his ordeal that began when he was 9.

Unger's father had a prosperous furniture business near Krakow. "Then the

infamous horde of Nazis overran our town, disrupted our life, murdered my

parents and little sister, and robbed us of all we had." He was the only

survivor of 50 members of the Unger family.

Christian friends hid him for a while, but he ended up imprisoned inside the

Krakow ghetto, then was moved to a series of concentration camps.

His daughter says that after he immigrated to America, he told a cousin with

whom he lived in New Jersey that his job at Dachau had been to tend the

ovens. The Nazis commonly used inmates for such purposes _ it was one of the

few ways of surviving.

Newly arrived in America, Unger spoke to Newark newspapers of his years of

torment, saying he escaped three times during marches between camps but was

always recaptured.

At one point, he told the Newark Evening News, he was herded into a gas

chamber at Natzweiler camp with 50 other prisoners, but they were spared at

the last minute because some of them were electricians whom the Nazis needed

for their war effort.

The two lives, briefly intertwined by the Holocaust and an album of photos

and paintings, ended 17 years apart _ Unger by hanging himself in 1972,

Porulski in 1989 in St. Mary's Hospital near Hereford, England, of pneumonia

and tuberculosis.

The death certificate gives his age as 74 and his profession as "painter

(retired)."

Shari Klages was 12 when her father died.

He had just been laid off from his 18-year job in the aeronautics industry,

and his wife had been diagnosed with brain cancer. His suicide is given

added poignancy by the image of the hanged inmate in the album, and Klages

believes it was his Holocaust experience that weighed most heavily on him.

"I have no doubt it was the most significant contributor to his death," she

said.