Zeev Porath Chronicled Nazi Rapists And Other Atrocities – In His Drawings
Detail of a drawing that was part of Remember the Women Institute’s VIOLATED! exhibition in 2018.
June 4, 2018
Sometime in 1943, a 35-year-old architect sat at a drafting desk on the third floor of the headquarters building in the infamous Janowska concentration camp in Lviv in what is now Ukraine. Over 80,000 Jews were murdered at this camp and it served as the main deportation center for 160,000 Jews of Lviv (a number which exceeded the entire Jewish population of the Netherlands).
In between doodling and planning the construction of mundane camp structures, this man, Zeev Porath, gazed out over a panorama of horror. Every day Porath was an unwilling audience to performances of unspeakable cruelty. From his elevated vantage point, he could witness these everyday terrors.
As a “privileged prisoner,” Porath could move relatively freely throughout the camp, past the everyday torture that characterized Janowska. He had no power to intervene. However, he did the one thing he was trained for: he could draw.