Another Holocaust Legend

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.

Shari Finds A 'Book Of Horrors'

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.

Holocaust Scholars Amazed

Now, she finally wants to make the album public. Scholars who have seen it call it historically unique and an artistic treasure.

Poppa Klage Brought The Album To America

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.

Artist Is Identified

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 Horror of Dachau

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?
 

Dachau Museum Director

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 Scholar Calls The Album A Treasure

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.