Art in the Worst of Times

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Butterfly by Margit Koretz
Student of Fredrika Dicker-Brandeis
in the Theresienstadt concentration camp

In 1942, Fredrika Dicker-Brandeis selflessly packed her bags, only 50 kilos allowed, with art supplies, limiting her personal clothing and valuables to a minimum. Her reasons were not only to ensure that she would have what she needed for her own artwork, but also to make sure she would be able to teach the children she would meet after her deportation to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in German-occupied Czechoslovakia.

The children of the camp had suffered great brutality, illness, loss and fear. Dicker-Brandeis (who was known as Friedl) taught over 600 of them, organizing secret education classes and art lessons. Her credentials came from her own studies in Vienna under the tutelage of Johannes Itten. She worked as a textile designer and artist in Berlin and Prague. But perha…