They'll have to catch me first : an artist's coming of age in the Third Reich
Annotation The life-saving power of art. Berlin 1939. A few months after Kristallnacht, eighteen-year old Irene Spicker tries to flee to Belgium but ends up in a Nazi prison. Freed after a few weeks, she tries again--this time, in the dark of night, she successfully crosses the frontier. The Germans invaded Belgium, and Irene was forced into hiding. Constantly on the move, she worked as a farmhand, at one point using false identity papers. Arrested by the Gestapo, she sat in a cellar prison cell destined for transport to Auschwitz. To clam her fears, she made a small detailed drawing of her hand that was to save her life. Incarcerated in the concentration camp at Mechlen, she was assigned to paint signs, posters, and numbers for her fellow prisoners to wear around their necks. This is Irene Awret's story of her first twenty-five years, from coming of age in a middle-class Jewish family, to Mechlen, where she met the young sculptor Azriel Awret, to liberation and freedom once more
Print Book, English, ©2004
University of Wisconsin Press/Dryad Press, Madison, Wis., ©2004