At the concentration camp 1943
WARNING GRAPHIC
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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.
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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.
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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. His own witnessing drove him also to draw the non-architectural scenes that he found most troubling.
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To Porath, this drawing was not simple. Indeed, he drew five studies of the same scene and three focused specifically on the SS-man.This moment haunted him. In the larger picture, he scratches out the original position of the left leg, perhaps to better illustrate the kicking motion. Moreover, based on the appearance of this guard, it is likely that the figure is not unknown, but is Richard Rokita, an infamous sadist in the camp.
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Rokita and other guards routinely stripped women naked and whipped them or forced them to have sex. One survivor recalled that Rokita had a “barnyard sexuality.” Another survivor wrote that raping Jewish women was Rokita’s “weakness.”
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Rokita was not the only rapist and Porath knew this as well. The camp laundry was run by SS-man Peter Blum, a notorious sexual predator. He staffed his workshop with “pretty Jewish women” who were “raped and later shot” according to another survivor. Porath, too, remembered that it was widely known that Blum “sexually abused women, in spite of the Nuremburg laws.” He also personally witnessed Rokita murder his former landlady and her daughter as he tried to smuggle food to them and repeatedly saw women he knew stripped naked and beaten.