Czy to ja … Pamiętnik obrazkowy Henryka Becka z czasu wojny i Zagłady

Dr. Henryk Beck (1896–1946), a gynecologist-obstetrician, survived the Holocaust in Lviv and Warsaw, and hid in the ruins of the city after the fall of the Warsaw Uprising. He is the author of a pictorial diary containing nearly 1,700 works from the period 1937–1946, including more than 900 from the war. This material shows a complementarity with the written sources, and the combined analysis of these allows a partial reconstruction of Beck’s wartime biography, which has not been worked out in detail so far. The sources reveal the social degradation that Beck, a representative of the Polish intellectual elite, experiences during the war. Maneuvering through the realities of the Soviet and Nazi persecution, he confronts the different attitudes of those around him, as well as the personal tragedy of the suicidal death of his father, Professor Adolf Beck. Although he receives help – especially from his wife Jadwiga and friends – and is clearly privileged in this regard, living in hiding, in mortal danger, he experiences stigmatization, dependence and emptiness, and even a loss of a sense of agency. The foundations of his identity as a Pole, a Jew, a doctor and an artist are shaken. He paints his experiences both literally and metaphorically, and the artistic language he uses conveys his high social status and reflects his immersion in the aesthetics of the interwar period. Beck reaches his peak in terms of style and cultural references in extremis, in the ruins of Warsaw, where he paints a series of drawings „Bunker,” which can be interpreted as a testimony to the Holocaust. Analyzing his artwork in a biographical context, the author argues that Beck’s artistic practice of that time was his way of coping with his sense of degradation and allowed him to symbolically liberate himself from the mortal oppression he was experiencing.