Francine Wolfisz is the Features Editor for Jewish News.
Thomas sketch of the selection on the ramp was chosen to be etched onto a memorial wall at Auschwitz
The ABC of an Auschwitzer
Armbands showing the prisoner hierarchy at Auschwitz
The prisoners on roll call
Going on the Death March
The wooden barracks at Auschwitz
The disinfection process
The entrance to Birkeanu concentration camp
When words failed him, one 15-year-old boy who survived three Nazi concentration camps instead set about drawing a series of remarkable sketches to tell his story of the Holocaust.
At first, Thomas Geve’s impulse was simply to explain to his father – who managed to escape to England during the Second World War – all the unimaginable trauma he had endured.
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After being liberated from a Nazi death camp, a Jewish boy sketched more than 80 profoundly moving drawings detailing his incarceration. Charlie Inglefield explains how he came to co-author a book of Thomas Geve’s powerful words and pictures.
Today, Zug the small, Swiss lakeside town where I live is home to some of the world’s largest companies, but, in 1945, it was a humble farming community renowned for its cherry production. That summer, the Felsenegg children’s home poised on top of the Zugerberg, a mountain overlooking the town, opened its doors to 107 exhausted and bewildered boys and girls, who had arrived from the horrors of Buchenwald concentration camp in Weimar, Germany.
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When words failed him, one 15-year-old boy who survived three Nazi concentration camps instead set about drawing a series of remarkable sketches to tell his story of the Holocaust.
The then 13-year-old Thomas Geve was imprisoned at Auschwitz, in Nazi-occupied Poland, from 1943 until 1945, and only survived the initial inspection by Hitler s SS guards - who would ordinarily have sent children to the gas chambers - because he was tall for his age.
Incredibly, though he was separated from his mother on arrival, other inmates risked their lives to help him have a fleeting 15-second reunion with her in the camp - where they touched hands and kissed - before he never saw her again.