As I approach my beloved husband’s seventh yarhzeit, I know the time is right for me to find new walls for Ludovit Feld’s Holocaust drawings. I’d like as many people as possible to view and learn from these heart-wrenching masterpieces.
I feverishly combed the Internet for more information about him, as the world must hear more of his story. I found a treasure trove of information. My search led to Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev’s book published in 2004, In Our Hearts We Were Giants, the remarkable story of the Ovitzes – an entire dwarf family that survived Auschwitz intact. The book, which also contains testimonies and pictures of Feld in Auschwitz, details the agonizing battery of tests he endured and describes his being forced to draw the dwarfs and the twins, as well as Mengele’s portraits.
Kalman Bar-On (formerly Braun), a twin who entered the death camp at age thirteen, shared the same bench and blanket with Feld (a distant relative) whom he described as a source of advice, wisdom and comfort. Peter Grunfeld, a twin who was a young boy at the time, recalled fidgeting while Uncle Lajos – the name they called Feld – drew his portrait in a large sketchbook.
The authors memorialized Ludovit’s final years: “After the liberation, Ludovit Feld, one of the ten dwarfs in Mengele’s collection, returned to his Czechoslovakian home-town of Kosice, where he resumed his artistic career and became one of his country’s renowned painters and art teachers ….
“It took Kalman Bar-On and Peter Grunfeld forty-four years to track down Feld. In the autumn of 1989 they traveled from Israel to Czechoslovakia to meet him again. Then eighty-five, Feld had never married and continued to live on his own, almost blind, bedridden. At his bedside he kept an album of his drawings, entitled ‘Children Are Also Led to Death.’
“‘Throughout the years, I’ve been waiting for you,’ Feld said to his visitors. ‘I can barely see, but each of the twin’s faces I painted in Birkanau is etched deep inside me. I remember the pretty face of one child with special sharpness – Pepicheck, who couldn’t sit still when I painted him. What happened to him?’ Peter Grunfeld knelt by Feld’s bed and let the blind man feel Pepicheck’s wet cheeks.
“Ludovit Feld died in May 1991. A black marble tombstone in the Jewish cemetery of Kosice bears his full Hebrew name in Hebrew letters.”
You can see Ludovit Feld on screen in the Auschwitz auditorium, every thirty minutes in an endless loop, his exhausted, tiny body plodding out of the camp gates on liberation day.
After long telephone conversations with Bar-On and Grunfeld, it became even clearer to me that Ludovit Feld’s drawings of the Holocaust must find a home in a museum to aid people in remembering our Six Million who perished at the hands of the Nazis.
And I shall make sure there is a window dedicated in Ludovit Feld’s memory at the old synagogue on Puskinova Street in Kosice.