Though he was untrained, Mr. Terna started to attract at Theresienstadt and have become a part of a bunch of artists there who scrounged for good paper and any uncooked materials they might flip into ink. He buried his sketches of on a regular basis life there in a tin field below the barracks ground.
Earlier than being deported to Auschwitz in September 1944, Mr. Terna gave his drawings of on a regular basis occasions, like folks lining up for soup, to a different prisoner, believing he would by no means see them once more. He had spent solely two months in Auschwitz when he was deported to Kaufering, a subcamp of Dachau. After an unsuccessful escape try, he was liberated by American troops on April 27, 1945.
Sick and weighing solely 70 kilos, he convalesced at a hospital, the place he started portray scenes from Auschwitz, in addition to landscapes.
“A lot later, my landscapes I observed that there have been partitions and fences in a lot of them,” he was quoted as saying by the Defiant Requiem Basis, which honors the prisoners of Theresienstadt. “It taught me that the reminiscence of the Shoah was part of me, and that it could not go away, and that I must reside with it.”
His father died in Auschwitz, and his brother died within the Treblinka extermination camp.
After returning to Prague, Mr. Terna reunited with Stella Horner, his girlfriend. They married in 1946 and moved to Paris, the place he studied artwork and labored as a bookkeeper for the Joint Distribution Committee, a Jewish aid company. They left for Canada in 1951 and later moved to Manhattan. (They’d divorce in 1975.)
Mr. Terna was not a part of the Summary Expressionist motion that had taken maintain after the struggle, however he tailored it to his creative imaginative and prescient, notably in his use of sand and pebbles to create texture in his canvases. Along with his Holocaust artwork, which he started within the Eighties, he painted circles as symbols of life’s continuity and representational items depicting angels and biblical tales like that of Abraham and Isaac.