In the early summer of 1945, the Swiss Red Cross invited 300 child survivors of the camps to recuperate in Switzerland for a few months. Many of the children came from Buchenwald. Among them were two Jewish boys of 16: Kalman Landau was Polish, Thomas Geve, German. Both had survived Auschwitz, Buchenwald and the evacuation marches to Groß-Rosen in the snows of January 1945, and,–at different times–both drew pictures to illustrate their experiences. A cycle of Landau’s 12 pictures would be published in the Swiss magazine Du in March 1946; Geve’s had to wait another 50 years, mainly for family reasons, before Yad Vashem and the Gedenkstätte Buchenwald brought them into public view. This essay explores the ways in which these teenage boys expressed their experience of the Holocaust in art during the first months after their liberation.
