Thomas Geve - The Boy Who Drew Auschwitz

Thomas Geve (1929 – 2024) was a Holocaust survivor from Germany. He survived Auschwitz, Gross Rosen and Buchenwald. He recorded his experiences in a series of nearly 80 drawings soon after the liberation and published a memoir in 1958. He gave testimony to groups at Yad Vashem and elsewhere.

This interview with Associate Curator Orly Ohana discusses Thomas Geve and his work.

"No one else has come forward to tell of those who grew up in concentration camps. The memoirs before you are not those of somebody famous but of someone who was only one among thousands ... I have merely recorded the truth."
Thomas Geve, May 19581

Could you tell me a little about what happened to Thomas Geve during the Holocaust?

Thomas Geve was born in Zuellchow, Germany, in 1929 as Stefan Cohn. With the rise of Nazism in 1933 his father was forced to resign from his work as a doctor and surgeon.  The family moved to his father's hometown Beuthen.

Following the November Pogrom (Kristallnacht) of 1938, Thomas's parents sent him to a children's home in a village while they searched for a refuge for the three of them.

About a month later he was sent to live with his maternal grandparents in Berlin. His parents managed to obtain visas to England for themselves, but not for Thomas. In the summer of 1939 his father fled the risk of arrest by moving to England; his mother moved to Berlin together with Thomas in the hope that his father would be able to obtain a visa for him as well. When war broke out in September, the borders closed and Thomas and his mother were trapped in Berlin.

Initially Thomas joined the Jewish school; when the Jewish schools were closed down in 1942, he began working in the Jewish cemetery. At first, he worked in the grounds, later, when fewer adult men remained in the city, he also helped with gravedigging. In June 1943, when he was only thirteen years old, Thomas and his mother were deported to Auschwitz where they were separated. His mother remained in Birkenau where she was sent to forced labor. As far as it is known, she survived for at least a year. Thomas joined the Building School in the mens' camp at Auschwitz I where he was forced to work in construction. In January 1945 he was sent on a death march to the East. After two weeks at Gross-Rosen he was send to Buchenwald where he was liberated in April 1945.

He describes the moment of liberation in his book:

"In the morning, as we woke up into freedom, it was as though we were reborn. I had never experienced that feeling of independence before. Nor had I ever known about being free."2

When you think about it, you realize that he had never experienced freedom. To a certain degree he was born into the war. He was only three years old when the Nazis came to power and the entirety of his childhood was during wartime, that is a very harsh way to grow up.

When and why did he change his name to Thomas Geve?

He was born as Stefan Cohn and he lived his private life as Stefan Cohn; Thomas Geve was the pen name that he chose at the age of sixteen after journalists showed an interest in his drawings and in his personal history. He used the pen name when he published his drawings and books and also later, when he began to present his testimony to international audiences. His public persona as a Holocaust survivor, witness, author, creator and educator was exclusively under the name Thomas Geve.

What art did Thomas Geve produce that related to his experiences during the Holocaust?

Following the liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp and the arrival of American soldiers, when he was still in the camp in poor medical condition, Thomas decided to draw a record of everything that had happened to him in the camps. He created a series of some eighty drawings that documented the details of daily life in the camps. He drew the whole series in a two-week period from the 26 May to 5 June 1945. The series documents everything that happened to him and everything that he wanted to tell his father when they would meet.

Why do you think that he chose to draw his experiences in this way?

It seems that it came from an internal need to relate and to document everything that he had experienced. He felt that he needed to share his experiences as a way to process everything that he had undergone; like psychological treatment, drawing was a therapeutic tool that could help him heal. It was also a way for his to share his experiences with his father.

There is no way to ignore the fact that he grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust; he experienced the threat of the gas chambers, the crematoria, starvation, abuse and so on.

For example, Disinfection portrays the arrival at the camp stage by stage.

You come in here by the arrow, and you undergo everything here…

And I can almost see how he sat with his father and said, "See what happened to me."

From an artistic perspective, this isn't 'Fine Art' and Thomas Geve didn't see himself as an artist. But it is art with a therapeutic basis that describes what happened in a strong, powerful manner. He documents a lot and a later date, he also published a memoir.

When did he write that? 

He first wrote down his experiences in 1946 but they weren't published until 1958.

So that's very early, it's long before the Eichmann trial which was in 1961; what do you think gave him the push to publish something intended for a wider audience long before most other survivors started to share their experiences?

Initially, the idea came from a journalist who suggested that he put his drawings into words, but it was also very personal.

"Writing allowed me to add another layer of expression to the facts and scenes that I had drawn. The words brought back memories, experiences, thoughts, fears consolations and victories, all of which had been a part of life during those harsh years of the war."3

He also saw it as a way of memorializing his friends who did not survive,

"My words would give their personalities and dreams, which had perished so unfairly and too soon, eternal life."4

What is the unique viewpoint of Auschwitz that we see through his works?

What is interesting about his story is the aspect that throughout his childhood he dealt with the "lack of freedom" as a result of being enslaved, and also, the separation from his father and then from his mother. He describes the moments of separation, how he was deported to Auschwitz with his mother where they were then separated, and then on one occasion he was able to see his mother for what he describes as 'fifteen seconds'. He barely recognized her. She wanted to give him a slice of bread but he refused. He was immediately moved on and he never saw his mother again.

In dealing with all the experiences that he describes, he is essentially, searching for someone with whom to share in order to heal from everything that had happened to him.

I think that in 1945 art therapy was only in its earliest stages, and he essentially 'did it' for himself in order to integrate what he had experienced and also as a way to tell his father that which he had undergone.

Could you tell me a bit more about the style of his drawings? How does he show processes or the passage of time? Is this something in which he might have been influenced by outside sources or is it his own naïve way of documenting?

He documents what he has been through, what he saw and experienced. His style is naïve and childish; the drawings are structural and informative, documenting historical facts and various situation that he experienced and witnessed.

Are there any aspects of Auschwitz that we know about through his works that we maybe might not know otherwise? Beyond his own personal story, and personal experiences of Auschwitz, something that really tells us about what happened there or the nature of the place that we learn about through his works? Not uniquely personal to him.

There are few people who are able to give testimony. There are barely any people who survived in order to tell. Especially children like him.

He as a child grew up surrounded by adults. There were only another three or so youths of his age and there is something unique about that. Although the style of his drawings is naïve, they do document the terrible suffering that he underwent through the years.

He documents a lot, he documents what every insignia means, the guards, and the details of the forced labor that he performs.

Did he describe just his own labor or also the labor that he saw going on around him?

I think that he described both.

Daily Routine really shows his daily schedule, with clocks that show the times at which things were happening, and the different things that he had to do during the course of the day, from early rising, through to nighttime when they went back to sleep. And in Brick-laying School he depicts the training he received in various crafts and skills related to construction.

What is interesting is how he describes freedom. In Hurrah, the FREEDOM, when he describes the moment of freedom he describes it is as normal life, it's not that he finds himself at the beach, he is just at a park or in the street. People are walking, women are pushing baby carriages, children are playing in the street, basically, everything that he had never experienced before in his life. That moment of freedom. The title of his book "Youth in Chains" – that is what he knew. His adolescence was in the shadow of the Holocaust. He was imprisoned. He had never been free.

American Friends shows another aspect of the liberation. He recalls that the American soldiers would give them cigarettes and chocolate and they would photograph them. It has power and he describe it a lot. In this drawing he documents the matter of them coming to document what had happened, what they had liberated.

Do you think that the act of documentation by the liberators encouraged or inspired him to do likewise?

It could be.

There is no way to know, but he describes in his book how the American soldiers wanted to take photographs of the survivors of the camps so that they could tell the world what had happened.

"Eagerly clutching their sparkling cameras, they came to invade our sleeping quarters. 'Do you mind chum? Just a little snap-shot for the folks back home.'"5

Thomas was proud that unlike the photographic documentation produced by adults – which at the time was limited to black and white – he drew in color. Through color, he could add a more realistic, vivid layer to his documentation than could be achieved by the camera and its inherent limitations.

Nobody had paid attention to them beforehand

Exactly

What they want to take photos of us? What do they want? What is going on?

It influenced him, it definitely influenced him, otherwise why would he have documented that moment?

Beyond this documentation project of all these drawings that he drew to show his father, and the book that he wrote, did he talk about his experiences to people? Did he give testimony to groups?

He gave testimony throughout his life, and he shared a lot. He wrote books. He was invited to lecture internationally and his drawings were exhibited – both at Yad Vashem and elsewhere.

There was always the matter of telling his story as much as possible.

When he gave testimony to groups, how did he reference his drawings? Did he refer to them explicitly whilst talking or not?

I think that the drawings always supported … the two always went together. So too, his books which were published in several languages always included the drawings. He didn't refer to them explicitly "see figure X" but you could immediately see the relationship between what he was saying and what he had drawn. When I heard him speak at a gallery talk, he did refer to the drawings.

Thomas Geve is featured in the ready2print exhibition Stars Without a Heaven: Children in the Holocaust. Bring the museum-quality exhibition to your community.

Special thanks to Thomas Geve's daughter, Yifat Ofek-Meir, for her illuminating comments

• 1. Thomas Geve (1958), Youth in Chains, preface
• 2. Thomas Geve (1958), Youth in Chains, p221
• 3. Thomas Geve (2023), The Boy Who Drew Auschwitz, p12
• 4. Thomas Geve (2023), The Boy Who Drew Auschwitz, p12
• 5. Thomas Geve (1958), Youth in Chains, p232