Explore through artist
Edgar Ainsworth
'I made a drawing of a girl aged 22, and in return I offered her a cigarette. She took it and ate it whilst I was fumbling with my matches to give her a light.... Conditions such as these are beyond anyone's power to explain away.'
Belsen, 1945
ink, Imperial War Museum
Wera Berger aged 13 after a Year in Ravensbruck (near Belsen), April 1945
oil, Imperial War Museum
Edgar Ainsworth was born in 1905. As the Art Editor for Picture Post magazine, Ainsworth visited Bergen-Belsen three times in the months after it was liberated and recorded in his drawings the changes he saw among the people he met there.
In September of 1945, Ainsworth published a number of his drawings in Picture Post along with an article that gave his witness account of life in the liberated camp. This article was written in response to the ongoing Belsen Trials and to combat the sentiments of scepticism and indifference he had observed among some members of the general public.
'I went to Belsen shortly after it was liberated. I saw the horrors of mass death. I was nauseated, as every other sane human would be. But it wasn't the piles of rotting dead that fascinated and horrified me, it was the condition of the still living'.
Edgar Ainsworth, 'Victim and Prisoner' Picture Post, September, 1945.
