Jan Hartman, born 10 August 1926, lived an affluent life as the son of a lawyer in Prague. Jan, his elder brother Jiri, and their parents moved to the Czechoslovakian countryside in September 1938 to avoid the expected German bombings of Prague.
Their escape from destruction was short lived; cut off by the arrival of the German Army the following spring and the imposed restrictions on Jewish civilian rights that soon followed. Despite his family's attempts to leave Czechoslovakia, his father was arrested by the Gestapo on a number of occasions and Jan and his brother were assembled for transportation to Theresienstadt camp in 1942.
In the years that followed, the brothers moved through the camp system becoming inmates in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Czestochowa and Buchenwald, where they were separated.
Jan and Jiri were reunited in the spring of 1945 when they were liberated.
The brothers returned to Prague together to find their flat empty and abandoned by the S.S. men who had lived there. Their aunt who had survived both Bergen-Belsen and Ravensbrueck, took them in under her care.
Jan and Jiri's parents never returned, and it was not until years later that Jan learned that they had been killed at Auschwitz.
Shortly following his return home, Jan began a series of paintings which reflected his experience in the camp system,
'I think it was in '45, I must have done them as quickly as I possibly could, because it was my way of expressing what I had seen... I couldn't do it today, because I wouldn't remember how it was, but at that time I still did.'
So it was one way of expressing an evidence the same way as I do it today in words'.
Jan Hartman