Exhibitions

An exhibition of the Memorial to Victims of the Nazi Regime, Düsseldorf; curated by Helen Quandt.
Presented in Hamburg by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research in cooperation with the Concentration Camp Memorial Neuengamme, Hamburg

Venue: Hamburg Institute for Social Research

Biographical Sketch
Despite his early wish to become an artist, Ladislaus Szücs trained as a physician in Germany, Prague, and Budapest, drawing only as a pastime. Together with his wife Hedy, Szücs was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, later was sent to Mauthausen, and finally experienced liberation in May 1945 in the Ebensee concentration camp. His wife survived the camps only to die after liberation in the final days of the war. His second wife, Julia Kértesz, was also a survivor of the camps.
Szücs tried unsuccessfully for many years to obtain permission to leave Romania. Finally, in 1974, he was allowed to move to Germany with his family where he resumed work as a physician in spa towns. His wife died in January 1999; Szücs followed her in death one year later.

The exhibition created by the Memorial to Victims of the Nazi Regime, Düsseldorf and shown for the first time in the spring of 1999 focuses on ink drawings originating from the 1950s and 1960s, painted with a “broken watercolor brush” on the backs of invitations, calendar pages, and prescriptions (paper was scarce). These images are an expression of the past that emerged long before Szücs decided to write about what he had experienced (published in German as Zählappell in 1995, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag). As Jan Philipp Reemstma has noted in referring to this work, it is evidence of the “great enigma that humans throw up to the devil: that beauty can emerge from suffering and that suffering can take no credit for it.”