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Source: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1145961234950&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
When Art Not Only Imitates Life - But Saves It
(Jerusalem Post) Etgar Lefkovits - Alfred Gluck, then 23, had been slated for extermination in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, but his ability to draw sketches from photographs impressed the camp commander. Gluck was saved. "By drawing I survived," Gluck, 85, recalled in an interview. He arrived in Palestine in 1946. He fought in Israel's War of Independence, after which he studied industrial design, eventually becoming the secretary of the Israel Designers Association. After his liberation in April 1945, Gluck began to draw in a DP camp in Bergen Belsen. A Jewish Czech officer gave him an album in which he sketched scenes from the Holocaust: the entry of the Nazis into Vienna, the death march, a self-portrait with his daily portion of food, forced labor in the coal mines, and the "selection." Six decades after he made the sketches, Gluck's album is now on display at Yad Vashem's Art Museum. A smaller selection of his sketches is also available at the Holocaust Museum in Washington.