Michigan Today . . . June 1996

The Case of the Artful Painter By Bara Zetter-Sapir

In last year's March issue, Michigan Today reported on Bara Zetter-Sapir's quest for the identity of an artist who had painted a powerful but disturbing image of Adolph Hitler as the Angel of Death. Some of those who have seen the painting, Zetter-Sapir among them, think that "it could be to the Holocaust what Picasso's Guernica is to the Spanish Civil War." Others say that it unintentionally glorifies Hitler.

The couple who were thought to have been the original owners of the painting, Bernhardt and Charlotte Kluger, said a fellow survivor of Nazi labor camps named Aczél painted it for them in Weiden, Germany, while they waited to emigrate to the United States. Aczél, a Jewish Hungarian, reportedly died of tuberculosis shortly thereafter.

After writing her master's thesis on the painting under the supervision of Prof. Victor H. Miesel, Zetter-Sapir decided to solve the mystery of Aczél's identity. Just when the apparent solution was in her grasp, the plot thickened. With her life savings and a few contributions, she began a journey that took her to Israel, Europe, Canada and California.

But let her tell her tale . . . .

As I walked through the farm fields of Csököly, a village in southeast Hungary, I looked back to the west at a wall of trees and thought of them as witnesses to the expulsion of the local Jews 50 years ago. This village, like many others in Europe, seems to have erased most of its evidence of Jewish residence. Still, I had come here to find traces of a Holocaust survivor who had painted a powerful testament to the slaughter of half of the Jews who lived in Europe between 1932 and 1945.

I had first seen the painting in Jerusalem in the apartment of a private collector, Reuven Prager, in 1992, and had spent the last four years trying to identify its creator. I accepted an account of its origin that said that a Jewish Hungarian survivor of Auschwitz had completed it in March 1946. The source of the account was the late Charlotte Kluger, whose estate sold the painting to Prager. In a taped interview in 1979, she said she and her husband, Bernhardt, had received the painting from a "Mr. Aczél."

The painting is oil on canvas and impresses one as being even larger than its 7' x 5'. The work is signed and dated on the lower right hand corner: Aczél/1946. The scene describes an apocalyptic vision: set against a tumultuous night sky, a nude and winged Hitler flies over a sea of emaciated victims. Hitler holds a large scythe which divides the horizontal composition in half. The scythe drips with the cumulative blood of the victims. In the painting's background, a city burns in the east, while strands of lightning tear the sky in the west. The work serves as a metaphor of the Holocaust through its representation of Hitler as the Angel of Death. It is remarkable in its imagery, technical achievement and history, and some scholars have called it "The Guernica of the Holocaust."

In a Bavarian Cemetery

Before going to Csököly, I had visited Weiden in the German state of Bavaria. On a long rainy day I looked for the house and shack Charlotte Kluger had described, but a modern office-apartment complex now stood in their place. The following day, I contacted Weiden's archivist, Petra Vorsatz, who promised to provide me with whatever records she could find on the Klugers and Aczél. Then I contacted the Jewish cemetery in nearby Amberg, the place where officials allegedly buried Aczél after they found him dead in his shack. The caretaker was persistent in telling me that there was absolutely no one with the name Aczél buried in the cemetery or in any records.

I was baffled by this information because this was the closest cemetery where Jews were buried after the war. Since Charlotte Kluger was confident of Aczél being buried in Amberg, I wondered whether it was possible that he was not buried in a Jewish cemetery. The following day I left for Budapest, with assurances from my hosts in Munich that they would do some cemetery research for me. My term in Budapest consisted of meeting with gallery directors, media, people in the Jewish community, and others who I thought might have information on Aczél. No one had heard of him.

What I "knew" of the painting at the time I paced the Hungarian countryside, I had derived solely from Charlotte Kluger's taped recording. She and her husband were survivors of Czech labor camps. She said that after the war she provided a shack in her backyard for the artist, a 54-year-old Auschwitz survivor, to live in, and that he had died there not long afterward in 1946. Officials who took his body to the Jewish cemetery found the painting six months later, along with a note thanking the Klugers. She and her husband, Bernhardt, emigrated to the United States, bringing the painting with them and limiting its viewing to visitors in their home. In 1979, the painting was sold to a Miami businessman, Reuven Prager, who established citizenship in Israel the following year. By 1985, both Klugers had died and the only information of the painting was the audio cassette Prager had obtained.

I thought the appraisers of the Kluger estate could help me locate the couple's son, who had approved the sale, but they turned up nothing new. Meanwhile, I also contacted dozens of Hungarian officials in search of information about Aczél. But no archive, institutional record, museum, gallery, census, book or Hungarian art reference guide mentioned him. In 1992, a letter from the Auschwitz archives identified an inmate as Deszö Aczél, a Hungarian of the same age as the Aczél described on the Kluger tape. His birthplace was Csököly, which had 10 Jews before the war. Two weeks after I arrived in Budapest, I traveled to Csököly, ready to confirm the only lead I had on the artist.

Poking in the Hungarian Past

Csököly's current inhabitants, including the local archivist, were uninterested in foreigners poking around their past. They offered no explanation or documentation for the expulsion or extermination of Jews from their community. On the other hand, one villager whom we met on the street became our guide, and he was extremely helpful, and a bit curious about me and my translator. When he found out we were Jewish, his eyes widened and he immediately reached for my Magen David, kissing it like a rosary. I was unclear as to whether this was out of respect or some type of an apology, but I was moved nonetheless. After visiting the dilapidated Jewish grave in the back of his property and finding no evidence of any Aczél, we left the village, and I wondered if I would ever find a path that wasn't a dead end.

When I returned to my flat in Budapest that evening, Helen Teitelbaum, the woman with whom I was staying and an editor of Where magazine, rushed in after spending the day at a book fair. She pushed a volume at me. "Here, you have got to read this," her voice lilting in excited tones, "I think this can help you." The book, Seeds of Sarah, was written by Judith Magyar Isaacson, a Jewish Hungarian survivor who lived in the town adjacent to Csököly before the war. Her book provided names of potential contacts who might have known Deszö. Soon I was able to meet some of them and was ultimately able to locate Deszö's son, who survived the war and was living in Budapest. I found myself in Gyula Aczél's living room discussing his father. "My father was a pharmacist and optometrist, not an artist," he said, his eyes glued to my photograph of the painting. He glanced up and said, "He was not the man you are seeking even though many of the statistics point to him. There is just no way."

I was disappointed to learn that Deszö Aczél was not the artist I was seeking. Nevertheless, I also realized that this information was a significant breakthrough. Now plagued by inconsistencies in the "Kluger version" of the painting, I wanted to return to Germany, but I had exhausted my funds and was forced to head back to the United States with one piece of solid evidence from the German War Tracing Documents in the archives at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Israel: the name and birthdate of the original owner's son, Salo Kluger, born in 1946. In 1979, Salo had approved the sale of the painting to Prager, who keeps it in his private collection of Judaica in Jerusalem.

Off to New Jersey

Meanwhile, an article in the Detroit Jewish News about my research told readers I was searching for information about Salo Kluger. It caught the attention of Jack Schwartz of Royal Oak, Michigan, who contacted the editor of the paper and told her, "I have known Salo Kluger for years; he and I collect Holocaust illustrations by the artist Syck." Soon after, I was talking with Kluger in his home, only a 20-minute drive from my childhood home in Edison, New Jersey. His living room was crowded with Holocaust, Yiddishkeit and Jewish art, family photos and antiques.

"My mother received the painting from the artist," Kluger told me. "She and my father housed him in their shack after the war, and he gave them the painting before he moved on."

"I thought he had died," I said, reminding him of his mother's account yet thinking to myself about Aczél's absence from the Amberg graveyard.

Salo replied that his memory was cloudy on this point, and that if his mother said that the painter died, that must be what happened.

I did not mention to him a letter I received just before I left Michigan for New Jersey from Petra Vorsatz, the archivist I spoke to in Germany:

Concerning the man Aczél: There was a painter by the name Aczél who lived in Weiden between 1945 and 1949. Enclosed is a page from the telephone book in 1951 of he is still listed. Aczél was born in 1921 then emigrated to Canada in 1949.

How could this be? The man she describes is 28 years younger than the Klugers' Aczél. I found my mind reeling with the possibility that Aczél was still alive. I ran to the Graduate Library and got the Toronto phone book on microfiche and found the listing: Aczél's Antiques and Interiors. Chills crept up my spine. Twenty minutes later, my shaking hands and quivering voice gained confidence as a woman with a heavy Eastern European accent answered the phone, "Aczél's Antiques." I asked if Mr. Aczél was available and introduced myself. I told her that I was doing research on Hungarian artists who lived in Germany after the war. She told me that her husband, Mr. Attila Aczél, was not available. He had indeed lived in Weiden, she said, adding, "He was not an artist; he sold art, and began doing that in Weiden." I told her I would call back the following day.

That night I obsessively theorized explanations of why the Klugers might have fabricated the tale or why Aczél had never attempted to find the painting after giving it to his hosts. Maybe, I thought, after his Auschwitz experience, and after painting such a work, he was unable to paint again. Psychologically that seemed plausible. He might have even struck a bargain with the Klugers to create the tale so no one would look for him. Hiding a talent from family and friends seems understandable when it is your primary mode of therapeutic expression of the largest horror you ever faced assuming that creating the image was, indeed, a therapeutic expression.

"Aczél's Art and Antiques" a voice boomed in accented English the next day. I covered the questions I had asked his wife, to which he responded, "Are you calling about a painting with Hitler coming out of the clouds with a burning city in the background?" I paused, unable to believe what I just heard, because I had not described the painting to him or his wife.

"Yes," I said.

"I am the man you are looking for. Who are you?"

I explained who I was and sent him my credentials at his request. I called him several times over the following weeks, but he was reluctant to speak on the phone. This continued for several weeks. But each time I'd ask him, "Did you paint this work? Where were you trained? Have you done other works?" He would respond, "I am the painter. I don't want to discuss any of this on the telephone."

After weeks of building trust, I expressed my desire for him to visit Ann Arbor to meet my mentors and me at the University. I wanted to honor them for the enthusiasm and appreciation they had of my scholarship and discovery. Further, I thought that if Aczél felt the support of these illustrious scholars, it would make him feel more comfortable. Several times I explained the importance of his painting and my desire to meet him. He remained evasive until I told him about the Klugers' tale. "Nonsense," he said, "I will set you straight, I will tell you everything when we meet."

A Train to Toronto

photo of Attila Aczél and Bara Zetter-SapirI took a train to Toronto. Once in the station, I recognized Attila Aczél immediately: an elegant and distinguished man in his mid-70s, looking patiently at the passersby. I walked up to him, he embraced me, almost silently acknowledging my determination and success in trying to locate him, the artist, the past four years. We walked to his Cadillac parked in front of the station and made our way to a hotel a dozen blocks away. With old- world charm he arranged everything for me at the hotel. As we stood in line for check-in he looked deep into my eyes and smiled. I felt as if he were searching for something confirming my commitment to this project of which he was an integral part. An hour later we sat in the hotel dining room and he related his story of the painting to me.

"I was born to a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother," he began. "Two years after my father died, when I was 5 years old, I was left at a state orphanage in Budapest. A few weeks after my arrival, I was sent to live in another orphanage operated by the Roman Catholic Church." When he left the orphanage he went to Budapest, where he met a man who helped him locate his family. Before meeting them, however, he was drafted into the Hungarian army, which was allied with Nazi Germany. To avoid combat on the front, he volunteered to work as an engineer, but in 1945 his unit was captured by Americans in Germany and sent to a POW camp. When the war ended three months later, they were released, and Aczél traveled to Weiden.

"In Weiden I was, how you say, active and successful in the black market; it was one of the surest ways to survive," he said, and shared vignettes of his many colorful exploits. These stories, all articulated with nostalgic charm, displayed his intelligence as well as his propensity towards mischief and adventure. His love and respect for the arts, as well as a desire to assist fellow Hungarians, put him in contact with many unemployed artists and performers. He met an artist named Ferenc Kecskés (pronounced "KETCH-kaysh") at a Hungarian gathering, and they became partners as soon as Aczél saw examples of some of Kecskés's paintings. Kecskés began to paint landscapes and portraits of US military leaders for American GIs stationed nearby. Aczél acted as his dealer, providing him with money, food and a converted-washroom studio-apartment.

photos of Aczél and KesckésA few months later, Aczél proposed to Kecskés an idea he had for a painting. While he had not been engaged in battle himself, Aczél had been horrified by the scenes of bloodshed that he had witnessed in Hungary, Germany and Russia. In addition, even though by Jewish law he was not considered Jewish because his mother was not a Jew, he identified with the Jewish people and was aware that if the Nazis had known of his parentage, he would probably have been killed.

"I felt an urgent need," he recalled, "to document the truth as I saw it." Combining Aczél's imagery and compositional ideas and Kecskés's talent as a painter, the pair created the 7' x 5' untitled painting of Hitler as the Angel of Death. Kecskés, fearing persecution by the Nazi sympathizers and fanatics still living in Germany, refused to sign his name to the painting and signed it "Aczél" instead. He also would not agree to do any more paintings of this nature.

"Shortly thereafter," Aczél recalled, "two Jewish men from Munich purchased the work." The men said they would pay half the price for the painting then, and put down what was a considerable sum for the time and promised to return the following week with the final installment. Even though the down payment was "enough to buy anything we wanted," Aczél said, "the men from Munich never returned with the money, and we never saw them or the painting again."

Aczél emigrated to Canada in 1947, while Kecskés was detained in Europe due to a spot that showed up on a lung X-ray. The doctors thought it might be tuberculosis.

After meeting with Attila, I spent the next week locating the Kecskés family in California. In telephone interviews, his two sons filled in their father's history. In 1951, Ferenc Kecskés emigrated to the United States under the sponsorship of a Hungarian organization in California. He settled in Los Angeles with his wife, Ursula, and their boys, earning his living by painting billboards, a job he loathed. He died three months after his retirement in 1976. Ursula died shortly before I visited her sons. While living in the United States, Ferenc Kecskés painted no known pictures of his war-time experience nor paintings that made any type of social comment. Instead, he focused on portraits, still-lifes, and landscapes that he sold to friends and neighbors. But both Frank and his brother, Alex, had heard about the Hitler painting while growing up.

Without offering any hints as to its imagery, I asked Frank, the younger son, whether his father had ever produced paintings with war themes. He described for me the Hitler painting as he recalled his father having described it. He remembered that "its imagery haunted my father and he feared signing his name to it."

I went to California to meet with both sons to learn more of their father's history and examine the style of his other paintings. When we met, Frank Kecskés, who studied under his father's tutelage, presented me with his own smaller version of his father's painting, done from photos of the original which I had sent him. "This is in gratitude for reuniting me with my father's most important work," he said.

The Case Is Solved, But Not Closed

Fifty years after its conception, the truth of its origin is freed from error and obscurity. Why the story of the dying man in the shack became associated with this painting remains a mystery, however. Perhaps the Klugers did help such a person, though not the painter. Or perhaps the Klugers were describing Kecskés, who was unable to leave the country because of the medical quarantine.

It is also possible that the story of the painter as a concentration camp survivor was fabricated by the two men from Munich to enhance its value to the Klugers, survivors themselves. Perhaps the Klugers, hoping to give greater validity to the image as the work of a Jewish concentration camp survivor, invented the dying-painter story. Frank Kecskés told me that his mother said she had heard that members of the Jewish community had commissioned the painting. In any event, it is not certain how the Klugers obtained the painting, nor who the Munich buyers were, assuming they existed.

The Aczél-Kecskés painting now hangs in a private collection in Israel. It is expected to show at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, with the Kluger tale still standing as the official story. As a researcher and educator, I feel a responsibility to challenge "too good to be true" stories told by our institutions.

The element which now most challenges a "Jewish reading" of the painting is the fact that while the collaborative artists were, strictly speaking, neither Jewish nor Holocaust survivors, both men considered themselves "survivors" of German fascism and of this violent period. While this does not detract from the aesthetic qualities of the painting, some may argue that it lessens the validity of the imagery since these men were not direct targets in Hitler's regime. I disagree with such an interpretation, especially since I have believed from the beginning that the painting stands magnificently on its own without any story attached to it.

The disturbing imagery in the painting, paired with what I've established as to its likely origin, will likely evoke a wide range of responses from different viewers. Any interpretation or analysis of its potent imagery, however, must be informed with the understanding that this painting reflects not only the expression of skillful and insightful artists, but also the immediacy of their experiences and observations. While Jews were the main victims of Hitler's regime and the "final solution," this painting testifies to an atrocity against Jews and all humanity at a particular moment in history. It also offers powerful testimony of the experience of being present during the Third Reich. The fusion of Hitler with the Angel of Death makes a provocative, albeit possibly controversial, commentary on Hitler's status as an extremely powerful and indeed exalted figure in European culture at the time.

Although many questions still surround the painting, the fascinating and slowly unfolding story is the subject of a book and a documentary, both in process, that will chronicle my investigations and explore the many questions raised by this work. I can report that, in my experience, Holocaust survivors have responded to the painting as a meaningful and important statement. And to all who view it, the Aczél-Kecskés painting demands thought, understanding, and emotional response. As such, the painting may well stand as one of the great interpretative icons of the Holocaust experience.

Bara Zetter-Sapir '91 BFA, '93 MA, plans to enroll in New York University's doctoral program in arts and humanities education this fall. Those interested in contributing to her documentary research in Europe and Israel may do so through The Aczél Testament Project, Account # 304291, University of Michigan Department of the History of Art, 519 South State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1357. All contributions are tax-deductible.

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