Who was Zoran Mušic?
Zoran Music: Dachau Artist
There are hardly the words to describe what happened at the Nazi concentration camps.
But Zoran Music, an artist from Austria, was incarcerated in Dachau and secretly drew the horrors of life there.
After graduating after studying art, he decided to travel. He was arrested by the Nazis when he was making sketches of buildings. They assumed he was a spy.
Story has it that he was tortured and then interrogated by an officer who told Zoran that he had two choices – he could either join the S.S or be sent to a concentration camp.
Zoran laughed in his face and was sent to Dachau.
There he furtively drew what he saw using scraps of paper he managed to scavenge and charcoal taken from open fires. When he left the concentration camp, he managed to smuggle many of these sketches out with him.
Copyright restrictions prevent me from showing his drawings here but you can see some in the video below. Here are some screenshots of his work from the video:
Once he was released, Zoran lived mostly in Venice and then Paris. He became well known as an artist in Europe.
Those who knew him said that he was a naturally elegant man and that he had no hatred within him.
He said that when he was in the concentration camp, he and the inmates told themselves that such atrocities would never happen again -that they would be the last.
Later in life he admitted that they had been wrong – that atrocities were still happening all over the world.
FURTHER READING
