CHILD'S VIEW OF HOLOCAUST; ART EXHIBITION DISPLAYS NAZI TERROR.

Byline: By JOANNE BUTCHER

A CHILLING child's-eye view of the Holocaust is on display in Newcastle.

The art of Holocaust survivor Helga Weissova Hoskova is on show at Northumbria University's Ellison building.

Helga was just 12-years-old when she was forced into the notorious Terezin ghetto in Czechoslovakia.

This "showcase camp" was publicised by the Nazis as a happy place, with healthy children who were portrayed as being able to lead an almost normal life, but the reality was very different.

Life for Helga, her parents, and the thousands of other Jewish families at the concentration camp, was characterised by hunger and disease as well as forced separation.

Young Helga, a budding artist even as a child, painted an imaginary snowman with the paints and brush smuggled in by her parents, but her father encouraged her instead to "draw and paint what you see".

Over the next three years, she drew and painted the daily horrors of her life using whatever art materials she could lay her hands on.

With the clear eyes of a child, Helga saw and captured on paper the barbarity and cruelty of life in the camp, creating a heartwrenching record of those dark years.

Her pictures show starving neighbours rummaging through rubbish to find food; a violinist performing a makeshift concert for camp members in a drab barracks; a queue of people waiting to be taken to the crematorium.

Helga survived the horrors of Terezin, only to be sent to Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland with her mother in 1944, then on to labour camps at Freiberg and Mauthausen.

Now 81, Helga has spent her life drawing and painting images of Terezin and other aspects of Jewish contemporary life elsewhere, sharing an insight into life during the Holocaust that only a survivor could know.

Helga will travel to the North East from her home in Prague to run workshops for children from local primary and secondary schools, as well as university students, during the exhibition next week.

Artistic director Geoff Pattison said: "The pictures tell a story. They are very much like a visual equivalent to the diary of Anne Frank. They share many of the same qualities as Anne's diary - the level of insight and clarity of thought is remarkable."

Geoff said the pictures differed from much Holocaust art because they are show a child's innocent perception and Helga's struggle to come to terms with the collapse of her world.

"Many of the earlier drawings are almost humorous in the way they detail everyday life. It is extraordinary. But that is the way children of that age see the world.

"It must also reflect the way that a child's psyche develops in response to such horror.

There is something incredibly optimistic about the works."

Organiser Richard Kotter, senior lecturer in human geography in the school of applied sciences at Northumbria, added that the exhibition would commemorate Helga, her work, and all those who suffered and died during the Holocaust.

The exhibition, called Creative Memories, has been organised by the Holocaust Interest Group, the School of Arts and Social Sciences and UNISON at Northumbria University in collaboration with the Holocaust Memorial Day Working Group hosted by Newcastle City Council.

Helga's work will be on display until Saturday, April 4.

CAPTION(S):

HEART-RENDING IMAGES: Helga's picture of Jews being led to a concentration camp; GRUELLING: A deathly image that reflected life in a concentration camp during the Holocaust; GRUELLING: A deathly image that reflected life in a concentration camp during the Holocaust; MEMORIES: Arist Helga Weissova Hoskova