HOLOCAUST ART: ENDURANCE OVER BRUTALITY.

Byline: Jenifer Hanrahan Daily News Staff Writer

``And thus in each of us a cry rang out, as basic as the instinct to survive. ... It was necessary to communicate with the outside world, but also necessary to communicate among ourselves. ... This community of spirit that we generated worked to create small miracles. ... First the pencil, then a bit of paper, and sometimes, even ink colors. ... The solitude was suddenly broken and there emerged among us a collective spirit, which in itself was a kind of triumph.''

- France Hamelin, 78, a member of the French resistance during World War II who escaped from detention during the Holocaust and now lives in Paris.

On May 17, 1944, France Hamelin and her 5-week-old son slipped past the guards, the searchlights and the barbed wire.

As Hamelin escaped from a transit camp in Paris where she was held for several months during World War II for her involvement with the French resistance, she took with her sketches of her view from the inside made with bits of paper and charcoal she scrounged.

In one scene, a mesh of barbed wire nearly obscures a guard standing his post. In another, weary women climb the steps into their cells.

Twelve of Hamelin's sketches, along with more than 250 works of art made in the early 1940s in concentration camps and prisons during the Holocaust, are on exhibition until June 16 at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in West Los Angeles.

The exhibition, ``The Enduring Spirit: Art of the Holocaust,'' includes paintings, drawings, poems, greeting cards and musical scores created by 45 artists in 19 concentration camps and prisons that were culled from museums in Europe; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.; and private collections, including those of the artists themselves.

The exhibition, sponsored by French Cultural Services, was unveiled several months ago in Reims, France. This is the only U.S. showing.

Most of the scenes deal with the harsh reality of daily life in the camps - open graves, emaciated forms and brutal guards. In one anonymous drawing, a line of women lined up for roll call dressed in kerchiefs and rags look away as a guard jabs a stick under one women's chin. Portraits reveal boredom, sadness and fear.

And yet, the artwork gives testimony to the endurance of the human spirit despite the most horrific conditions.

``It's haunting. It's enigmatic. It depicts despair,'' said Gerald Margolis, the museum's director. ``But in the very act of depicting despair, it's a form of resistance. Painting is the spirit rising up to the occasion.''

In many cases, the artists risked their lives to bear witness to the atrocities.

They drew on cardboard, newspapers and scraps of paper - even prison walls. They used charcoal and dyes made from rust. They sketched with stone and pencil. Dolls were made from string and wire. Even stale bread was used to fashion chess pieces.

``Whenever I had a moment in respite - during air raids at the mine or at school - I would make rapid sketches of my companions in prison or on work detail, hiding my work to the best of my ability,'' reads an inscription below the work of Jacques Barrau, an imprisoned member of the French resistance who worked in the gypsum mines near Neckarelz, a concentration camp in Germany. ``They were like snapshots that caught the expression of fatigue and desperate weariness.''

Some of the art was brought out of the camps by artists who survived. Hamelin and Barrau are still living in Europe. Other anonymous artwork was discovered after liberation, hidden in the cracks of walls.

``On the one hand, art is the expression of the finer things of Western civilization,'' Margolis said. ``But this art shows that other face of Western civilization. It reveals brutality, exploitation. It shows slave labor, hunger. ... But because of the capability of the artist, sometimes you have to remind yourself of the conditions under which this art was being done.''

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

Photo: (1) ``Work Detail'' is included in ``The Enduring Spirit: Art of the Holocaust'' at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance.

(2) ``Deportee Crucified on a Swastika'' is among more than 250 works of art made in the early 1940s in concentration camps and prisons during the Holocaust.

(3) Drawings - including the ink-on-paper ``Hands in Chains'' - paintings, poems, greeting cards and musical scores created by 45 artists, will be on display until June 16.

Phil McCarten/Daily News