Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and Her Work in Terezín: Children, Art, and Hope

Friedl had us drawing what we like to do, what we dream about . . . She transported us to a different world.

—Helga Pollak Kinsky, as quoted by Linney Wix in Through a Narrow Window¹

Introduction

In his State of the Union address on January 25, 2011, United States President Barack Obama gave praiseworthy preeminence to education and to his “Race to the Top” program. However, he deemed only two fields of education worthy of note, namely, math and science. He mentioned these areas of knowledge several times during his speech but omitted any reference to educating children in the arts. This is a regrettable oversight, as arts education nationwide and perhaps worldwide has been progressively undervalued and underfunded. Yet, as one of America’s finest poets, James Weldon Johnson, wrote:

A people may become great through many means, but there is only one measure by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged. The final measure of greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced. The world does not know that a people is great until that people produces great literature and art. No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior.²

Johnson wrote those lines in 1922 in the preface to his anthology, The Book of American Negro Poetry, and his primary aim was to foster and encourage the growth of a robust African American literary tradition. I quote his words because they jive with, while suggesting a corrective to, President Obama’s rather limited agenda for recouping America’s superior standing among the nations with regard to education. If we wish to soar, we need—à la Johnson—to accord the arts a prominent place in our thinking about the education of children.

My focus in this essay is to advocate for the arts by bearing witness to their power during times of great trouble. If art can help children exist under conditions of irrational hatred, racism, terror, and mass murder— under conditions so dire that life’s fundamental necessities of food, shelter, and family love are withheld and perception shut down so that stimuli are warded off for purposes of survival—then surely art, as well as (at least occasional) access to untrammeled perception and free play, deserves a place in children’s lives during times of peace, when relative measures of health and safety prevail. This essay recounts the life and work of an artist-teacher who devoted herself in the last years of her life to children who were about to die (as was she); children who lived amidst cruelty, sickness, and death; children who had lost almost everything they knew. She taught them art and gave them hope. As we follow the outlines of her life work and try to grasp its nature, we may feel a sense of shame that we have allowed the arts to languish in our schools and be withheld from today’s children, children whose destiny—as we must fervently hope and believe—is to live on to imagine and to create a better world.

Figure 1.

Children prevented from entering a park. Drawing made in the concentration camp at Terezín by Hana Turnowska. Museum of the Old Jewish Cemetery, Prague, Czech Republic. Photo credit: Scala/ Art Resource, New York.

I. Friedl Dicker Brandeis, Artist and Teacher

Growing up in Vienna during the period just before and during World War I, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (1898–1944) was born Frederika Dicker and was bereaved by the age of four, having lost the mother whose nickname for her stuck and remained in place throughout her life.³ Both parents were Jews, and her father, a modest seller of paper goods, brought her up. Intense by nature, Friedl quickly responded to the rapidly changing, dramatic, and exciting artistic world that swirled around her and formed the backdrop of her daily life. During those years, Vienna was truly a wellspring of originality in...