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Showing posts from January, 2009

"Keep this safe, it is my whole life."

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In 1943, Charlotte Salomon went to the gas chamber in Auschwitz at the age of 26. She left behind a series of nearly 800 paintings known as "Leben? oder Theater?" (Life? Or Theater?) in the care of a family friend. She reportedly said, "Keep this safe, it is my whole life." Her short life was characterized by the deaths of her mother and her grandmother by suicide and living in the shadow of the Third Reich. Her mother took her own life when Charlotte was nine. As a teenager, Charlotte studied painting at the Berlin Art Academy until Nazi policies ejected her due to "racial grounds" in 1938. Charlotte fled to Nice in the South of France to live with her grandparents. After her grandmother's suicide on 1939, she and her grandfather were sent to Gurs , a political concentration camp in the French Pyrenees. They were released in 1941 due to her grandfather's declining health. Over the next two years, beginning in 1941, Charlotte frantically painted 1,