Boris Lurie takes us onto the deck of a ship to look over the shoulders of two Wehrmacht soldiers and one plain-clothed man – where we can see two prisoners in the striped prison clothes of the concentration camps. Standing with legs apart and with their hands on the hips, they are looking at the two soldiers and the third guard, who is identifiable by his armband,  as a so-called overseer – i.e. a functional prisoner in the services of the SS at a concentration camp. The defiant posture of the two prisoners and the casual attitude of the “privileged” prisoner are interlocked through their gazes and to the ship’s railing which seems to guide the “privileged” man’s controlling gaze to the two prisoners.

The drawing is part of the ”War Series” in which Lurie attempted to capture and thus tried to understand – in sketches and scenically elaborated drawings – his traumatic experiences in the ghetto,  the Nazi’s labor and concentration camps, his time after the liberation of the camps with the US Army, and his work for the American CIC (Counter-Intelligence Corps) in Germany, as well as his early days in the United States.

He did not exhibit  them until the 1990s; and he remained silent about his

experiences in the camps until his trip to Riga in 1975 – after that, he began writing his memoir,  In Riga. This autobiographical text is the source of our knowledge about his adolescence and also provides a reference to the drawing. After Lurie and his father had been transferred from the ghetto in Riga to the labor camps in Riga-Lenta and Salaspils, they were deported – during a period of the advances bythe Red Army and after the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler – by ship from Latvia to the more westerly Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk. Lurie describes this evacuation as a “Dantean inferno”: As Boris Lurie remembered in the 1970s, the SS men kicked people to drive them up the gangway and also mistreated them time and again on board the ship.  Conditions on the ship were so poor that cramped prisoners had to climb over other prisoners and sometimes vomited on one another.  On board, Lurie and his father saw overseers for the first time, and the striped clothes of concentration camps prisoners.¹

The drawing shows the prisoners, the soldiers of the Wehrmacht, and a capo, or overseer

– the difference could not be more pronounced, however, with regard to Lurie’s written memories, decades after the drawing had been created. Here, the two prisoners are self-confident while facing their guards, and they seem to assert themselves – despite all their humiliations.  We cannot tell whether the artist intended to use these two figures to present himself and his father.  However, the drawing was created less than two years after their liberation by the US  Army from the Buchenwaldsatellite camp of Madgeburg-Polte, on April 18, 1945, where they had been transferred from Stutthof in early November 1944.  We may assume that the undaunted pose by the two prisoners is evocative of the exhilarating feeling by Boris, in his early twenties, of having been saved and being alive.