Walsken was a resistance fighter, imprisoned by the Nazis and forced to labor in the northern German peat bogs. But he was also an artist whose works are among the few remaining artistic documents of the Nazi camps.

Walsken's drawing show men - sitting on stools in dreary barracks, reading, writing letters, performing manual labor, or just looking out the window at the barren landscape. He was drawing what he saw; the exhausted, pensive, sad, people who were worn out by the death that surrounded them.

The artworks - on view through February 21 at the Kunst Museum Baden in Solingen, Germany - documented the lives of his fellow sufferers in the Nazi penal camps in the Emsland region of Germany, which borders Holland.

The Emsland camps

Walsken was a resistance fighter, a democrat and a socialist. The Nazis condemned him to hard labor for "preparing for treason," and as part of his odyssey through the penal system, he spent two years in the work camps known as the Emsland camps.

There were 15 Emsland camps that operated between 1933 and 1945, including prison camps, concentration camps, POW camps, and military prisons.

Later, Walsken wrote about his arrival to the camp: "A wall in a bleak compound, raised even higher with electric wire. The bus stops. Men in blue uniforms are expecting us.Yelling. Get out. Line up. Sentries with rifles in position. And then: Counting. Through the barracks on the double. Get registered, change clothes. First beating. Then I became number 373: The hair shorn short, wood shoes for the feet."

Working in the Marsh

The brutal work on the marsh involved digging peat and digging trenches. For years after his release, Walsken was plagued by terrible memories: "The peat had to be cut in precise blocks and thrown far over the edge of the ditch. If anyone stood up they were immediately punished. The harassment began. Lie down, deep knee-bends, jump over the graves. Sometimes, out of desperation, someone would just run into the chain of guards. Then, a shot.

Like most other things, drawing was forbidden in the camp, but Walsken did it anyway. His first pictures were made with shoe polish since nothing else was available. Later, he used simple pencils or homemade watercolors. Paper was tight; the painter used only those scraps he could find. Everything had to be hidden. Many of his drawings were smuggled out by prisoners who were released.

Traumatic memories

But ultimately, Walsken was lucky. He survived the prisons, and later also lived through a military operation in Tunisia. There, he deserted and defected to the Americans, which was followed by a stay in American prisoner-of-war camps. Afterward he returned alone to his home town, where he worked and painted again.

But no one could return to him the years stolen by the National Socialists. For a long time he didn't want to discuss the experience with his family, according to his son, Ernst Martin Walsken.

"I first learned of it when I was about 17 years old. Sure I already knew that something had occurred but it wasn't easy for my parents to talk about it."

Later the painter Walsken travelled around Germany and abroad, telling his firsthand experience, a critical observer of German political events.

"My father did what he considered to be right and that was something that people afterwards approved of," his son Ernst Martin says today. "I think it's good too, but I would't call it heroism. He was simply a great democrat who advocated for what is right."

Author: Cornelia Rabitz (ad)
Editor: Jennifer Abramsohn