He was the ghost child who shadowed my childhood. Petr Kien was my mother’s cousin and playmate whose adventures in Varnsdorf, their Sudeten Czech home town, formed a rich canvas for her future bedtime stories. He would write poems about wolves and foxes, and see things invisible to anyone else. Together they would cross an imaginary river over a “bridge of lies” into which you would fall and drown if you told a lie, and your hand would stick up forever as a sign of your mendacity.
Petr, child artist and poet, was gifted enough to be given drawing lessons at the age of five, and at 17 taught art at Prague’s prestigious Czech art school, the Pragensis.
He did not live to see the fruition of his talents. Like many of those who became known as the artists of Terezin, he died in Auschwitz, murdered because of a subversive opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis (Emperor of Atlantis) he wrote in Terezin with his fellow prisoner, Czech composer Viktor Ullman. He was just 25.
The opera, written in the Brechtian post-modern tradition personifies Death in an age of absolute darknesss. But Death cannot die. Until he does, the world cannot be saved. At its dress rehearsal in Terezin, the Nazis grasped the opera’s not so secret message and both heroic men were sent to their deaths.
In London, my mother, who had left the land of pine trees and rolling hills where the two of them would ski and invent tales, grieved that she did not have a single drawing by her cousin to remind her of their lost childhood before Hitler marched into Prague. So my husband and I went to the Prague Jewish Museum and the curator unrolled several drawings Petr had produced while a student at the Pragensis. Somehow they had reached the fusty, creaky old drawer in this office after 30 years of being handed from one survivor to another; the last barely knew him. The curator asked for £200 — but the last “owner” it later transpired, had died.
We paid and with the rolled-up drawings safely in the boot of the car, we drove to the airport. There was a strong sense of my childhood shadow having come home. I could almost feel Petr’s relief.
The drawings were delicate yet powerful; pale nudes and strong portraits from his student days expressing their vitality in graphite pen on thinning, tattered and yellowing drawing paper. It was not difficult to see the strokes of this young man’s energy and talent, but I was afraid that in their fragility they might crumble away into nothing. An art shop recommended acid-backed paper, and soon I could present my mother with the framed trophies to Petr’s memory that she longed for.
Now that my mother has passed on, I begin to look at them in another way. How many of Petr’s subjects were Jewish? The middle aged woman with narrow, questioning eyes and taut lips; another with a long neck and air of deep introspection. The insouciant stare of a middle-aged man into the distance; hooded eyes, black hair awry. The whimsical girl, a Blue Angel with a sense of boyfriends hovering. The plump, homely woman in semi-profile. None of them actually look at you. All have a certain, worldly cynicism.
These are faces you might see in any kosher deli or butcher shop, assessing the produce, poking, looking; dissatisfied. And yet you would not. They are not modern Jewish faces, they belong elsewhere, to a time abandoned, outgrown, ravaged and yet somehow eternal.
How many of Petr’s subjects —and we don’t know their names — survived the Nazis? How many escaped, through patronage, or benevolent, courageous neighbours — or like my mother, through the promise of jobs in the UK? How many queued at embassies begging exit visas, terrified of the time to come? How many mourned children, gratefully sent on Kindertransport knowing they would never see them again. How many died?
Petr Kien’s paintings and sketches, post-modern, Impressionistic or traditional, feverishly produced in Terezin where he worked in the Gestapo drawing office, now hang in the Jewish Museum in Prague and the Terezin Memorial’s permanent exhibition. I have a catalogue of his work published by a fine-art publisher in Florence. Confronted in Terezin with the full panoply of them moved me to write a play about his life, which became a three-week production on the London fringe a few years ago. It was my small tribute to a man — a creative inspiration — I would never meet.
Before Petr was sent to Auschwitz the Nazis broke his hand, so he would never paint again. Unlike his fairytale “bridge of lies” Petr’s hand stands out of the void for all time. Not drowning, not lying, but speaking the truth for which he gave his art and his life.
