Azriel Awret was born on 10 August 1910 in Łódź, a major industrial city in Poland. He went on to endure a journey spanning continents and decades, leaving behind a legacy rooted in the transformative power of art and the experience of persecution. His life story encompasses both familiar and extraordinary elements, including identity, survival and artistic expression, against the backdrop of one of the darkest periods in history.

Awret's early years in Łódź, a city that would later become central to the Nazi persecution of Polish Jews, shaped his understanding of vulnerability and the need for adaptation. In his youth, he relocated to Belgium and settled in Brussels, where he established a career as an electrical engineer. This professional skill would later prove crucial to his survival.

While studying art at the Ghent Academy of Arts, he revealed himself to be a man determined to cultivate his creative spirit alongside his technical expertise. He studied under the renowned sculptor George Minne there, and his mentor's influence would later be evident in Awret's own sculptural work. His dual identity as an engineer and an artist was a recurring theme throughout his life, with practicality and creativity intertwining as survival strategies.

The Nazi occupation of Belgium in 1940 transformed Awret's world overnight. His marriage to Anna Louisa Bonhiere, a Christian woman, initially protected him from the systematic deportations that decimated Belgium's Jewish population. While offering him temporary safety, this arrangement created psychological tensions, such as the constant awareness that his survival depended on concealing his Jewish identity and the complex emotions surrounding a marriage that was as much a shield as a romantic union. The protection afforded by mixed marriage was always tenuous, dependent on the whims of Nazi policy and the vigilance of informants. For nearly three years, Awret lived in this liminal space between safety and danger, his engineering work and Christian wife providing a façade of normalcy in an increasingly hostile environment.

On January 23, 1943, Awret's fragile status collapsed when he was arrested and transported to Mechelen (Malines), the primary transit camp for Belgian Jews destined for concentration camps in the East. The camp, a converted army barracks, served as a holding centre where lives hung in the balance between temporary internment and final deportation to extermination camps.

Within this environment of fear and uncertainty, Awret's dual skills as engineer and artist became instruments of survival. His technical expertise secured him employment as an electrician, a position that likely provided him with some mobility within the camp and access to materials. Simultaneously, his artistic abilities manifested in two distinct forms: the official work of sign painting for the camp administration, and the clandestine documentation of camp life through his secret paintings. These secret works represent one of the most significant aspects of Awret's legacy. The act of secretly painting the experiences of his fellow prisoners required extraordinary courage, as discovery could have meant severe punishment or death. His visual documentation serves as both a personal catharsis and a historical testimony.

It was in Mechelen's art workshop, the Mahlerstube, that Awret encountered Irène Spicker, a young Jewish woman who had fled Berlin in 1939 and had been hiding in Belgium until her arrest in 1943. Both artists, both prisoners, both uncertain of their fate, found in each other not just companionship but a shared understanding of the role art could play in maintaining dignity and documenting truth.

The intervention of Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, who had established herself as an advocate for Jewish children and adults during the occupation, proved crucial to Awret's survival. Elisabeth was a patron of the arts and painted and sculpted herself. Awret's family's appeal to the Queen resulted in his release from Mechelen on October 16, 1943. This highlights the arbitrary nature of survival during the Holocaust, where personal connections and individual acts of courage could mean the difference between life and death.

During the Second World War, Queen Elisabeth used her connections and German background to save many Jewish children and adults from occupying Nazi forces. She was later recognized as Righteous Among the Nations, demonstrating how even within the apparatus of occupied Europe, moral courage could create pockets of resistance and salvation.

Post-War Transformation and New Beginnings

Liberation brought both opportunity and complexity. Awret's divorce from Anna Louisa Bonhiere and subsequent marriage to Irène Spicker in 1944 marked not just a personal transformation but a symbolic one—the abandonment of the survival marriage that had protected him, for one based on shared experience, artistic vision, and genuine connection. Their marriage represented a conscious choice to build a future rooted in their shared understanding of persecution and their mutual commitment to artistic expression.

The couple's immigration to Mandate Palestine in 1947 represented a common trajectory for Holocaust survivors seeking to rebuild their lives in a Jewish homeland. Their settlement in Safed (Zephath) in 1949 was particularly significant, as they became founding members of the Safed Artists' Colony, a community that would become renowned for its contribution to Israeli art and culture.

In this mountaintop city, steeped in Jewish mystical tradition, Awret found a new medium for his artistic expression, focusing primarily on sculpture and ceramic work. The transition from the clandestine sketches of camp life to the public sculptures of his later career represents not just an artistic evolution but a psychological one—from the art of survival to the art of celebration and memorial.

In 1969, the family immigrated to the United States, settling in Northern Virginia. They produced an array of public art, including ceramic murals at several Montgomery County schools, and Azriel's sculptures adorned George Mason University's campus. This period of his life demonstrated his continued commitment to public art and education, ensuring that his artistic vision would reach new generations in his adopted American homeland.

The Enduring Significance of Witness

Azriel Awret's death on December 11, 2010, at the age of 100, marked the end of a century-long journey from the industrial streets of Lodz to the universities of Virginia. His works, particularly those created during his internment at Mechelen, serve as invaluable historical documents that complement written testimonies and official records. The donation of these works to the Beit Lohamei Haghetaot (The Ghetto Fighters' House Museum) ensures that his visual testimony will continue to educate and inspire future generations.

The reopening of the gallery in Safed where the Awrets worked stands as a testament to their enduring impact on Israeli artistic culture. More than mere exhibition space, it represents the continuation of their vision—that art can serve as both personal salvation and collective memory, that creativity can flourish even in the aftermath of destruction, and that the drive to create beauty and meaning-making can transcend even the most systematic attempts at dehumanization.

Azriel Awret's life story demonstrates that survival during the Holocaust was not merely a matter of physical endurance but of maintaining one's humanity, dignity, and creative spirit under systematic persecution. His artistic legacy stands as both witness to the past and inspiration for the future, showing that even in history's darkest chapters, the human impulse to create, to document, and to hope endures.

References

Irène Awret's Testimony, Ghetto Fighters' House, no date.

The Museum of Deportation and Resistance, Malin (Mechlen) archive, Belgium.

Janet Blater and Sybil Milton. Art of the Holocaust. Pan Books, London, 1982.