Osynka, Paladij

Album politviaznia [Album of the political prisoner]

Munich: [Hanns Lindner], 1946. Original illustrated wrappers. Good condition. Item #248

Octavo (15 x 21 cm). Original pictorial wrappers with a monochrome illustration of Auschwitz in the green square. 8 pp. [16] leaves of plates; Contains 16 stylized color illustrations depicting life and death inside Auschwitz (concentration camp). Light wear to spine. Illustrations clean and crisp.

Bilingual caricature album in Ukrainian and English with a preface by the artist. Published and distributed in the displaced person's camps in Germany and Austria in the aftermath of WWII. The sketches of this life drawn in the form of cartoons by the bed-fellows of the author may serve as a reward for those who survived this inferno in the earth. On the other part, they may serve for every Ukrainian and for strangers as a document of the fight of Ukrainian people for their higher ideals.

Amongst those marked for extermination by the Nazi regime were individuals deemed politically dangerous, such as the author of this book of life in Auschwitz. A Ukrainian nationalist in eastern Poland after the joint invasion by Germany and the USSR in 1939, the pseudonymous Paladij Osynka was hunted by the Soviet and later the Nazi intelligence services. Captured and sent to Auschwitz, Paladij was one of only forty to survive the camp out of a population of 15,000 Ukrainian prisoners. While there, Osynka produced a number of sardonic sketches of camp life caricaturing prisoners and guards alike: according to the artist, the reality of life in the camps was too horrible to portray in naturalistic fashion and such nightmarish events could only be conveyed truthfully through satire. Paladij's experiences did not dim his ardor for a free Ukrainian state: in his preface to this album, he dedicates his work to the Ukrainian people as a tribute to their suffering for their highest ideals.

Extremely scarce.

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