“The Gold Smelters at Birkenau Paul Katz and Francichek Tchek, Murdered at the End of 1944,” 1945
Like Irene Awret, David Olere used his artistic skill to document life in the camps. Olere was a formally trained artist who was arrested and first interned at Drancy, in France, and later transferred to Auschwitz, then to Birkenau. During his last days at the camp, when the SS officers were paying less attention to inmates, he began to capture scenes of working inmates. In this ink drawing, Olere depicts two men melting gold taken from the bodies of the dead. He, like Awret, wanted to preserve for posterity the horrors of the camps; in this way, their works defied Nazi attempts to isolate the camps and erase from memory the brutality of the camp system.
