Painting, Crying Boy Bent Over Table

Date

1944

Description

Self-portrait of a crying boy bent over a table as his dead mother's body lays in the background. It was painted by Heinz Geiringer, a Jewish teenager in hiding in Amsterdam. Geiringer passed his days by painting, writing poetry, learning languages, and playing music. In 1944, the Geiringers were betrayed and captured by the Nazis, leading to Heinz and his father Erich dying at Mauthausen in spring 1945. Despite what this painting implies, Heinz's fears of his mother's death were unfounded, and his mother Elfriede (Fritzi) as well as his sister Eva survived the Holocaust. After being liberated from Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945, the women returned to Amsterdam where Fritzi would go on to reconnect with, and eventually marry, their former neighbor Otto Frank (posthumously making Heinz the step brother of Anne Frank), and Eva would retrieve the paintings that Heinz stashed under the floorboards of his hiding place. Today, Eva Schloss-Geiringer continues to educate about the Holocaust and share the artwork of her brother, which stands as a testament to Jewish humanity and cultural resistance in the face of Nazi brutality.

Type

Image

Region

Global

Era

The Great Depression and WW II

Topic

Genocide, Global History and Geography, Jewish History, World War II

Repository

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Identifier

55015

Source

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Eva Schloss

Rights

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